A Fragile Wife: Billionaire Romance (19 page)

Of course, Lana was not so lucky recently. The first person she encountered upon entering her spacious home was none other than Chloe, who appeared to take Lana’s coat and umbrella.

“Did you have a good day, ma’am?” she asked, her cute little face almost enough to make Lana throw up. “Roberta says your dinner is waiting for you.”

Lana eyed her suspiciously. “Bring it up to my room.” She shook off her sweater and piled it on top of her coat in Chloe’s arms. “If my husband comes home, tell him I want to see him.” They had a cuddle appointment.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Lana hoped that was the last of seeing any help that night. As soon as she had her dinner waiting for her on a small table in the master suite, she switched on one of her favorite TV shows and enjoyed it until she was full and happy enough to go about her business.

She slipped into something more comfortable, which amounted to a thin white T-shirt and cotton shorts, topped with a red silk robe that was more style than function. It mattered little to her. Her body ached from the trials of the day, and if her damned husband would respond to her texts, she could find out if she should take a bath without him or wait for his arrival.

Damnit, forgot my seal.
She was in the midst of gluing invitations together for a soiree she was throwing at the beginning of February, shortly after returning from her second honeymoon. She paused the DVR on the flat screen and shuffled into the hallway. Her office was a few doors down, and she was absolutely sure that’s where she last left her seal.

Unfortunately, Ken’s office was another stone’s throw away from
her
office. This meant she had a fantastic view of his open door and the light spilling out.

He’s home?
That was annoying, if only because he never texted her, and nobody came up to inform her after she explicitly asked for them to do so.
I need to hire new help. And a new husband.
Huffing, Lana marched down the hall, bypassing her office to head straight to Ken’s.

She caught Chloe going through her husband’s locked drawer. A key dangled from her fingers.

“What the!” Lana suddenly became three times as large, overtaking the office doorway the moment Chloe freaked the hell out. She slammed the desk drawer shut, locking it with no more finality than Ken ever did. “What the hell is going on here?”

They came to an instant impasse. Lana, finding the help going through her husband’s belongings; Chloe, caught with a key hanging from her hand. Her face was so pale that she looked almost spectral.

“Mrs. Andrews…”

“That’s
right.
” Lana found her bearings and approached, not giving a shit if her robe slipped open and Chloe saw the boss’s bouncing tits beneath a thin white T-shirt. “Mrs. Fucking Andrews. Care to tell me what the
fuck
you are doing here, little girl?”

Chloe really did look little and girlish. She looked like a teenager caught sneaking out, or a small child caught peeking a look at the gifts beneath the Christmas Tree. But she
wasn’t
a child. She was a grown-ass woman. A grown, sexualized woman caught going through the master’s belongings.

Or had that key been
given
to her? Not even Lana had a key to her husband’s desk. She knew where to find it, but had never been
given
one…

“I’m so sorry… Mr. Andrews told me to…”

“Told you to what? Oh, I bet this is rich.” Here it was. Here came the confession. Chloe couldn’t deny it any longer. Either she was up to something too nefarious for words, or she was cheating with Lana’s bastard of a husband.

“He told me to pick up and drop things off here. I’ve been helping him with a project, ma’am.”

“What project?”

“I’m so sorry!”

Lana was no match for how tiny this girl was. Chloe was able to slip easily past her, bolting into the hallway with the key still clasped in her hand. No matter how loudly Lana called after her, she could not convince the girl to stop, confess her sins, and meet her fate.

You’re kidding me!

Lana went into her husband’s office, slamming the door behind her.
I will expose this asshole.
She went to the coat closet full of tax files and receipts. There, on the top shelf, was an inconspicuous box that Ken kept some valuables in. Sure enough, she quickly found a tiny ring of keys, one of which was sure to go to his desk.

I may regret this, but I don’t care.
Lana tried one key after the other, crouched low between desk and office chair. No matter which key she tried, however, nothing was making the lock budge.

Not until she reached the second to last key, which snapped everything open.

Lana gasped, mentally preparing herself for whatever she might find. Love letters? Dirty books? Presents exchanged between master and mistress? Whatever was in here, it was not meant for Lana’s eyes… but for some reason Chloe was more than invited to partake.

That alone was enough to give Lana the strength to pry it open.

She looked upon a mess of books and papers. Neatly organized, yes, but a mess nonetheless. Piles of Ken’s stationery, neatly covered in his handwriting, stared back at her. Spiral bound books and what looked like a manuscript proof were crammed into the corner. Everything was covered in colorful sticky notes, some of them with Ken’s handwriting, and others with what looked like… Chloe’s.

What the fuck?
Lana pulled out the top stack of papers. They were neatly creased in the middle, the perfect size of Chloe’s bag that she packed around the house when she went about her job. They even smelled like her, if that was possible. Sure enough, Lana found a pink sticky note on top written in girly handwriting.
“This is really beautiful!!!”

“I’ll show her a beautiful bruise…” Lana ripped off the note, crumpled it in her hand, and began reading the sordid love letter her husband wrote the maid.

“The first time I met my wife, I thought I was crushed by the weight of the universe and sent to the afterlife. That’s because she looked like a glamorous angel come to deliver either very good or very bad news about my soul’s fate. Instead, she came up to me and asked if I knew where the women’s restroom was. She was one of the only women there, which should have tipped me off regarding how deliriously intelligent and bullheaded she is.”

What the hell?

“Lana Losers was definitely not a loser, no matter how much people made fun of her for her name or for being a woman, let alone a conventionally beautiful one. She was a winner through and through. In that first hour meeting her, I learned that she had dominated her internship at one of the biggest real estate agencies in the city. There were vicious rumors that she slept her way to the position. These are lies, meant to slander my wife. But, even if she had, it didn’t demean her in any way to me. She proved her merit when she showed me her portfolio of one-hundred high class sales… all within the past year!”

Lana flipped through the first half of the papers. Her name showed up at least once on every single one of them.

“What. The.
Fuck.
”

She reached back in and pulled out more papers.
“For our wedding, Lana wanted to have only three bridesmaids, which pleased my mother greatly, since I have exactly three brothers. However, the drama that erupted because I chose two friends over two of my brothers almost caused us to elope in Vegas. I brought it up more than once. It would have been easy enough to do… hop a plane and get married at the nearest Elvis Station. Yet I knew how much a family affair meant to my wife, and convinced her to take on two more bridesmaids. She ended up picking a pair of cousins she hadn’t talked to since she was nineteen. I think they thought they had stepped into Cinderella’s castle on our wedding day. I couldn’t blame them. I thought she looked like a princess as well.”

Lana fell to her knees in front of the open drawer. There were more pages – pages upon pages – with Ken’s meticulous handwriting scribbling his thoughts on his wife, marriage, and even bits and pieces about his career and home life.
“The first thing she told me when I asked her to be my girlfriend was that she didn’t want to have children. Was I okay with that? Would I pressure her in ten years to give me an heir? You have to understand, if you’re not in our society, it can be confusing… but women don’t have a lot of freedom regarding children. It’s mandatory in many of the more conservative families to have an heir, preferably a boy or two. You know the saying – an heir and a spare. Lana was upfront saying she was going to get her tubes tied or ablated, or whatever, and never consider motherhood again. It wasn’t for her. Until then, I had been on the fence about children, assuming that my wife would make the final decision. Well, she did, didn’t she? I wouldn’t take a gaggle of perfect children in exchange for my wife.”

More words. More praise. Tiny criticisms, like how she often spat her toothpaste into the sink and didn’t wash it down all the way. Or how she mumbled in her sleep, usually about the most nonsensical things.
“She can be harsh to our staff sometimes, but she’s also very generous come Christmas and birthdays, or because something made her think of someone working in our house or office. Lana simply expects excellence from everyone around her. If any of our staff thinks she’s tough on them, imagine how she is on me! If I screw something up, I hear about it for months, sometimes years. She wants me to improve myself. In turn, I challenge her as well.”

Sometimes things were crossed out. Other times there were tiny notes in the margins, usually in Chloe’s curly handwriting.
“You’re so sweet, Mr. Andrews.” “I’m not sure Mrs. Andrews would like the word ‘beastly’ in reference to her flirting…” “Do you have a picture to go with this passage? I think the audience would like a visual reference. I know I do!”

“Lana!”

Papers crumpled in her hands as Lana turned, heart thumping wildly in her chest. “Ken!”

There he stood, in his office doorway, suit jacket tossed over his arm and tie loose around his neck. The look he gave his wife was both one of shock and horror. “What are you doing in my private drawer?”

Lana dropped what she held, but the damage was already done. She and her husband kept few secrets between them, but one thing they acknowledged was private correspondence and spaces. They didn’t go through each other’s mail, electronic or physical. They didn’t intrude on meetings unless previously given permission. And they sure as hell stayed out of each other’s locked drawers. Lana had violated more than her husband’s trust by rooting through his locked desk drawer.

“I had to know what was going on!” Already she was on the defensive, determined to clear her besmirched name before her husband even
had
the chance to besmirch it. “Things had been so shady around here… you and Chloe…”

“What about me and Chloe?”

She saw the look on her husband’s face. He knew instantly what she had suspected, and it was more than betrayal coloring his cheekbones. Lana bent over the yellow stationery scattered on the floor… and cried.

They were tears of relief and fear. Relief that her paranoia was just that, and her husband was not cheating on her. But the fear. The fear!
I fucked up badly!
Now Ken knew how crazy she was. Not only had she suspected something as heinous as infidelity, but she had rooted through his private stashes in search of something against him. Had the tables been turned? Lana would have never forgiven him.

Ken stayed far away from her for a minute. Lana could not see his face through her shameful tears, but she could feel his aura from so far away.
“How could you, Lana?”
He wasn’t angry. He was sad. The woman he had written so highly of in these papers was sobbing on his office floor after being caught like Chloe was.

“Lana.” That stern voice was not sexual.
Rarely
did Lana hear this side of him and not be the submissive end to his domination. No, this was matrimonial, sure, but for all the wrong reasons. “I am not sleeping with our maid.”

“I know!” she cried through her sobs, each one more heinous than the last. They wracked her body… a body purging itself of the negativity, the paranoia, and her will to destroy a marriage that seemed too good to be true for so long. And yet here she was, destroying the best thing that had ever happened to her. “I’m sorry.”

Sorry would never be enough for her unwarranted suspicions. Of course Ken had not cheated on her.
Why
would he? Was she really so dumb, so foolhardy as to believe this man who let her get away with murder would be any less than faithful to a fault? For fuck’s sake, they were
swingers!
If he was happy, why would he cheat? Because he was a man? Because men always cheated? What sort of disgusting half-truths had Lana swallowed over the years? Did she really have so little faith in her marriage?

I didn’t confront him about the maid because deep down I knew it was baseless.
Like her therapist told her, she had only been concerned with dismantling her own marriage, finding every little fault as an excuse to get a divorce. Except to what end? Did she really need Ken to prove his love to her every ten years? Would she still be playing this game with herself at
eighty?