Chapter 1

The room went dead silent the second Silas Kendrick finished speaking.

Then, the laughter erupted.

"Silas, that mouth of yours is brutal. Look at her, the poor woman's gone white!"

His childhood friend aimed a phone camera at me and whistled. "I'm saving this. Next time someone says girls these days don't know their place, I'm pulling this up.

"Two generations of the craft, handed down like a family heirloom."

Laughter crashed over the room.

I looked down at the diamond necklace around my neck and suddenly felt it pressing against my throat like a weight. I forced my head up and squeezed out a smile that was probably uglier than crying.

"Silas, stop."

His eyes were dark, unreadable, but something in them glinted like he found my response amusing. "Willa, you know what reminds me most of your mother?

"When we're in bed together.

"You're just like her, slutty and shameless and cheap. When you showed me that picture of her, only one thought crossed my mind.

"Like mother, like daughter."

He turned and gestured toward the far corner of the room, where a few unfamiliar faces sat at a table I hadn't noticed before.

A woman in a dusty pink knit dress rose slowly, long hair falling past her shoulders, and walked through the crowd toward us. Every pair of eyes in the room followed her.

Silas slipped his hand around her waist like it was the most natural thing in the world and pulled a velvet ring box from inside his jacket. He flipped the lid open. Inside sat a diamond, at least ten carats, dwarfing the stone hanging around my neck.

"Everyone, I'd like you to meet my future wife, Natalie Vaughn."

I thought of the day Mom died. Her eyes were half-open, and when she saw me, her lips moved. I leaned in close and heard her whisper, "Willa, never trust what a man tells you."

Mom dated a man in college who promised her the world. Then, he told her his family was too wealthy, too important, to let him marry a woman like her.

She was already pregnant by then, and they spent half their lives tangled up in each other. That was the only lesson she ever taught me.

I didn't listen.

I believed in Silas so completely that I laid everything bare for him, holding nothing back. And he took the thing I cared about most and used it to gut me.

I was a fool. Mom spent her whole life being strung along by a man, and I was no different.

I reached up, unclasped the necklace, and turned to leave. I made it seven or eight steps before Silas' voice caught up to me. "Willa Sherwood. If you walk out that door tonight, don't ever come crawling back to me."

My steps faltered for a second, but I didn't stop.

Whispers rippled through the crowd. Someone asked him, "She's really just leaving like that?"

Silas scoffed. "Give it three days. She'll call me crying, begging me to take her back."

Once I was outside the bar, my phone buzzed with a new email. It was a job offer from one of the top fragrance houses in the world.

The starting salary was 200,000 dollars a year, with mentorship under their lead perfumer, Oliver Durand, and a co-credit on a debut commercial fragrance. The only condition was that I couldn't come home for three years.

My thumb hovered over the screen for a second, and then I typed back, "I accept. Please start the process as soon as possible."