Chapter 1

"Sign the papers. The villa is yours, and I'll give you fifty million on top of it."

Hubert Delgado's voice was cold as deep winter ice as he pushed the divorce agreement across to Layla Fox, not lifting his eyes.

Layla looked at that thin sheet of paper, her fingertips gone pale. She asked softly, "Is it because Letitia Pruitt came back?"

His hand paused over his own signature. At last he looked up at her, and there was no hiding the impatience in his eyes. "Since you already know, spare yourself the scene. Her health is poor, she can't take any stress, and I don't want her knowing we're still tangled up in this."

"Tangled up?" Layla let out a bitter laugh. In three years of this marriage, she had lived like an invisible housekeeper. When had she ever tangled him up in anything?

"Fine." She picked up the pen and signed her name cleanly. "Hubert, I hope you get everything you want."

Just then his phone rang. He answered, and his tone turned tender in an instant, as if he were a different man. "Letitia, don't be scared, I'm coming right now. There's a good girl, do as I say..."

Watching that back hurry off, that back that had never once softened for her, something in Layla went quiet and dead.

The wind outside the county records office was fierce, biting at her eyes until they ached.

The red divorce certificate in her hand, its gilt lettering, was hard to look at.

Just half an hour ago, she and Hubert Delgado, the man who held the reins of the wealthy Delgado family, had ended three years of marriage for good.

Hubert hadn't even waited to walk out the door with her. He took his copy and got straight into the Maybach parked at the curb, headed in the direction of Downtown General Hospital. She'd heard Letitia was getting a checkup there today.

Layla pulled her trench coat tighter and flagged down a cab.

"Parkview Residences, please."

"Sure thing. You don't sound local, from your accent. Just finished up some business?" The driver was a warm-hearted sort, glancing at her in the rearview mirror.

"Yeah. Just finished." Layla managed a thin smile and turned her head to the streets rushing past the window.

These three years, she had lived like a joke.

Layla came from an ordinary family, a high school English teacher. Her father had died young, and her mother lived on a pension. Three years ago, old Alvin Delgado fell gravely ill, and a fortune-teller said the family needed a marriage arranged as a blessing to ward off ill fortune, that they had to find a girl with a strong fate and a steady temperament.

Back then Layla was still reeling from her father's death, and the family was buried in debt. The Delgados came knocking. They paid off her debts and arranged the best care home for her mother. Their only condition was that she marry Hubert Delgado.

Hubert was the classic scion of a wealthy house, cold, sparing with words, with nothing in his eyes but work.

On their wedding night, he moved into a separate room from her.

"I married you for my grandfather's sake," Hubert said from the bedroom doorway, unfastening his cufflinks, his expression indifferent. "As long as you know your place, you'll have every bit of the standing and comfort a Mrs. Delgado is owed. But anything beyond that, don't even think about it."

Layla was young then, and she always believed that no heart was truly made of stone.

She thought that if she did well enough, she could thaw the ice in him eventually.

So she quit the teaching job she loved and threw herself into being a full-time wife.

Hubert's stomach was bad, so she learned to make healing broth, simmering him a different porridge every day, even though he often came home late from business dinners and sometimes didn't touch it at all.

His clothes all had to be washed by hand, so all through the dead of winter she kept her hands in cold water, red and stinging, and never said a word.

The Delgado relatives were difficult, her mother-in-law sharp and prickly, and she was always the one with her eyes lowered, pouring the tea and swallowing every slight in silence.

Even a stone should warm up after three years of being held close, shouldn't it?

But Hubert wasn't a stone. He was iron, and he only carried warmth to one particular person.

That person was Letitia.