Chapter 3

3.

The day Maud came home happened to fall on Noah's month-old celebration.

Herman came back from a phone call with a faint, hard-to-catch tiredness around his eyes.

"Tabby, you know how it is. Maudie's always been timid…"

"She's just back in the country, doesn't know a soul, and she keeps insisting I be the one to come get her."

In my last life, Herman never even finished that sentence before I was already fighting with him.

"I already put up with you bringing that bastard child home, and now the mistress wants to move in too? How is any of this fair to me?"

A perfectly good celebration turned into a joke, and that wasn't even the worst of it.

Stranger still, Maud got kidnapped the moment she left the airport.

After she was rescued, she looked at me through a haze of tears.

"Tabby, I know Herm only ever saw me as your stand-in. I'd have stayed abroad my whole life and never come back. Why did you have to have me kidnapped?"

Because of all the hostility I'd shown her before, everyone assumed I was the one who'd done it.

To soothe her, Herman brazenly moved her right into our marital home.

At the time all I cared about was driving Maud out of the house.

I never once realized that kidnapping had planted a seed of wariness in Herman toward me.

He'd owed his life to me, so even though he and Maud were inseparable across those six years, every one of the brothers under him acknowledged only me as the boss's wife.

And my younger brother was Herman's right-hand man at the company.

Right when the company needed to go clean and take itself public, Herman made my brother the scapegoat.

He even made sure the brothers walked in on us during a fight, on purpose.

Little by little, I lost their loyalty at the company too.

This life, I could not repeat those same mistakes.

I patted Herman's shoulder to settle him.

"Herm, things aren't stable at the company right now. You'd better go get her yourself."

"As for the party, Noah's own mother is here. Surely there's nothing left for you to worry about?"

Herman gripped my hand back hard, every trace of suspicion gone.

"Tabby, what I admire most about you is how well you handle the big picture."

He pressed a quick kiss between my brows and turned and left.

The corgi came fawning up to my feet again.

"Stupid woman, gotten addicted to playing the proper wife, have you?"

"Once Maud's back, just you wait to get thrown out of Herman's house!"

I tossed a bone on the floor and it went after it.

An animal was still just an animal.

Its head full of nothing but love and romance, how could it ever understand what I was planning.

Herman and Maud's affair was no secret.

But amid the clinking glasses, everyone could see who the real mistress of the Butler house was.

And everyone understood that only my child could ever be the Butler heir.

"Tabitha Simmons, you really can hold it in."

A long-fingered hand closed around my wrist out of nowhere.

I raised my eyes to Rhys Delgado. He was Herman's biggest rival.

That bullet in my chest had been a gift from him.

Yet in my last life, after I died, he was the one who truly grieved for me, the one who saw to my body.

I turned the tables and closed my hand around his instead.

"That's right. I really can hold it in."

I lifted my glass to him and arched a brow.

"For instance, if Mr. Delgado would agree to work with me, I could let that bullet you put in me slide."

His fingers slid suggestively across the back of my hand.

"Tabitha Simmons, I don't make losing deals."

At that same moment, on a deserted little road beside the airport expressway, an utterly clumsy farce was playing out.

Maud had switched off her phone on purpose.

She tousled her own hair and tore the hem of her clothes.

Making herself into the picture of a pitiful woman who'd been kidnapped.

She was certain I wouldn't let Herman leave the party, so she'd timed it all in advance.

By the time Herman learned she'd been taken and rushed over, he'd catch her exactly like that, a pear blossom in the rain.

What she wanted was Herman's tenderness, his guilt.

What she never expected was that I would send Herman away early.

Herman's assistant told me about it while I was seeing guests off at the hotel entrance.

Looking out at the wrecked banquet hall, I picked up the red wine on the table and gently swirled the crimson liquid in the glass.

Watch him raise the tower. Watch him feast his guests.

Watch the whole thing come crashing down.

The corgi at my feet was utterly lost, its heart full of disbelief.

"How could this… how could she be so stupid, playing a good hand this badly!"

Then, as if it caught itself, it hurried to change its tune.

"This is wonderful, now my master won't have to suffer, that scumbag has finally seen her true colors!"

I lowered my eyes, indifferent, ignoring all its excitement.

Did Herman really not know what Maud was up to?

At the end of it, he simply chose to indulge her.