Julian tightened his hand around my waist — a silent warning not to embarrass him in public.
I simply smiled.
“No problem,” I said. “Work always comes first.”
They both visibly relaxed. While Kayla handed over her passport, I opened the airline app on my phone. The entire itinerary had been booked under my account, the way I’d handled most of our travel since we started dating three years earlier.
I selected only my ticket.
Cancel flight.
Refund processed.
“I need to use the restroom,” I said. “You two go ahead through security without me.”
The moment they disappeared into the crowd, I turned around, walked back out through the terminal doors, and took a cab home to Ashcombe.
Eleven hours later, Julian stood inside the oceanfront master suite at the Opaline Resort on Marisol Island. I wasn’t there. Neither was my luggage. For the first time in longer than I could remember, real panic started creeping across his face.
Then his phone buzzed.
A message from an unknown number appeared.
Julian, happy honeymoon. I truly wanted to join you, but a honeymoon for three sounds rather exhausting. Oh, there’s also one minor administrative detail I forgot to mention at the airport…
As Julian read the next line, every trace of color drained out of his face.
I want to back up, because none of what I did that morning happened on impulse. I’m not the kind of woman who improvises a decision like that one at an airport counter. I’m the kind of woman who spends weeks quietly building toward it.
Julian Ashford and I had been together three years by the time we got married. He ran Ashford Capital Group, a mid-sized investment firm headquartered in Ashcombe, and I met him through my own work as a corporate event planner, coordinating a shareholder gala his firm hosted the winter we met. We got engaged after two years together. I was thirty when we married. He was thirty-three.
