THE HUSBAND SHE THREW AWAY

CHAPTER THREE: THE ACQUISITION

The bar he ended up in wasn't one he'd chosen for any reason beyond proximity—dim, half empty, smelling faintly of stale beer and pine cleaner, the kind of place that didn't ask questions of a man who ordered whiskey and didn't stop. He drank the way he used to work offshore during a heavy tide: steadily, deliberately, chasing a numbness that never quite arrived.

 

 His body was too used to steadying itself through worse to let alcohol do what it was supposed to do, leaving him, infuriatingly, sober enough to feel every jagged edge of the afternoon.

The amber glass felt heavy in his hand, leaving wet, overlapping circles on the scuffed wooden table. His knuckles were bruised, the skin across his jaw tight where Elowen’s coldness had struck far deeper than his own fists ever could.

He didn't hear her come in. He felt her before he saw her—the particular, suffusing weight of her presence sliding into the booth across from him. She smoothed the skirt of her tailored ivory jumpsuit and ordered a drink of her own from the passing bartender, acting as if this were just another evening in their four-year marriage.

"You're going to make yourself sick doing this, Caelen," Elowen said, her voice smooth, measured, and stripped of the heat from earlier.

He didn't look at her. He just watched the ice cubes melt in his glass. "Why are you here?"

"Because you're being ridiculous, and someone has to tell you that."

He laughed, short and humorless, a dry sound that scraped his throat. "You feel nothing. Do you understand that? I watched you shrug. I watched you dismiss four years of my life with a wave of your hand."

"Every woman needs love, Caelen." She said it like a rehearsed fact she'd recited before, to herself if no one else, her posture perfect, her manicured hands resting on the edge of the table. "I am not going without for a month at a time just because you decided the ocean was more important than me."

"I decided the ocean was how I could afford to keep you," he said, finally raising his eyes to meet hers. "I stayed on that rig so you could live in Brickell. So you could have the clothes, the portfolio, the lifestyle."

"Stop being dramatic," she said again, that hated word slipping past her lips with sickening ease. Something in the repetition made his hands go still around his glass. "Come home. We can talk about this like adults instead of you hiding out in a dive bar."

"I'm not coming home, Elowen."

Her jaw tightened, the first real crack in her composed façade all night. A flash of genuine annoyance darkened her eyes. "Fine. If you're going to throw a tantrum, then you should know you haven't sent this week's allowance yet. And I have a trip to New York coming up for a agency showcase. The deposit is due."

He stared at her, certain, for one absurd, desperate second, that she was joking. She wasn't. Her expression held nothing but mild impatience—a woman waiting for a mundane domestic obligation to be fulfilled by a dependable laborer.

"You're asking me for money," he said slowly, the realization settling into his chest like lead. "Tonight. After what I walked into."

"I'm reminding you of a responsibility you already have," she said, leaning forward slightly, her voice dropping into that quiet, persuasive tone she used when she wanted him to yield. "Don't make this into something it isn't. Personal matters shouldn't interfere with my career, Caelen. You know how important this showcase is."

Something in him that had been holding steady for hours—for four agonizing years—finally gave out with a silent, catastrophic snap.

"You have no idea what I've been building to give you a better life. None," he said, his voice dropping into a register so dark and low it caught her off guard. "And you're sitting here across from me, asking about an allowance like I didn't just watch you with another man three hours ago."

"You're being selfish and inconsiderate!" she snapped, color rising rapidly in her cheeks as her composure shattered completely. "You know nothing about what love actually requires, Caelen. You never have! You think sending a check from an oil rig makes you a husband?"

"I called you a whore in my head the second I saw him wash your blood off his mouth," he said, quiet now, quieter than he'd been all night, every word measured and cold. "And I want to know how many men there have actually been. How many of your gigs I actually paid for while you let me believe it was talent."

Her hand moved before he registered it—her glass tipped, whiskey splashing hot and sharp across his face, immediately followed by the flat, deafening crack of her palm across his cheekbone.

The sting of the slap echoed through the quiet bar, but Caelen didn't flinch. He didn't even blink.

"Go to hell," she hissed, her voice shaking with something that might have been fury or the first honest thread of fear she'd felt all night. She stood up, her chest heaving, pulling her coat around her shoulders. "You know how much you love me. You'll come home when you're ready to grow up."

She turned and marched out, the heavy door swinging shut behind her, cutting off the humid Miami night air.

Caelen sat motionless in the booth, wiping the stinging amber liquid from his eyes with the back of his sleeve. The burn of the alcohol on his skin was nothing compared to the sudden, icy clarity washing over his spine.

A man in a sharp, tailored gray suit slid into the booth she had just vacated, setting a sleek leather folder on the wood between them. He didn't ask if Caelen was alright; he simply unclasped the brass lock on the portfolio.

"We've been processing the paperwork for weeks, Mr. Blacksew," the lawyer, Eldridge Ward, said calmly. "Your acquisition is finally complete. As of five o'clock today, you officially own eighty-five percent of the shares of Solstice Model Management. You've also been added to the guest list for their annual autumn gala as the primary stakeholder."

Caelen blinked, the words taking a moment to clear through the ringing silence in his head. "Say that again."

"Solstice," Eldridge repeated patiently, sliding a set of corporate registry documents across the table. "You own it now. Effectively all of it. Dunstan Cray is now your employee, and Elowen's contract is entirely under your control."

Caelen looked down at his wet glass, at his own signature printed on the legal documents, and then toward the door his wife had just walked out of. Something cold, heavy, and utterly unyielding locked into place inside his chest—something that had nothing to do with alcohol at all.