Ten minutes later, the chairman introduced the company’s new majority owner. I walked onto the stage—and my husband stopped breathing.
“Go home,” Julian whispered after striking my shoulder hard enough to make me stumble into a champagne table. “She belongs beside me tonight.”
Two hundred employees were gathered beneath the glass chandeliers of the Halcyon Hotel for Aurelia Systems’ twentieth-anniversary party. Conversations faltered, then resumed with the careful volume people use when they have witnessed something ugly but fear the man responsible.
Camilla Price stood at my husband’s side in a fitted red gown, one hand resting possessively on his arm. As Aurelia’s communications director, she had spent months appearing beside Julian at conferences, dinners, and “emergency strategy retreats.” Tonight, she wore the diamond earrings I had found missing from my jewelry box.
She tilted her head. “Audrey, perhaps this isn’t the right evening for a domestic scene.”
My shoulder burned beneath my blue silk dress. I adjusted the strap, lifted my chin, and said, “No. I think I’ll stay for the announcement.”
Julian’s smile tightened. He was Aurelia’s chief strategy officer, and for three weeks he had talked about the promotion he expected tonight. He believed the board would make him president. He also believed I spent my days managing a modest inheritance and volunteering at an arts foundation.
