Page 2 of Neglected By Her CEO Husband

I stopped. The gold light shifted on the floor.

"When are you going to make time for you?" Her voice had dropped, gone soft in a way that hurt more than if she'd shouted. "When's the last time you actually painted something? Not picked out a color scheme for a party. Painted, purely for joy? For yourself."

I opened my mouth and found I didn't have a number.

I tried to remember. The studio at the back of the house, the one Damon had built me as a wedding gift, with an abundance of north light and clean white walls, had become a place I walked past on the way to the linen closet. My brushes were stiff in their jar. There was a canvas on the easel I'd primed and never touched. When had I primed it? Before Curtis's birthday. Which was… Last autumn. A year, easily. Maybe even more.

"I don't know," I admitted.

"That's the problem, babe. You don't know."

"I'm sorry, El." My phone buzzed against my cheek, a text sliding in. "I really am. But I have to go, Damon needs⁠—"

"Of course he does."

"I'll call you later. I promise."

"You won't," she said, but there was no cruelty in it, just sadness, and she hung up before I could lie to her again.

I looked at the text. Where are my onyx cufflinks? Not in the box.

I typed back: Left side of the dresser, in the small dish under your watch winder.

The reply came fast. Looked there. Not there.

I closed my eyes and sighed. Told Lisa the flowers were handled, that I'd approve the final layout in the morning, and walked out into the circular drive where the car was waiting. The whole way home I held my phone in my lap and didn't paint a single thing in my mind.

The house was quiet and enormous, the way it always was, swallowing the sound of my heels on the entry stone. I climbed the stairs and found him in the bedroom.

Damon stood at the mirror, half-dressed, a charcoal shirt open over his chest and his collar still loose. Even like that, unfinished and distracted, he had the kind of presence that filled a room and dared it to argue back. Tall, with that dark hair he kept short and severe, and those gray eyes that could pin you to a wall or slide right past you depending on his mood. He was the most beautiful thing in any room he entered and the coldest, and I'd spent eight years learning to live in the space between those two facts.

He didn't look up when I came in. Didn't say hello.

"They're not in the dish," he said, working his cuff. "I checked. Twice. I need them for tonight and you've moved them somewhere."

I set my bag down and crossed to the dresser. His left side. The small porcelain dish under the watch winder, exactly where I'd told him. I lifted the watch winder an inch, and there they were, two black onyx studs catching the light. I plucked them out and held them up between two fingers, level with his face.

He turned. Looked at my hand. Had the grace, at least, to falter.

"Huh," he said.

"Huh."

A corner of his mouth tipped up, and there it was, the smile that had made me forgive him a thousand small cruelties. He reached for the cufflinks, debonair even in defeat.

"You put them there to make me look bad."

"You wish." I drew my hand back, just out of his reach. "I told you exactly where they were. You didn't lift the winder."

"That's a hostile place to keep cufflinks."

"It's where they belong. It's where they've always belonged." I kept my hand up, the studs glinting between us. "Say please, Mr. Sterling."

He sighed, rolled his eyes, and leaned in, and kissed me. Quick, warm, the smell of his cologne folding over me, and for half a second the eight years dissolved and I was twenty-three again, a new bride so sure that this man would learn to want me the way I wanted him.

I let him take the cufflinks. But I kept my hand on his chest.

"Where are you going?"