Moaning My Best Friend’s Name

Seven hundred and thirty nights of marriage, and my husband still hadn’t touched me—until I heard him moaning my best friend’s name behind the half-open door of his study.

I stopped on the hallway runner, gripping the handle of the silver thermal case in my left hand. Inside sat the finalized Elysium cellular-regeneration compound—a five-hundred-million-dollar formula I’d just spent forty-eight sleepless hours perfecting in the basement lab as my second anniversary gift to Preston Sinclair.

Through the two-inch gap in the mahogany door, a woman’s breathy giggle spilled out of Preston’s speakerphone.

"Slow down, baby," Chloe Sutton purred. "Your pathetic little wife is still locked downstairs in the lab, isn't she? What if she comes up early?"

"Let her stay down there breathing in fumes all night," Preston panted, the leather of his executive chair creaking in a steady rhythm. "God, Chloe... keep talking to me like that. Wear that red lace set tomorrow after the board meeting. The second I put your name on the Elysium patent and hand it over to Sinclair Global, we’re done hiding."

My boots made no sound on the carpet. In my right hand, I held a porcelain mug of warm chamomile tea I’d made for Preston’s chronic nerve pain—the lingering injury from the car crash right before our wedding that had supposedly left him impotent.

For two years, I’d swallowed the guilt over that crash because Preston claimed he’d been speeding through the rain to make our rehearsal dinner on time. I’d walked away from my billionaire family, hidden my identity as the legendary formulator S.K., and put up with his mother’s daily insults under this roof without a single complaint. Whenever Preston flinched from my touch in bed, I was the one apologizing for making him feel broken.

"You really are a bastard, Preston," Chloe teased, using the same sweet, bubbly tone she always put on before borrowing my designer handbags. "Faking an impotence diagnosis for two whole years just to avoid sleeping with her? Any other woman would’ve divorced you after six months."

"And go where?" Preston scoffed, his breathing turning ragged. "Sienna’s a penniless orphan with nobody backing her. She thinks you’re the only friend she has in this city just because you brought her a five-dollar bowl of soup back when she lived in that dump. Saving myself for you was the easiest lie I ever told. Why waste my energy in bed on a boring lab rat when I can have you?"

"Mmm, you better mean that," Chloe whispered, letting out a low, theatrical moan over the line. "Tell me what you're going to do to me on my new Chief Formulator desk tomorrow, Preston..."

Preston groaned her name again, rough and frantic behind the heavy wood.

I didn’t make a sound. Setting the porcelain mug down on the marble console table beside the door, I slipped my phone out of my trench coat pocket, opened the camera, and aimed the lens through the gap.

For forty-five seconds, the screen captured everything in crisp detail: Preston sprawled in his leather chair with his eyes shut and his slacks undone, while Chloe’s voice echoed from the speakerphone on his desk, laying out their exact plan to steal my life’s work at tomorrow’s ten o'clock board review and throw me out on the street with nothing.

At the forty-five-second mark, I ended the recording, uploaded a backup straight to my encrypted private cloud, and slid the phone back into my pocket.

Two years of misplaced guilt vanished on the spot.

I turned my back on the study and walked down the east wing toward the small guest room I used as an office. Stepping inside, I set the silver Elysium case on my desk, locked its triple-layer biometric latch with my thumbprint, and woke my laptop.

Six months ago, when my older brother Marcus begged me one last time to come home to the Kensington estate, his legal team had sent over a standard divorce agreement in case I ever came to my senses. I’d left the file buried in a hidden folder, convinced Preston deserved my loyalty.

I opened the document, typed in tonight’s date, and hit print.

The laser printer hummed, feeding three crisp pages into the tray. I uncapped my red lab pen and signed Sienna Cross across the bottom line. Then I slid the plain platinum band off my left ring finger and set it right on top of the stapled papers.

Grabbing the divorce agreement and the locked silver case, I clicked off the desk lamp and headed back out to the main gallery to leave the papers right outside Preston’s door.

I rounded the corner near the grand staircase, twenty paces from Preston’s study—and collided with a solid wall of a man.

The impact knocked me half a step back. Before my heel could slip on the marble floor, a strong arm caught my waist, and the rubber tip of a heavy matte-black titanium cane planted itself beside my boot.

Raindrops glistened on the shoulders of his bespoke charcoal overcoat.

I looked up into storm-grey eyes framed by damp dark hair. A black leather driving glove encased the hand gripping my waist.

Dominic Sinclair—Preston’s older half-brother and the ruthless head of Sinclair Global—glanced down at the signed divorce papers in my hand, then toward the muffled sounds still spilling from Preston’s study ten feet away.

He leaned down until his lips nearly brushed my ear, his voice a dark murmur.

"Don't stop on my account, little sister-in-law. I was just waiting to see if you were going to use a pen—or a knife."