HATE ME, HUSBAND

Layla’s POVHangovers are a bitch.Now add a vicious housekeeper and you’ve got a hangover crafted by the devil himself.I heard Mrs. Stavrakos before I saw her — the sharp click of her heels against the hallway floor, purposeful and unforgiving, the particular rhythm of a woman who had decided that my suffering was not her concern and my comfort was not her problem.She came storming into my bedroom at what I can only describe as an ungodly hour of the morning. The curtains were yanked open with the enthusiasm of someone who had been waiting all night for the opportunity. Light — cruel, merciless, entirely unnecessary light — flooded the room and hit me directly in the face.I groaned and pulled the pillow over my head.It was removed immediately.“Miss Layla.” Her voice carried the particular energy of a woman who had raised difficult people her entire career and had run out of patience for all of them. “Up. Now.”“Mrs. Sk—”“Now.”I don’t know exactly how long it took her to get me

Ian’s POV“You are kidding me.”I raised an eyebrow at my grandfather across the desk and waited for him to confirm it — to tell me this was some elaborate test of my composure, or a hypothetical he was walking me through for reasons I would understand later, or literally anything other than what it sounded like.Alan Lawson looked back at me with the expression of a man who had not made a joke since approximately 1987 and did not intend to start today.I kept my voice level. I was not going to get worked up. I was twenty-seven years old and I ran a multi-billion dollar company and I did not lose my composure in the office.“This has to be a joke,” I said.He picked up his phone from the desk and turned the screen toward me.Media headlines. Three of them, stacked on top of each other on a news aggregator, each one more specific than the last.LAWSON-THOMPSON MERGER: IAN LAWSON TO WED LAYLA THOMPSON IN BUSINESS ALLIANCE OF THE CENTURY.THE WEDDING NEW YORK HAS BEEN WAITING FOR: LAWSON

Ian’s POVOne hour.I looked at my watch for the fourth time in twenty minutes and felt the number settle into my chest with the particular weight of something that had crossed from inconvenient into personal.One hour and seven minutes, to be precise.Lateness was one of the things I could not tolerate. Not in business, not in my personal life, not in any context that required another person to value my time enough to show up when they said they would. It was a simple thing — the simplest thing — and the fact that some people moved through the world as though other people’s schedules were suggestions rather than commitments was something that had irritated me since I was old enough to own a watch.I picked up my water glass. Set it down. Looked at the restaurant entrance. Looked away.The restaurant my grandfather had chosen for this occasion was the kind of place that understood discretion — private booths, lighting calibrated to suggest intimacy without enforcing it, staff who move

Ian’s POV“Good swing.”Gabriel’s voice carried across the green as we both watched the ball arc through the Saturday afternoon air and land with satisfying precision exactly where I had intended it to go.I lowered the club and rolled my shoulders.There was something clarifying about golf. Not the social version of it — the corporate rounds where half the conversation was positioning and the other half was performed casualness — but this. The family course on a quiet Saturday, just the two of us, no agenda beyond the game itself.“We should do this more often,” I said, walking back to the golf cart with Gabriel falling into step beside me. “It’s been too long.”“Agreed.” He dropped into the passenger seat as I took the seat beside him. “Especially considering we somehow managed to play this morning after the reunion last night. That’s either discipline or stupidity and I’m not sure which.”I said nothing. Both, probably.Gabriel Kingston had been my best friend since we were seven y

Layla’s POVFour weeks.Sometimes four weeks feels like a lifetime. Like when you are waiting for a vacation or counting down the last days of a school term — every hour stretching out longer than the one before it, time moving like something that has decided to punish you specifically.And sometimes four weeks disappears so fast you start questioning your own sense of reality.One minute I was walking out of that restaurant with don’t you dare fall in love with me still hanging in the air behind me.The next I was standing in my bedroom in a wedding dress.I looked at my reflection in the mirror.The ballgown. The one Ian’s mother had chosen. Big, white, full skirted, the gems catching the morning light in small scattered flashes. It was beautiful — I had accepted that much. Beauty was not the issue.The issue was that in approximately twenty minutes I was going to walk into a church and marry Ian Lawson.The last four weeks had moved in a blur of boxes and decisions I had barely bee