Page 1 of Neglected By Her CEO Husband

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MADDIE

The ballroom of the Ellemore Estate was the perfect place to celebrate the promise of forever. I stood in the center of it with a clipboard I didn't need and a mental image I'd been building for weeks.

"The tables should pull in tighter," I told Lisa, the planner. "Right now they're sitting too far from the center. People will feel like they're eating in a warehouse."

She tilted her head, considering. "We sketched it at twelve feet apart."

"Bring it to eight. And angle the head table so it faces the windows, not away from them. When the sun sets, that whole wall will turn amber. You want Quin sitting in it, not with her back to it."

Lisa made a note, then looked up at me with something close to admiration. "You have an eye, Mrs. Sterling. I mean it. Most of my clients tell me what they hate. You tell me what the room wants."

I smiled. "The room knows what it wants. I just listen."

Her phone buzzed and she pressed it to her ear, and I watched her face fall by degrees. When she lowered it, her mouth had gone thin.

"Great. The peonies fell through. Their grower had a blight and they can't fill the order."

"How many arrangements?"

"Forty. Plus the installation over the arch."

I didn't let myself panic. Panic was a luxury, like sleeping in or saying no. I looked at the windows again, at the gold pooling on the floor, and focused on finding an alternative.

"Forget peonies. Go to ranunculus and garden roses. The ones that look like they're about to spill open. Cream and the palest blush, nothing saturated. Then run trailing amaranth down the center so it pours off the tables." I gestured at the arch as I spoke. "And the installation needs to be stripped back. Make it sparse. Branches and a few blooms, like something growing wild through a ruin. It'll photograph better than a wall of flowers anyway."

Lisa stared at me.

"You came up with that in ten seconds."

"I've had the room in my head for a month. The flowers were always the easy part."

She sighed, tapping something onto her tablet. "Quin is lucky to have you as a sister-in-law. I hope she knows she owes you."

I smiled and didn't tell her that no one had asked me to manage this. That I'd simply seen the proposal go up on the family group thread and felt the old machinery start turning in me, the part that needed everything Sterling to be flawless. Because this was what I'd given my art career up for, or rather, traded it for. Building the Sterling family empire even taller. Standing at Damon's side as the perfect, devoted wife, and all that entailed.

My phone rang. Ellie's name lit the screen, and I excused myself and stepped into the alcove by the windows to take it.

"Tell me you're calling to say yes," she said, no hello, which was very Ellie. We'd been best friends since high school and some things never changed.

"Yes to what?"

"The exhibition, Madeline. The group show. I sent you the email three weeks ago and you've been ghosting me like a man you matched with on accident."

Yeah, right. We both know I never matched with anyone. I only dated two guys casually before I met Damon at university. Before our families pushed us together.

I pressed my fingers to my temple. "Ellie, I'm so sorry. I can't."

"Can't, or won't?"

"Can't. I genuinely can't. I'm planning Quin's engagement party, and I'm standing in the venue right now. And Damon's got the launch coming, so I'm hosting the investor dinner next Thursday, and there's the foundation gala after that, and the journalist thing this week, plus our anniversary next month and⁠—"

"Maddie."

"—and somewhere in there I have to find a tailor who can fix the hem on the dress I'm wearing to the engagement party, so honestly the timing just isn't⁠—"

"Maddie. Stop. Listen to your own list."