The Billionaire They Never Saw Coming

Chapter 3

The gate opened before Ethan finished giving his name, which meant someone had been watching for his car since he turned onto the street.

Isabella stood in wait in her dark green dress, and for a while neither of them spoke.

"You look as if you're about to enter a deposition," she noted finally.

"Feel about right."

"My father will ask what you do. Say investment consulting and let him assume it's a small firm. He loses interest quickly once he thinks there isn't a serious amount of money involved." she told quickly, quietly, as if it had been rehearsed in a mirror somewhere and she had trouble convincing herself it would do any good. "Do not correct him. Whatever he says tonight."

"I wasn't going to."

"I mean it. Whatever he says."

Already seated as they entered the room, her father was handsome in his way but the charm had curdled slightly over the years into something colder; he did not rise to meet them but offered his hand across the table, a small test of who was going to have to stretch further to reach it.

"Ethan." He said the name like he was pricing it. Isabella informs us you're in the world of finance,"

"Consulting, mostly."

"Mostly." His eyes flicked over the suit, over the simple watch, cataloguing and dismissing in the same glance. "What firm?"

"Independent."

"Ah." The word landed as a verdict. He turned back to Isabella without waiting for more. "Sit, both of you. We are already behind."

Four other guests, the table Ethan had not been warned of, an older couple who ran in the circles of Laurents and their son Aluko, who had the confident, overfed air of a man who had never had to work for anything he had.

"So you are the fiancé," Aluko said, not waiting for them to touch the food. "I imagined him to be someone taller."

"Preston," his mother said, not meaning it.

"What? I am permitted my expectations."

He grinned around the table, seeking laughter, and found one in the shape of a thin smile from Isabella's father. "No offense. Isabella generally runs in different circles. What'd you say your firm was called again?"

"I didn't."

"Right. Independent. That's a nice way of saying small."

"Depends on what you're measuring."

"Kent mentioned you were once engaged to Serena Whitmore." Aluko said lightly, reaching for his wine, offering Ethan a compliment rather than a blade. "She's married to real money now. Must be a bitter pill to watch that take place, around the time you've picked up yourself a fiancee who's, well," he gestured vaguely around the room, the house, the silver on the table, "considerably more than you're accustomed to."

The table went still in the fashion that suggested to Ethan the room had indeed heard what he had said, and was waiting for the first sign of flinch. Isabella's fork froze halfway to her mouth.

Ethan did not flinch. "She's welcome to him."

"Confident, for a man who got himself traded up." Aluko laughed at his own quip, and looked around for agreement he did not get.

"Preston." Isabella's voice cut across the table, quiet but final. "Enough."

"I'm just speaking the truth."

"You're voicing your thoughts. Make the distinction." She put her fork down. Ethan watched her contemplate in real time the cost of spending her father's goodwill to defend a man her family had dismissed, and watch her spend it anyway. "He's my fiancé. Control your manners or eat somewhere else."

Her father finally looked up and the calm that accompanied his voice had the certainty of a man who thought he, too, had been just in the room. "Aluko isn't wrong to wonder, Isabella. What does this man who will be running a company like ours bring?" He turned to Ethan, neither kind nor cruel but most definitely uninterested in finding out. "No offense. I prefer to understand the thing I'm looking at."

Every true answer sat behind Ethan's teeth. He swallowed them all.

"Patience," he said instead. "Most people underestimate how much that can be worth."

Aluko snorted into his glass. Her father's mouth twitched, not a smile was closer to a man closing a file he had already decided wasn't worth reopening and the conversation moved on without either of them, back to the board, back to a version of the evening where Ethan had been written down, harmless and forgotten.

It was Preston's father who picked it up to resume where it had left off, halfway through dessert, apropos of nothing, as older men sometimes do.

"Vale," he said suddenly, putting his spoon down. "That's interesting. I haven't heard that name in years. There was a Vale who ran an investment firm out around here, back what, 12, 13 years ago?" This one had been total collapse, fraud allegations, I think, though nothing ever stuck. Man lost everything overnight, and then he was just " he snapped his fingers, "gone. No relation, I assume.”

The table did not go silent this time. It turned out not to be worse than that no one appeared to have heard the question landed so far in the room, already moving on to some story about the Whitmores' new boat, but Isabella's eyes came up to meet Ethan's like she had heard a door creak open somewhere in a house she thought she knew every room of.

Ethan kept his expression exactly as he had been wearing it all night.

"No relation," he echoed.

He'd told smaller lies with more effort before.

Under the table, Isabella's hand sought at his knee not comfort, this time, asking him silently some question that had no use in his mouth as a possibility to six witnesses. He did not answer it. He couldn't, not here, not yet, and the not-yet sat in his chest like something he had swallowed whole.

His phone vibrated against his leg as the housekeeper came to clear away the plates. He waited for attention to move entirely back to the boat story before he checked it, and when Marcus's message loaded onto the screen, the calm he had carried through the entire dinner split down the middle like a crack.

Did you hear about the fraud filing from 13 years ago? Your father's signature is forged on it. I know whose handwriting matches it instead.