Page 2 of My Husband Problem

“But…” Iris frowns. “Do you want me to have Linnea talk to him?”

I sigh. “It’s too late. He wants to see us.”

“Us?”

“Astrid and me. Together. In person. I assume he wants our assurance that our marriage is solid and there’s nothing to worry about.”

Iris’s eyes are wide. “You’ve been summoned to Cara?”

“Yes.” I blow out a breath. “He wasn’t supposed to even know that we’re living apart.”

“Well, Astrid shouldn’t have done such a great job putting her hockey team in the spotlight,” Iris says.

I nod. Then straighten.

“What are you going to do?” Iris asks.

“The only thing I can do,” I tell her. “I’m going to Louisiana. To get my wife.”

CHAPTER 2

ASTRID

“What wouldyou say if I told you that you can get rid of your husband one week from tomorrow?”

I stop mid-stride and stare at my sister on my phone screen.

“Get rid of as in ‘I have a shovel and a lot of land no one ever visits’ or get rid of as in…” I trail off. “I don’t know what else you could mean. He’s a billionaire, so we can’t pay him off. And I’ve been doing everything I can fortwenty monthsto make him crazy, so he’ll divorce me. And he. Will. Not. Do. It.” I blow out a breath.

My husband just insists on staying married to me no matter what.

I’ve been a total pain in the ass, but Declan O’Grady has been impossible to get rid of.

Linnea laughs. “In the sense that his grandfather has decided that seeing all of us truly in love makes him happier than he ever realized he would be. He wants you and Declan to be like me and Jonah, Fiona and Knox, Torin and Abi, Cian and Scarlett, and now Alex and Nora.” She pauses. “But he realizes that you’re not.”

I swallow hard as she names off our siblings, each of whom has found true love in the last couple of years. I nod. “It’s prettyhard to ignore how right you all are for each other. Even for him.”

Linnea smiles that smile that always lights up her face when she thinks of or talks about her husband. “Yes.”

Declan’s stubborn, eccentric grandfather has been making demands, both reasonable and unreasonable, on his grandchildren for years.

Including his desire for a marriage uniting his family with the family of his best friend, my grandfather.

That demand was finally met by his eldest grandson, Declan.

And me.

“So, what does that mean?” I ask my sister. “That he realizes we’re not like the rest of you?”

“Diarmuid has been reading the Rebel website, watching the hockey team coverage, and has seen how happy you are there in Louisiana,” my sister says. “Clearly your move to Rebel has been a success. And now that it’s been ten months and Declan is still in Portland and never comes to see you, Diarmuid’s realized that you really are not in love. And he’s decided it’s not going to happen even given time. He’s realized he can’t make you continue in this marriage. He loves you both and wants you to be happy and free to find true love like the rest of us have.”

My breath catches in my chest. I shake my head. “Really? He said that?”

She nods. My sister sees him every day and he loves and trusts her. “He did. He knows he put a lot of pressure on you and had really high expectations for your gymnastics career and the Olympics. He feels a little bad now that he’s put this marriage-and-babies pressure on you, too.”

The tightness wrapping around my chest increases, and I struggle to take a deep breath.

The most painful period of my life, both physically and emotionally, was when I let everyone down at the Olympic trials.The moment where everything I had trained for my entire life, my family’s and country’s high hopes, and all of my plans had come crashing down—literally—when I fell from the uneven bars.