Page 69 of The Vow

Fifteen years ago…

“Damon?” I wrapped my towel tighter around me and walked from the bathroom toward the sound of my husband’s determined stride.

We were getting ready to go out to dinner, but there was no rush. Not like his pace implied.

“Hey.” I stopped when I saw him standing at the closet door, completely dressed and almost ready to walk out the door. “What’s going on?”

Damon’s head dipped down at the sound of my voice, and he plucked his hat from its hook. Even from his profile, I caught the corners of his mouth pinching his lips tight.

“Damon—”

“Sandrine texted. She wants to talk to me. She said it’s urgent.”

Like an electrical pulse along my spine, I stiffened, fully alert and my mind turning over the possibilities. Did Sinclair realize what we were doing? What our intention was?Did Sandrine?

Worry wrapped its grip around my throat.

With Sinclair trying to distance himself from Damon, especially since Damon and I had gotten married, our only secure access to their house was through Sandrine.

When this was all over, I’d let myself fully feel the guilt for using Sandrine to get to Sinclair. She was a friend, if I could even call her that because of our deception.

Last week, she’d caught us in Sinclair’s office, and we’d pulled the samein flagranteschtick as the first time, but tacked on the honeymoon-phase excuse, too. If she’d told Sinclair, he wouldn’t have bought the excuse as easily. Not anymore.

“Did she say anything else?” I croaked as he settled his hat on his head and faced me, my body warming at the sight of his impeccably clad form.

“No.” He came to me, gripped my chin, and brought my mouth to his for a hard kiss, promising, “I’ll be back.”

I started. “Wait, I’ll come with?—”

“No.” The word fired with unexpected ferocity.

Balking, I scrambled to protest. There was no way I’d let him walk into the lion’s den alone. Not with something as cryptic as a message like that.

“Damon…”

“I don’t want you leaving here until I know what’s going on.”

Not since that very first night when we’d met had I felt the pit in my stomach like I did now. It hadn’t formed instantly, instead yawning ever wider over the last four weeks ever sinceDamon proposed, and we’d married a few days later at the courthouse.

The flagrant upending of Sinclair’s plans for me was the proverbial straw that broke Sinclair’s back. An unspoken, invisible line drawn between them that, should Sinclair try to use me, he would risk being undone by his very own Brutus.

Since then, Sinclair had almost completely withdrawn Damon from his operations, replacing him with this hot-tempered brute, Rodgers, as his second-in-command. The uncouth grunt enjoyed nothing more than keeping Damon at arm’s length and conversing in barely concealed threats.

We were on borrowed time. We’d gathered lots of information over the last several months, copious proof that Sinclair was defrauding people with his phony, Ponzi scheme investments, but the deeper, more insidious ties to Belmont and GrowTech still eluded us. And now, Amir Shazad was thrown into the mix. It didn’t need to be said what a boon it would be to the FBI…to the world…to bring down a man such as him. It left Damon and me no choice, leaving Damon and me to resort to drastic and riskier measures to find the incriminating evidence we needed before time ran out.

“Do you think she knows?”

Sandrine, as always, was a wildcard, one we’d had no choice but to play because Sinclair had shut Damon out. We’d argued countless times about whether or not to bring her completely into the fold, after all, she had warned Damon about Sinclair’s plans for me, but Damon always shot down the idea.

“We’ll never get to him if any of us has something to lose.”And Sandrine had her daughter, so trying to turn her was too great a risk to everyone.

But it wasn’t too great a risk to pry as much information from her as we could. Damon decided to capitalize on the concern she’d shown for us, and now, I worried all the time he’d spent ingratiating himself with her had worked against him.

“She doesn’t know,” he grunted.

The knot in my throat ballooned, and I asked hoarsely, “And ifhedoes?”

“He doesn’t.”

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