DEEPLY IN LOVE WITH HER

"Marry me, or stop looking after me." After my mother's funeral, I took the old debt Nicholas owed her and used it to force him to marry me.

He told me he only thought of me as a little sister. I took the marriage anyway — a marriage in name only — and I kept to my place in it.

Later, someone asked him whether he'd come to like me.

He was quiet for a moment. "It isn't that I like her." "I'm deeply in love with her." Chapter 1 In the third month of my marriage to Nicholas, I came across an interview with him in a business magazine.

It ran a full six pages. On the last page, the reporter asked a question that had nothing to do with business. "I understand you were married three months ago, Mr. Wexford.

Would you tell us a little about your wife?" Nicholas's answer was short. "She's young.

She doesn't like being bothered by the public." "I'd ask everyone to give her some privacy." Below that, nothing. I stared at those two lines for a while, then closed the magazine.

There wasn't much to say, really. Nicholas had had smooth sailing for half his life. The one place he ever ran aground was the shallowest water there is — marriage.

A "kid" — me — called in a debt on him, and he had no choice but to marry me. Naturally, the last thing he wanted was to mention me in public. My phone chimed just then.

A deposit alert from the bank. Nicholas had transferred money into my account again. Seven figures. The memo was a single word. Household.

I looked at it for a while, then texted him. "I haven't spent last month's yet." It was ten, fifteen minutes before he answered. "Keep it." I sent back, "Okay." Nothing came after that.

I sat on the couch for half an hour. I had "What time will you be home?" typed into the message box, and I never sent it.

Up until about a week ago, I still had illusions about what Nicholas and I were. So for three months I had worked at playing the good wife, putting him first in everything.

Cooking for him myself, ironing his shirts, asking whether he was cold or tired or had eaten. I thought that one day it would move him.

Then last week I went out to the old house in Greenwich for a family gathering. In the lull after lunch, when everyone had scattered, I went up to Nicholas's old room.

It was spotless. Someone clearly still cleaned it. On the desk sat a dark red photo album. Something got into me. I opened it, and my fingers went cold.

A young Nicholas, smiling that soft smile, and beside him a girl in a white dress. The library, the field, a treelined walk… in every one of them he was laughing without restraint.

I had never seen that look on Nicholas's face. "What are you looking at?" Sutton's voice, behind me. Sutton is Nicholas's cousin — his uncle's daughter.

By any reckoning, that makes me her cousin's wife now. She has never once acknowledged that, in front of anyone. Plenty of the younger Wexfords know why Nicholas and I got married.

They don't say it out loud. That doesn't mean they think much of me. The way they see it, my mother helping the Wexfords all those years ago is one thing.

Me cashing in that debt to force Nicholas to marry me is another. She leaned against the doorframe, a smile at the corner of her mouth.

Chapter 2 "Do you know who she is?" She came in and tapped the face in the photograph. "Nicholas's first love.

Ten years ago he rushed back from London to take over the company, there was a misunderstanding, it got out of hand, and she married someone else." Sutton bent down and said, quietly, close to my ear, "Why do you think Nicholas went ten years without marrying?

He was waiting.

She finally comes back, divorced, the two of them are finally about to have their chance — and then you come along and use that little favor to force him to marry you." She straightened up, her tone dismissive. "Tell me.

Isn't that selfish of you?" I snapped the album shut, nails digging into my palm. I knew Sutton had left it there for me to find.

The two of them in those pictures, leaning into each other — it still went through me like a splinter. So it wasn't that he was busy.

It wasn't that he had no appetite for any of it. It was that the wound had never closed, and he'd locked the door on his heart and thrown away the key.

After I got back from the old house, I asked my friend to dig into that stretch of Nicholas's past. Six years, high school through college. They were never apart.

Everyone they knew called them the perfect couple. If there had been no one else, I could still have told myself that feelings grow with time.

But what if someone was already living in his heart? A little after eleven, I finally heard the front door. I'd been about to go to bed. I threw a jacket on and went out anyway.

Nicholas had just come in. He must have been drinking — there was a faint smell of it on him, a slight crease between his brows, one hand working his tie loose.

He stopped when he saw me. "Why are you still up?" "I was just going to bed." His face was a little pale.

I couldn't help myself. "Is your stomach bothering you?" "A little." "I'll get you something for it." "No need." He stopped me. "Iris." "It's late.

Go to bed." I hesitated, then nodded. Two steps away, I turned back. "There's soup in the kitchen. I had the housekeeper keep it warm.

If you're hungry you could have some." He was looking down at his phone. "Thank you." Thank you. Standing at the foot of the stairs, I suddenly found those two words funny.

Husbands and wives aren't supposed to be thanking each other all the time. And yet Nicholas and I seemed to say it constantly. Thank you. Sorry to trouble you. Don't wait up.

Get some rest. Anyone who didn't know would take us for two guests under the same roof. Which wasn't far off. Once we were married, he kept the master bedroom.

I took the one next door. The day we signed at city hall, Nicholas pushed the deed to the house and a black card across the table to me. "We're married.

You'll get what you're owed." He said it calmly. Like a man discharging an obligation that went without saying. What Nicholas considered owed to me covered a great deal. Money.

A house. The name Mrs. Wexford. And his protection, without hesitation, any time I was in trouble. The one thing it didn't cover was love. Nicholas keeps his promises.

I've known that since I was small. Ten years ago, Wexford Capital was nothing like the size it is now. Nicholas was twentythree, just back from London to take over the family firm.

That was the year everything came apart for the Wexfords. His father died without warning.

The company ran short of cash, several investors who had been with the Wexfords for years pulled their money out while they could, and the lenders started calling in what they were owed.

At the worst of it, my mother was the one who helped him. She and his father had been friends for years.

Chapter 3 She sold off part of what she owned, lent him the money, and got him in front of several longtime shareholders and old family friends who had been refusing to see him.

Wexford Capital pulled through. It took Nicholas a few years, but he paid my mother back, principal and interest. She wouldn't take the interest.

All she said to him was: "Your father went too early.

It's a lot to put on a young man, carrying something this big." "Do well from here on, and you won't have let him down." After that, Nicholas looked after my mother and me in every way he could.

When she got seriously ill, he was in London. When he heard, he cancelled his meetings that night and took the first flight back. He was still a little late.

By the end my mother couldn't say much.

She took Nicholas's hand and put mine into it. "Nicholas." "I'm not worried about much." "It's only Iris…" I sat by the bed and cried until there was nothing left to cry.

Then Nicholas's fingers closed around ours, and he answered her quietly. "Don't worry." "I'll take care of her." Only then did she close her eyes. And he did.

Every detail of her funeral, he arranged himself. My schooling. The estate she left. The Brackenridge relatives circling it. He handled them one by one until none of it touched me.

He even meant to have the rest of my life arranged for me. He said, "Iris, you're young." "If you want to keep studying, keep studying.

If you want a job, I can make calls." "Your mother's gone. You still have me." When he said it, I think he really did only mean to be a good older brother.

The kind of man my mother could trust her daughter to at the end. But he didn't know. I had long since lost the ability to be his sister and be at peace with it. Leave, or have him.

So in the end I forced that choice on him. It was a despicable bet, and I knew it. I knew what kind of man Nicholas was.

I knew he would never go back on what he'd promised my mother. So in the end he had to marry me. "Iris, we can get married." "But all I can give you is the name Mrs.

Wexford." "The rest of it, I can't." I nodded. So I suppose I never had the right to feel wronged. Not from the beginning. A door closed across the hall.

I got up and shut my own door — the one I always left cracked open — and closed off every sound outside it.

In the dark I looked at that room, at the traces of a life that had only ever been mine, and suddenly I regretted it. Regretted forcing that choice on him.

After that I stopped texting Nicholas. I kept regular hours. He left early and came home late.

Without the runins I used to engineer, we went most of a month under the same roof without seeing each other. Then a friend asked me to stand in for her at a charity gala.

All I had to do was show my face, bid on a painting she wanted at the auction, and leave. I didn't expect Vernon to be there. The Grissoms carry some weight in this city.

So through two years of his hounding me, I said no, and I said it clearly — but with my mother's business to think about, I never made it ugly.

Maybe because I never made it ugly, he went on believing he had a chance. "Iris." Vernon came over with a drink in his hand and looked me up and down. "It's been a while." I nodded, polite. "Mr.

Grissom." Chapter 4 "I hear you don't go out much these days. I've asked you a few times and never gotten anywhere." "I've been busy." "Busy with what?" I stopped.

Then, after a moment: "I got married." The smile on Vernon's face caught. "When?" "Four months ago." "Something like that, and not a word got out?" "We signed at city hall.

There was no wedding." He studied me. "Who's your husband?" I didn't answer. Nicholas almost never mentions me in public.

So there was no reason for me to go around wearing the name Mrs. Wexford. Vernon waited. When nothing came, his expression eased.

He'd decided, I think, that I'd married someone not worth naming. "Iris.

Don't tell me you just married whoever was standing there." I frowned. "That's none of your business." "How is it not?" He lowered his voice. "If you were really doing so well, would you be afraid to say your husband's name?" I turned to go.

He stepped into my way. "I told you a long time ago.

A temperament like yours doesn't get far in this crowd." "Vernon." I looked up at him. "I'm married." "And?" "And I'd like you to have some respect for yourself." The smile went out of his face by degrees.

Probably it was that people nearby had started to notice; losing face in front of them turned his tone ugly. "Iris Brackenridge.

I've been doing you a favor, and you've started believing you're somebody?" My hand tightened around my glass.

He let out a snort. "Everybody in our circles knows exactly where the Brackenridges stand right now." "Your grandfather hasn't even drawn his last breath and his sons and daughters are already clawing each other bloody over that little block of shares.

Brackenridge Holdings has been worse every year, the sun's going down on it, and half this town is waiting for it to fall." "As for you—" He looked me over, top to bottom. "How many people in that family even remember you're supposed to be their heiress?" The room around us was going quiet.

The looks landing on me, half there and half not, were worse than anything he'd said. Because not all of it was a lie.

After my father died, my mother took me out of the old Brackenridge house, and from then on that family and I drifted further apart every year.

I rarely showed up to anything they hosted. In time everyone knew that Iris, the Brackenridge heiress, had long since been shut out of any room where the family made decisions.

Vernon took my silence for a hit on the sore spot. "Me coming after you was a favor to you." "And you throw it back in my face." He leaned in closer. "Take some advice." "If you want to stay in these circles, find yourself a man to hide behind, and do it soon." "Otherwise, the mess the Brackenridges are in, when the day comes to carve up the estate—" He laughed. "you won't be left so much as a crumb." I looked at him. "Are you finished?" Vernon blinked. "Then move." His face went dark. "Iris Brackenridge." I ignored him.

I was about to step around him when someone beside us spoke up, quietly. "Mr.

Grissom, maybe leave it." Whoever it was sounded hesitant. "I heard… the man she married is a Wexford?" Half the drink went out of Vernon's face on the spot. "A Wexford?" For a beat, everything around us went still.

Chapter 5