Forever With You

by Laurelin Paige

  Seemed I wasn't the only one in my marriage keeping secrets.

  9

  Alayna

  I enjoyed Hudson's touch so much that I pretended I didn't hear him when he crept up behind me in the kitchen the next morning. I took one long breath with his arms around me, filled my nose with his spicy scent, let myself feel his embrace for the barest of moments.

  Then I shrugged him off.

  "Don't. Please," I said, sharply, pulling a mug down from the cabinet.

  He stepped to my side and leaned against the counter, his aftershave wafting over the aroma of freshly brewed coffee, reminding me what I was missing when I was mad.

  But I was still far too mad—too hurt—to let it go.

  Hudson was my best friend, my anchor. Discovering he was hiding things from his crazy wife was a knife in my gut, one that twisted anew every time I remembered the look in his eyes when he looked right at me and lied.

  But in some ways I did understand. I would forgive him. Once he stopped doing what he was doing, and made it up to me properly. Once he admitted that just because I was paranoid, it didn’t mean I wasn’t under threat.

  Until then... I stepped away from him again.

  "So we're still doing this, are we?" he asked.

  "It's not me who's doing anything, Hudson. It's you who has all the secrets locked up inside and doesn't want to share the key."

  "Right," he said, a note of sarcasm in his tone, likely because I had been doing something—specifically, I'd been giving him the cold shoulder. He'd come home at dinnertime, ignoring my warning to stay late at the office, but I'd managed to get through the whole entire evening without speaking more than three words to him. And he most certainly had not slept next to me in our bed.

  "I see that you didn't sleep on the couch like I specifically asked.” I poured the coffee into my mug and ignored his waiting cup.

  "I saw no point in sleeping on the couch when there was a perfectly good bed in the guest room."

  "The point was that you would be miserable.” I handed him the pot with barely a centimeter of liquid at the bottom of it.

  "Believe me—I was still miserable," he said in that charming way that he had, moving his gaze up and down my body to leave me in no doubt as to what he was missing. Even after all these years it made my stomach flutter.

  But I wouldn't be won over that easily this time.

  I grabbed my coffee and headed to the kitchen table, stopping by the fridge to nab the creamer. "Well, until I feel less miserable, you can go right ahead and stay in there at night, as far as I'm concerned," I told him, regretting the words as soon as I said them. It had been pretty terrible in the king-size bed without him too, if I were being honest. I never slept well without him by me. I was addicted to him in so many ways.

  Was I pushing him even farther away with this?

  "I guess I better start working harder." He poured more coffee grounds inside the coffee maker and then took the pot to the sink to fill it with water. "What do you have on your agenda for today?"

  I stared at him in his fitted Armani suit. It was light gray, like his eyes, and it brought out all of his best physical features. Once upon a time I would've maybe tried different tactics to get him to open up. Ones that involved me getting into that suit, or rather, getting him out of it. Once upon a time, he wouldn't have been able to keep his hands—or eyes—off of me, especially when I was wearing a skimpy nightgown like I was.

  Were we better together now? Or were we boring?

  Before yesterday, when I'd been convinced he would share anything with me, even the things that scared him—especially the things that scared him—I would've said we were better.

  But now, I wasn’t as sure.

  "Alayna?" he asked again, when I didn't answer his question.

  "Things," I said dismissively. "My usual things." He wasn't going to tell me his stuff, and I certainly wasn't going to tell him my stuff. Tit for tat. A secret for a secret.

  Okay, so I hadn't planned on telling him what I was doing today before I found out about his secret, but that was beside the point. Now more than ever, I felt a desperate desire to lose myself in my business, to drown my fears under an ocean of paperwork.

  "You boosted security at The Sky Launch too, didn't you?" I asked, suddenly worried I wasn’t being careful enough about this.

  "Yes," he said slowly. "Why do you ask?" He eyed me carefully—suspiciously?

  No, I was being paranoid.

  "Because I don't want anyone to get hurt or threatened there in some crazy douchebag's attempt to get to me." Not exactly a lie.

  "How thoughtful." He continued to study me. "I'd like you to stay put today, Alayna. Do you hear me?"

  "Jesus, you’re kidding me, right?" I stirred my coffee with my finger then took a giant swig. "I can't stay locked in the penthouse like your princess in a tower. Even Mina goes to camp. I have things to do too."

  "Today you have things? You have to leave the house today?" The coffee pot beeped that it was done, but he ignored it, keeping his focus on me. I avoided his eyes as he stared hard.

  "Maybe." I knew if I followed this through I would have to name what those things were. A secret for a secret. A lie for a lie. "All right, so there's nothing today. But there could be."

  I swallowed my guilt down with another sip from my mug.

  "Stay put, Alayna." He turned to the cupboard and pulled down a to-go thermos, then poured the coffee inside. When he was done he turned back to me, and added sternly, "And if you do go anywhere, don't give your bodyguards a hard time."

  That almost made me smile. Because he knew me well enough to know how hard it was for me to accept an order. Because he knew me well enough to know I would give anyone who got in my space a hard time.

  Because he knew me and he put up with me anyway.

  "So do you think it's someone who knows Hudson? Or some rando who’s jealous and spiteful?" Gwen asked later that morning at The Sky Launch when I finished telling her everything I knew about the letters and the heightened security.

  She had looked shocked while I spilled, but she didn’t seem nearly as frantic as I was about it. Was that because it wasn’t happening to her? Or was it another sign that I was overreacting?

  The answer to that might depend on the answer to her question.

  Someone who knew my husband might have real cause to wish him harm. Or it could be some unhinged stranger who got wrapped up in Hudson Pierce. A random whoever who could eventually get distracted, or medicated, or arrested, and we’d never hear from him again.

  Could.

  Or they could be as fixated as I could get.

  I crossed my leg and perched on the edge of the loveseat, considering. We had remodeled the office while I'd been on bedrest with the twins, so now instead of two desks there was one large table that Gwen and I sat on either side of while we worked. We figured it was the best use of space since both of us were usually not on duty at the same time, and we liked to look at each other when we did work together, so we could talk and gossip in between running day sheets and balance reports. Of course, I hadn't been back since the new design had been implemented, but the place looked good.

  Today, she sat at the desk/table, while I lounged, thinking, in the sitting area on the opposite side of the room since I wasn't officially on the clock.

  "I don't know," I answered, finally. "There were some pretty specific things in those letters. Things I didn’t even understand, but I don’t think they were vague references."

  "Someone Hudson used to work with, then? An employee? A business rival?"

  "Yeah, maybe something like that." Though I had a feeling our threat didn’t have anything to do with Hudson's job or career or how much money he made, but rather the games he used to play. Games was the term he always used when he talked to me about the schemes he’d pulled in the past.

  Manipulation and bullying were more like it.

  I hadn't told Gwen about that part of Hudson's past,
and I wasn't about to now. It meant I had to dance around some of her questions, and since she seemed hell-bent on my life being one of those thriller books that she read, she had a lot of them.

  Besides, there was no telling where and how the information came from. For all I knew, there were whole internet sites devoted to compiling lists of my husband’s misdeeds.

  "Are you worried?" she asked now.

  I bounced my ankle in the air where it dangled. "A little. Maybe more than a little. I wouldn't be worried if Hudson would give me the status and tell me exactly what was going on, but since he's trying to dismiss it and say it's no big deal, I’m a little more convinced that’s not the case." I shrugged.

  "Does he not even know you? Of course you would worry."

  No, he knew me. Knew me too well. Well enough to be concerned about how much I’d worry, but I didn’t want Gwen concerned about that too, so I kept it to myself.

  She tilted her head in thought. "I didn't think much about it when he said we were updating the security system here. It just happens sometimes, needing an upgrade, but this was a pretty expansive upgrade. That was more than a year ago now. Then, on Monday, we all of a sudden had a second set of security guards working the doors."

  More than a year ago.

  That letter had to have arrived while I’d been pregnant. All of this had to have begun around then. Had Hudson been acting off for that long, and I'd missed it?

  "I know what you're thinking," Gwen said, assuming she could read my mind. "But you've had a lot going on. Being a mom and taking care of one kid is enough of a handful. You had a hard pregnancy and birthed twins. Your home life probably seems like it's turned upside down. If there’s been something going on this whole time, how the hell could you be expected to spot it? Even if Hudson has acted differently, you’d probably attribute it to not enough sleep and the new chaotic life.”

  I guess she could read my mind.

  "Or maybe it hasn't been that serious until recently." I still hated the idea that I could have gone so long unaware of something weighing so heavily on my husband. "You did say the extra security started this week. And that's true at home too."

  “Good point. Maybe something changed. The threat got more real.” She suddenly narrowed her eyes. "Should you even be here?"

  "Oh my God, you sound like Hudson.” I stood up and smoothed my hands down over my skirt. "He’s gone out of his way to make it safe here. Obviously. And at least here I have something to do. At home, I have nothing—"

  "—except being the mother of two kids under one, and a preschooler," Gwen interrupted.

  "I have nothing," I repeated, louder, "that challenges my mind, and I'll end up obsessing over those letters until I drive myself crazy. Trust me. It's better for everyone that I'm out of the house. Besides, I didn't want to cancel on Lee Chong on such short notice. It’s taken long enough already for these pieces to fall into place."

  I followed Gwen's glance up to the clock on the wall. "But your appointment with Lee Chong isn't until this afternoon," she said. "Why are you here so early?"

  "I wanted to drop off my materials for the presentation before I ran my other errand. Which I should be getting to now if I want to get back in plenty of time." I stood, picking up my purse from the floor beside me. I'd already unloaded my laptop with my PowerPoint presentation and the drawings I'd mocked up for the event space stored on it.

  I was certain once Mr. Chong saw them, he’d see why we were the perfect buyers.

  Gwen sat back in her chair, a brow raised. "Errand? You said you were safe because there was extra security here at The Sky Launch. Is it really smart for you to go anywhere else? And why do I have a feeling that whatever this errand of yours is, it isn't going to make your husband very happy?"

  "Well, he's not making me happy right now either," I huffed.

  But she was right. It was probably wise to make sure someone knew where I was at all times. Ideally, someone who wasn’t Hudson Pierce.

  "Look. He can't expect me to sit back and let him do all the work on this by himself. Some of those threat letters referenced things in his past, things that I couldn't make any sense of, but that doesn't mean there isn't somebody who can."

  She sat forward, suddenly alert. "Don't tell me you're going to Celia Werner about this."

  "No." Though that was an interesting thought. And potentially better than my own. I considered, then shook my head. Facing that dragon was one step too far. "She isn't the only woman who knew Hudson before I did."

  "Okay. Good. Because for a minute there I thought you’d truly gone crazy." She smiled as though she wasn't quite sure if she'd gone too far in her terminology.

  I grinned back, letting her see me accept the phrase with no harsh feelings.

  "Hey, you don't think she's behind these threats, do you?"

  I'd already considered it. How could I not? Celia in my life, weaseling in near our family was a constant concern for me. "She just had a baby," I said, sharing the conclusions I'd come to on my own. "She can't possibly be so obsessed with us that she's been hounding Hudson for the last year and a half—could she?"

  Gwen's shrug said she was as undecided about that as I was. On one hand, it didn’t really seem like her style. Celia usually preferred subtlety. On the other hand, if this was something she’d put someone up to, we could be certain that whatever her game was, this would only be her opening gambit.

  "For the moment, I'm giving her the benefit of the doubt. Because of the motherhood and marriage thing. But she’s certainly on my possibility list," I said.

  "Hard to imagine that you might have enemies worse than her," my friend said sympathetically.

  "I know, right?" A chill ran down my spine at the thought of someone worse than Celia. For once in my life, I was thankful for Hudson's bodyguards.

  Thirty minutes later, with Brody, today's security sidekick, I rang the bell at Mirabelle's boutique in Greenwich Village. She opened the door, already babbling.

  "Laynie! You don’t have an appointment today. What are you doing here? Of course I'm so happy to see you. And you never have to have an appointment to come by. I will always fit you in. Do you need something to wear for an occasion? Something special that I can help you with? Is Hudson taking you somewhere special? Or is this a social visit? And who’s the stocky bald guy brooding in the corner? Did you finally hire a personal assistant? Not the type I thought you’d go for, but to each her own.”

  My sister-in-law was in her usual perky mood. No one could simultaneously energize and soothe me quite like Mira, without me ever getting a word in edgewise. She hugged me and shoved a glass of champagne into my hand, then rushed off to attend to another client before I could answer a single one of her questions. I watched her flit around tirelessly and felt a pang of envy. The energy and speed she naturally had in her body had likely helped her regain her pre-pregnancy body with little effort.

  It was a tempo I recognized, but had never achieved physically. Even before the children, when I would run regularly, I never had her energy. Only my head, my thoughts, ever traveled that fast. That unstoppably. Watching her was like seeing my mind personified.

  Sometimes it was exhausting to look at, and I had to turn away.

  Finally, she had a moment free, and she pulled me aside into a consultation area near the dressing rooms where we could sit and talk.

  "So what is it? Need a dress or an escape? I'm happy to provide both."

  I chuckled as I finished off the last of the champagne she'd given me, then set the glass down on the table between us. It was neither, but between being here and the bubbles, it did feel like a momentary breather from my frenetic worrying.

  "Actually, I wanted to ask you something. I thought you might be able to help enlighten me about Hudson. About his past." I swallowed.

  The corners of her mouth turned down slightly. "That's an odd request. I am intrigued. What exactly do you want to know?"

  I hadn't yet decided which way I was approa
ching my conversation with Mira before I'd arrived, whether I was going to tell her about the letters Hudson had received or not, but on the spot, I decided to be transparent. I explained to her everything that I knew, what I'd seen—the extra security, Hudson's refusal to tell me any more. After telling Gwen earlier, I had the story down to a concise narrative.

  Mira's face was expressive as I spoke, her mouth gaping, her eyes wide. By the time I was done she was no longer sitting in her seat, but up out of her chair and bouncing around the room.

  "Oh my God, Hudson!" she exclaimed. "I can't believe he was keeping you in the dark like this. Doesn’t he understand anything about his wife? Of course you're going to obsess about it. Of course you would want to investigate on your own. Does he not know you? Does he not think of you as a partner? Marriage is supposed to be a two-way street! This is absurd! I’d kill Adam."

  "Exactly!" It was so relieving to know she was on my side, that she understood where I was coming from. It had been a risk coming to Hudson’s sister. She might've felt inclined to defend him, being his blood relative and all. "That brings me to why I came to you. I was hoping you would maybe be able to shed some light on the past. Maybe you could direct me to who might've sent the letters? He's not helping me, since he's not letting me know what angle he's working." I sat back, pleased that this had gone so easily.

  To my shock, Mira turned her frustration back to me.

  "No way. Because what are you even thinking, Laynie? Going off behind his back like this? It's one thing for him to keep something from you, but you're just as bad. Isn't this the kind of thing that's got you in trouble in the past? Tip-toeing around him? Two wrongs never make a right. And I am not about to get in the middle of your marriage squabble. You two need to work this out. You go back to him and you get him to open up to you. And thank you very much, for bringing whatever drama safety issue this is to my store. Did you even think about that? You’re a mother now. You have kids. Kids! You can't go chasing down the bad guys like there are no consequences. Now promise me you aren’t going to follow up on anymore of this bullcrap and you’ll leave the investigating to the people who do that for a living.”