The Billionaire's Marriage Contract

by Avery James

  “Already?” Vi asked. “I know you’re new to this dear, but spouses fight. Hell, in my time, I caused a few of those fights.”

  Amy couldn’t help but laugh, but she let out a long sigh before speaking again. “Please don’t try to cheer me up, Vi. Not tonight. Come on. We’re going home.”

  Chapter 24

  After a long cab ride back to her place, Amy couldn’t sleep. Instead, she spent the night cleaning her house. As she went from room to room, she wondered how she had ever needed so much space. The size of the house was overwhelming. By the time the sun rose in the morning, she had worked her way down to the kitchen. She was just finishing wiping down the counters when Vi came down for breakfast. She had spent the past hour cleaning the ornate handles of each cabinet. By the end, she half wished her kitchen were as minimalist as Ethan’s. But she was just glad to be back in her home, where she was in control. If she wanted to change the handles, she could, and no one could tell her otherwise.

  "Are you ready to tell me what happened? You dragged me across town in the middle of the night, and you’ve been stress cleaning ever since then. Talk to me, Amy.”

  "I got angry with Ethan for never including me in his decisions and treating me like I needed his help, but the truth is I broke things off with him because I was losing myself. I didn't know who I was anymore. Tell me I'm not crazy for doing this. Have you ever felt that way?"

  "Only after several strong drinks, but by that point it doesn't worry me much."

  "Vi, I'm serious."

  "So am I. You need to stop worrying about everything so much. Does he make you happy? Do you make him happy? In the end, that's all that matters. Did it ever occur to you that your husband might have lost himself too? If you ask me, Ethan was more worried about being your knight in shining armor than being himself."

  "But that's not what I wanted."

  "Maybe it's not what he wanted either. Besides, no one would ever mistake you for a hapless damsel in distress."

  "Yeah, I'm too old for that."

  "No, you're too strong. You're too smart. That man had beautiful women throwing themselves at him for years, and yet he came to you. Why do you think that is?"

  "Because he needed someone to impress Hank Harris."

  "If you believe that, maybe you are helpless."

  "So just because he likes me I'm supposed to change who I am?"

  "You're going to lose yourself at times, Amy. It happens to all of us. You just have the opportunity to lose yourself in something bigger, something exciting and new, you and him together. The two of you are just too afraid of admitting this to each other. Now go get ready for work. I’ll fix you a breakfast that will make you forget all about what’s-his-name.”

  “Vi, after your heart-attack, I hid all the liquor.”

  “In that case, I’ll order out,” Vi said. She winked at Amy. “Do you want your breakfast neat or on the rocks?”

  Amy shook her head. Sometimes she didn’t know what to do with Vi. Others, she didn’t know what she’d do without her.

  ***

  Although the DC summer was the hottest on record, the next few weeks passed at a glacial pace. Amy struggled to readjust to life without Ethan. Struggled to adjust to the big house again, to looking up from whatever she was doing and not seeing his face. She didn’t want to admit it, but she missed him terribly. She missed the way he would sing as he showered and the way he ran his thumb across her cheek as he brought her breakfast in bed. She missed the random visits at work and the nights out on the town. No matter where they were, Ethan had a way of making her feel like they were the only two people in the world, that she was desirable and special. Now that he was gone, she just felt completely alone.

  At one point Amy had enjoyed plunging into the improvement of her home, but now it all felt like too much. The house was so much bigger than what she needed, and all of the fancy china and silverware she had for parties just seemed so unnecessary. She missed Ethan’s streamlined apartment, his smaller kitchen, and the cozy feeling she got when she spent time with him there, eating dinner or reading or just talking over a bottle of wine.

  In particular, Amy struggled to readjust to sleeping alone. She had always had trouble falling asleep, unlike Ethan who seemed to fall asleep the instant his head hit the pillow, but whenever he fell asleep, the rhythm of his quiet breathing and the warmth and weight of his arm over her shoulder had lulled her to sleep. Now that she was alone again, Amy tossed and turned all night, unable to find a comfortable position anywhere in her bed. He was the only man whose absence had ever annoyed her. Even though she was still mad at him, she couldn’t help but smile at that thought.

  Despite her best attempts, Vi couldn’t seem to cheer Amy up. She had tried every trick she knew, and a few she claimed to have thought up on the spot, but she just couldn’t seem to make her niece happy. Amy was glad to see that Vi was feeling better, but she couldn’t muster the energy to pretend to feel well herself. Even Callie visited a few nights a week in an attempt to help Amy get out of this rut. Even when Amy was with both of them, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was missing something.

  Amy buried herself back in her work hoping to find some relief. But work was no better. In the hot summer months, when Congress wasn’t in session, and the elites were all off on vacation in more moderate climates, DC was a ghost town, with low-level staffers running everything. Staffers alone weren’t important enough to cause scandals. Even though she had long since handed off primary contact with Ethan, Amy had spent years working with the rest of Haven Communications cleaning up his summer scandals, some real, some invented. Now, without him as a client, she had nothing to distract herself from the fact that he was no longer her boyfriend and only technically her husband. She still hadn’t signed the divorce papers. She couldn’t bring herself to do it. She had stashed them in the top drawer of her desk. She couldn’t look at them without bursting into tears.

  If she hadn’t given away half of her caseload to Callie, Amy would have had at least something to distract her, but instead, she spent her days staring out her office window wondering what she should do next. She all but prayed for the phone to ring with a scandal, any scandal, big or small, to at least give her some time to stop thinking about Ethan. At this point she was ready to do anything, even if it meant diversifying the kind of work her company did.

  More than a month had passed since Amy had told Ethan to get out of her life. She hadn’t heard from him since that fight in his apartment, but she read about his acquisition of Harris Energy in the Washington Post. The headline read: Tech Mogul Bets Big on Energy. Amy didn’t get past the first paragraph before throwing the paper in the trash. “You got everything you wanted, Ethan. I hope you’re happy,” she whispered. She spent a week sitting at her desk wondering whether she should call Ethan and tell him what a lousy, terrible, no-good asshole he was, but she never bothered. Besides, she was worried that when she finally did call him, she’d miss some incoming call, some crisis to take her mind off of everything.

  When work slowed even further, Amy started taking mornings to herself at home, only going into the office when she was needed. She knew there was a dark cloud hanging over her, and she didn’t want her mood to affect her employees. She was beginning to feel like her company was better off without her there. Everyone tried to avoid her as much as possible. After a particularly harsh scolding from Amy, Laura took a case on the west coast just to get out of the office for a few weeks.

  Even Rich got on Amy’s nerves whenever she spoke with him. In all of Amy’s years working with him, she had never lost her temper. Since breaking up with Ethan, she had already shouted at him twice. The first time, she had wrongly thought that he had misplaced a file. The second time, he had simply asked her if she needed any help. “Do I look like I need help? Did leaving for a few days suddenly make me incompetent?” Amy had snapped back. She immediately apologized, but realized that she had to do something to snap out of her foul mood.
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  The next morning, she started working from home. It was like everything she had known had somehow reversed itself when Ethan had proposed to her, and, now that he was gone, she couldn’t figure out how to put it back into place. As time passed, she realized how desperate she was for someone to call with a crisis. She convinced herself that some good, hard work would turn her luck and her mood around.

  When Amy’s phone finally did ring, she was ready to jump on a plane anywhere, as long as it got her out of town for a week or two. It was one of those mornings when Amy hadn’t even bothered to change out of her pajamas before walking down the hall to her home office. She was shocked when the phone rang at exactly nine thirty, and she was even more surprised by the voice on the other end of the line. “Amy, I hope this call finds you well. I know I’m probably not the first person you want to talk to on a morning like this, but I need your help again.”

  “Hank.” Amy straightened up in her seat. “What trouble has Logan gotten himself into now?”

  “It’s not Logan this time. I have a situation, and I need you to take care of it. It’s urgent, and it is sensitive. How soon can you be in Newport?”

  Amy looked down at the mostly blank calendar on her desk. “Hmm,” she said, “if I shuffle a few things around, I could be there as early as this afternoon.”

  “I sent a jet for you about an hour ago. It will be waiting at an airfield outside town. I’ll have someone get you the information if you agree to take this on.”

  “I need more information than that up front.”

  “A friend of mine is in a tough spot. I have a vested interest in helping him get through this situation. I know this will be slightly awkward for you given what happened the last time you were in Jackson Hole. And this might just be the old sentimentalist in me speaking, but I want to give you a chance to make things right. My wife and I never had a daughter, Amy, but if we had had one like you, I’d be a very proud father. If you do this one for me, I’ll consider us even. Either way, I hope to remain your friend. When you and Ethan visited us, I felt like you became part of our family.”

  “Thank you, Hank. That really means so much to me. It’s been a rough month, but I feel like I’m finally turning the corner. I’ll head over as soon as I hang up.” Amy’s pulse jumped as she said goodbye to Hank. This was it, she thought. This was her chance to get back to normal. She’d be in her element, handling a situation, taking control. It would be good for her. She made a quick call for a cab. Sure, it wasn’t having Ethan’s personal driver bring her, but that was for the best. She could use a little dose of reality.

  “Vi,” Amy called out down the hall when she arrived, “something has come up, and I have to head out of town on business.”

  “I hope it’s someplace nice,” Vi yelled back. “Maybe you’ll meet a man.”

  Amy laughed. “I think I’m done with men for a while.”

  “Well, then,” Vi said, “I hope you meet a woman.”

  “Call me if you need anything.” Amy walked back to her bedroom and grabbed her overnight bag. She needed to dress to make a good first impression. It was time for her to take control of her life again. It was time to leave Ethan in the past.

  Chapter 25

  The flight from DC to Newport was short, barely an hour long, but it was more than enough time for Amy to realize that no amount of travel would take her mind off Ethan. Instead of giving her a distraction, the calm and comfortable flight gave her too much opportunity to dwell on what could have been.

  Before everything had gone to hell, Ethan and Amy had planned on making this trip together to visit Hank and finish Ethan’s acquisition of Harris Energy. Amy had been looking forward to it, and she had harbored a secret hope that maybe a second long trip would help her and Ethan take another step forward in their relationship. She felt like an idiot as she thought back on how happy she had been. She thought of how she had felt in his arms. She thought about that damn kiss in the rain after they had been ambushed by paparazzi. She thought of what happened later that night once they were truly alone, the way Ethan had held her, the look in his eye as they had undressed each other in his apartment. She really had fallen for him, and she had thought that he felt the same way, too. Of course, that had been before she found out that he had been lying to her for nearly their entire relationship without giving her any good reason why.

  As the plane touched down outside of Newport, that thought stuck in Amy’s mind: Why couldn’t he have at least explained himself? Why couldn’t he have just done what she had asked and actually consult her on something? Why couldn’t he open up and let her know what he was thinking? Why didn’t he try to fight to keep her?

  Amy got angrier the more she thought about the way Ethan had left things. After getting into a town car at the airport, she tried to calm herself down as she prepared for her meeting at Hank’s house. She closed her eyes and leaned back and tried to think of anything but Ethan Cole, but it was too late. She had gotten too worked up during the flight, and she needed to do something to get him out of her mind.

  She pulled out her phone and flipped through her contacts. Her mind raced as she imagined what she would say to Ethan if he picked up on the other end of the call. She wanted to yell at him and tell him that she had done the one thing she had sworn not to do. She wanted to say that it was his fault she had fallen in love with him and his fault things ended the way they had and his fault she was miserable without him.

  Amy cracked the window open and let the cool sea breeze wash over her face. Everything is going to be fine, she thought, but she couldn’t stop thinking about calling him. What if he was mad at her? After all, she did almost screw everything up by putting herself in a stupid situation with Logan, and she was so angry with Ethan when she had returned that she hadn’t even taken time to consider that maybe her actions had hurt him in some way. Why couldn’t Ethan just tell her how he felt without trying to sweep her off her feet?

  As the car wound down the narrow road that led to mansion after mansion looking out over the sea, Amy wondered if it was really too late. She looked at each enormous house along the way. There were stone mansions with Italianate cornices and brick mansions that looked like castles, but Amy was sure that Hank’s “cottage” would somehow outdo them all. Soon enough, she’d be at Hank’s house, helping someone she had never met deal with some crisis she didn’t care about. She wouldn’t have time to deal with her own crisis. Besides, Ethan was the only person who could help her with her mess, and he could be half a world away for all she knew.

  When the driver finally turned off the road, Amy caught her first glimpse of the “cottage.” It was a true New England monstrosity. The lush, manicured grounds rose up to the mansion. Amy counted three chimneys and a half-dozen gables along the expansive roofline of the three-story home. The only aspect of the house that resembled a cottage was the weathered shingle exterior. The house blocked any view of the sea, but Amy could hear the gentle lull of the surf, and she could only imagine the view from inside the home.

  If Amy just called Ethan quickly before heading in, she’d be able to tell him that she needed to talk. It wouldn’t solve anything, but it would be a first step. It would help her get closure. As she was about to hit send, her phone rang.

  “Hello?” Amy said.

  “I just wanted to let you know that the whole team is at the office, and we’re on standby to do whatever necessary to help you with this one.”

  “Thanks, Callie. I don’t know if that will be necessary. How is everything on the home front?”

  “Good. We’re all just excited to have the old Amy, our leader, back in action.”

  Amy smiled. “It’s good to be back.” She half meant it. She had always loved her job, just not the same way she had loved spending time with Ethan. The car pulled around the circular driveway to the side entrance to the mansion. “I’m here. I’ll make sure to update you as soon as possible.”

  “We’re rooting for you.”

 
Amy laughed. “Am I that much of a basket case?”

  “No, you’re my sister,” Callie said. “Now go save the day.”

  Amy didn’t usually need a pep talk, but she was glad her sister had known to give her one. She got out of the town car with a new sense of purpose. She was Amy Haven, successful businesswoman. She would fix whatever this scandal was, quickly and professionally, and then she’d head home to wait for the next crisis only she could handle. It was time to move on. Even if it meant saving herself, she’d figure out a way to move forward.

  ***

  Amy should have realized something was amiss when the door to a twenty-five million dollar mansion was wide open. Instead, it took her exactly three steps inside to realize what had happened. Her heart jumped as she looked at the man standing before her.

  “I’ve been set up,” Amy said. She was standing face to face with Ethan.

  He held his hand up in front of Amy’s mouth. “Before you say anything else, I have something I need to tell you.”

  Amy shifted back from him and folded her arms. “If you’re trying to apologize, you’re a bit late.”

  “I’m not. I just needed to tell you something.” Ethan reached into his pocket and pulled out what looked like a tattered piece of cloth. He looked down at it and asked, “Did you sign the papers?” As he waited for Amy’s response, he worked the napkin through his hands again and again.

  “No. I couldn’t bring myself to do it.”

  “Well, you upheld your end of the bargain, and I’m still trying to uphold mine.”

  “This is your idea of upholding your end of the deal? Having Hank call me and tell me there was an emergency? Another lie?”

  “It’s no lie. This is an emergency. I’m trying to fulfill our original deal.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Ethan. I already told you that I can’t make myself sign the divorce papers.”