All Chapters of The Billonaire Silent Bride : Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

The floor was shaking.Not loud. Josie had no use for that word anymore. The organ came up through the marble instead, into the thin heels she had never worn before today, up her shins, into her ribs, and settled there like a second heart. A big, slow animal breathing under the cathedral.She counted it. Four beats. Eight. Twelve.Twelve meant the officiant was nearly at the part about lawfully wedded.She knew because she had been reading his mouth for six minutes straight, the way you read a road sign in fog. He had a small mouth. He chewed his words. Dearly beloved had come out shapeless, and she had almost lost her place, and for one horrible second she had not known whether she was thirty seconds from the end or three minutes.Six hundred people were sitting behind her.She could feel them, too. Six hundred bodies made the air in a room heavier, denser, like water. When they laughed, the floor buzzed. When they leaned forward, the light changed.Right now they were leaning forwar

The Sterling house had nine bedrooms and it was the quietest place Josie had ever stood in.She did not say that out loud, because people took it badly. Hearing people wanted her to be lonely in a house like this. They wanted the silence to be a tragedy.It wasn't. It was beautiful. In her mother's house the floors carried everything — footsteps, doors, the washing machine, her mother's temper coming up the hall. Here, nothing came through at all. The rugs ate it. She could stand in the middle of the front hall in her sister's shoes and feel absolutely nothing, and for one strange moment she was almost happy.Then Julian appeared in a doorway and made a small gesture with two fingers, and she followed him.The study was dark wood and green glass. He had taken his jacket off somewhere between the car and this room, and his tie was gone, and he looked less like a photograph and more like a man who had been awake for two days.There was a folder on the desk.He turned on a lamp before he

The dress was ice-blue and it fit her.That was the part she had not expected. Not the price of it, not the car, not the photographers folded up along the steps like birds on a wire. The fit. Somebody had taken her real measurements from somewhere and had not rounded them off to her sister's."Stop pulling at it," Julian said in the car."It's too—""It isn't." He didn't look up from his phone. "You look like the most expensive thing in the building. Try to enjoy the next four hours, because none of them will."Then the door opened, and the light came at her in white bars, and his hand arrived at the small of her back.She was ready for a lot of things that night.She was not ready for how steady that hand was.Four hundred people, and Josie could feel every one of them deciding what she was.She got nine minutes of peace. Then a waiter carried a microphone to the low stage, and Regina Sterling took it, and the room turned like water going down a drain.Regina was wonderful at this. T

CHAPTER SEVEN — The Dead Man's HandThe certificate came out of a fireproof box at one-fifteen in the morning, and the witness line had a name on it that meant nothing to either of them — a notary from a hospital in another state, dead end, a rubber stamp with no face behind it."Nothing," Julian said, and set it down harder than he needed to."Not nothing." Josie turned the page toward the lamp. "Look at the date field. Fourteen months ago, the seventh. Now look at the transfer log you gave me."She had it open already, pulled up on the second screen, the one Julian had unlocked for her without hesitation two hours ago, in a gesture that had done more to her chest than the kiss on the mezzanine had.*Read-only access to twelve years of Sterling's books.*He had done it the way you hand someone a key, not a leash."Two weeks after your father died," she said, "the first Meridian transfer clears. Forty-one million. Then again six weeks later. Then again.""How many times.""Sixty-one,

CHAPTER NINE — Room 112She was already turning when Dom Reyes came through the door with his hand halfway to his jacket.He stopped when he saw her. Really saw her — pale, alone, four feet from a bathroom with blood on the tile — and something crossed his face that might have been relief if the timing hadn't been so wrong.Four minutes.That was the number that mattered. Not the blood, not yet — the four minutes it had taken Dom Reyes to arrive at a motel two hours from the city, a motel she had told no one about, had found herself, had driven to alone with the radio off and her phone in her coat pocket the entire time."How," she said."Josie—""How did you get here four minutes after me."Dom's jaw worked. He was a big, careful man, the kind who moved like he'd been trained to take up as little space as possible, and right now he looked like a man deciding how much of the truth would fit through the door he'd just walked through."Your phone," he said finally."You're tracking my p