All Chapters of Once Bitten, Twice Shy: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

"Five years," I said out loud, to no one, because saying it out loud made it real.Five years of marriage. Five years of building Gideon Shaw into the man half this city wanted to shake hands with. Five years of candlelight dinners on this exact date, in this exact dining room, with the same white orchids he bought me the first time he told me he loved me.I lit the last candle and stepped back to look at the table. Two plates. Two glasses. A bottle of the wine we drank the night he proposed. I had asked the chef to make the dish Gideon's mother used to cook for him, the one he claimed no one else could ever get right. I wanted tonight to remind him of every reason he chose me.My phone buzzed against the table runner.*Gideon*: Emergency at the office. Contract issue blew up. Might be here late. I'm sorry, El.I read it twice.Five years married to a man who built an empire out of nothing, and I had learned that "emergency" was a word that meant different things depending on the day.

"Milo, I need you to look at some documents. Today, if you can." My voice came out steadier than I expected, considering I hadn't slept more than two hours since finding that photograph. I sat in my car outside a coffee shop three blocks from Shaw Holdings, phone pressed to my ear, the folder of images still open on the passenger seat beside me. "Elise, it's seven in the morning." Milo Grant's voice carried the roughness of a man who'd been my father's lawyer for twenty years and had learned to answer his phone before he was awake. "What kind of documents?" "Restructuring paperwork. Some transfer agreements I don't understand." "Send them over. I'll look before my nine o'clock." I didn't tell him where I'd found them, or whose signature I suspected was forged, or which name kept turning up where mine should have been. I forwarded the photographs one by one and kept the rest to myself. He called back forty minutes later, and his tone told me everything before he said a word.

I sat in the dark of my bedroom, the laptop open on my knees, the photograph of my father and Gideon still glowing on the screen, and watched every excuse I'd made for my husband collapse at once.I had told myself the affair started after the marriage went stale. I had told myself the fraud grew out of ambition, a man who got greedy after years of success. Somewhere underneath the anger, I had told myself Gideon once loved me before he decided I was worth more as a target than a wife.The photograph erased that last comfort.Eight months before we met, my husband already knew my father.I thought back to the night we were introduced, a charity gala my father hosted every autumn, the kind of event where half the room wore borrowed confidence and the other half wore old money. Gideon had approached me near the bar, charming in a way that seemed effortless at the time. He told me later he'd noticed me across the room and couldn't stop himself from crossing it.Now I wondered if he'd cro

"How long have you been standing there?"Gideon didn't answer. He crossed the study in three slow steps, his eyes dropping to the open folder on the desk in front of me, my father's letter still visible inside it.I closed it before he reached me, my hand moving faster than my thoughts could catch up to."What are you doing in here?" he asked, his voice even, a question with no heat behind it yet."Looking for the restructuring papers." I kept my hands flat on the desk, steady, though my pulse was anything but. "You said you left them for me.""Those are on the kitchen counter. You know that." He studied my face the way he might study a contract with a clause he didn't trust. "Why are you going through my father in law's old files, Elise?""They're my father's files," I said. "In my house. In my study.""That's not what I asked."I made myself hold his gaze instead of looking away. Looking away was what a guilty woman did. A woman with nothing to hide looked tired, a little annoyed at

"He joined something that was already happening."Milo's words sat in my chest long after I hung up the phone, a weight I couldn't set down. My father hadn't died of a weak heart. Someone had built a machine to drain his company dry, and my husband had climbed aboard partway through, not at the start.I refused to accept the rest as an accident. Not anymore."I need everything my father kept," I told Milo the next morning. "Every record, every note, anything he wrote down about the company before he died. If he was investigating this himself, there has to be a trail.""Your father kept a private archive," Milo said. "Boxes he never gave to the estate lawyers, stored in a unit under a name that wasn't his own. He set it up two years before he died. I found out about it only because his instructions to me mentioned a storage fee that needed to keep getting paid.""Get it. All of it."He called back that evening, his voice carrying the same weight mine had carried all day."Elise, your f