Page 1 of Falling for Her

PROLOGUE

FINLEY

“Lunch was amazing.” I lean in and air-kiss Kelly’s right cheek and then the left one. “Next time it’s my treat.” We attended the same boarding school for just a few years as young teens and reconnected at the club when she moved to the area a few years ago.

“Of course.” She moves to her shining-white BMW without a speck of dust or dirt on it, wiggling her fingers my way as she gets into the driver’s seat.

One of the valets drives up with my silver Mercedes, which is a few years older than Kelly’s new BMW. It was the last gift my grandparents gave me before they passed away. I hold my purse in both hands as I wait for him to stop. Only then do I start walking toward the driver’s side. My heels click-clack on the cement. “Here you go,” he says, holding out his hand, helping me in. I turn to put my new light-pink Hermès purse on the passenger seat. The valet slams my door shut.

After snatching up my gold-rimmed sunglasses, I make the long drive home, classical music playing softly. Kelly insisted we meet at this restaurant that just opened, which everyone is talking about. It’s well over an hour from where I live without traffic, and we lingered, so now it’s rush hour. I don’t think it lived up to the hype, but Kelly happily posted several photos of each course to her Instagram. Each and every single time the food came out, we couldn’t just start eating. No, she had to take at least fifty photos before we could think about picking up our silverware. Then she mulled over editing each of them before finally digging in.

When I pull up in front of my apartment building, the doorman is already making his way around the car to open my door. “Welcome back, Ms. Westbook.” Even though I’ve been married for the past three months, no one calls me by my married name.

I nod at him. The glass doors slide open for me, and I step into the cool, white lobby. He retrieves the valet key from his desk and heads to the garage to park my car. I press the elevator button to go up, and one of the six elevators opens. Stepping in and pressing PH1, I enter my code on the keypad. Only when the code is confirmed do the doors close, and the elevator starts to rise.

The elevator doors open to a spectacular view of the sunset. The whole back wall of my penthouse is floor-to-ceiling windows. Two steps lead me down into the sunken dining room that has a table for eight facing a state-of-the-art kitchen. The only thing I’ve ever done in there is make my coffee and heat up my food. I put my purse on the white granite counter before kicking off my pink slip-on high-heeled sandals. I open my purse, taking out the folded papers I picked up before lunch, and head back to my closet to change into my cashmere lounge set of wide-legged pants and an oversized shirt that falls off the shoulder.

In the kitchen, I pick up my phone and dial my husband, Davis. It rings twice, and then he answers, his voice low as if he’s hiding something.

“Do you know what time you’ll be home?”

“Later,” he says. “I’m busy now. At a meeting. Don’t wait up.” He doesn’t give me a chance to answer him; he just hangs up.

“Busy my ass,” I mumble.

I move down two more steps into the living room and out the glass door to the patio. I lean on the railing beside my private swimming pool and look out at the shimmer of lights from the skyline in the distance. The loneliness comes roaring into me like someone just opened a box full of memories. I’ve never felt this way before, even though I’ve always been by myself.

My parents were both only children, so no cousins on either side. It was just me. My father’s parents really tried to forge that family bond, but they were both older when they had him, and they could be a bit selfish. Still, I knew they loved me with their whole hearts. My grandfather owned O-Tex Oil and was a key player in the industry. To this day, it’s still going but is run by the shareholders. I get my checks every single month, so much money that I haven’t even touched my trust fund. My grandfather also bought me this penthouse when I was twenty-one, so I could have a place of my own.

Except nothing about this place has ever felt like home. It’s more like a place that I stay in, even more so now, since that day exactly two months ago. I went to see my husband at his office and caught his secretary ordering diamond earrings for herself and another woman, charging them to his personal credit card. When I confronted her, she just smirked and showed me the email from him telling her to do it. I could see the other woman’s address on her screen, so I turned on my heel and immediately drove there. I was humiliated, and my heart was broken, but the last thing I wanted her to see was that she got to me, that she had won.

I don’t know what shocked me more, the fact that he was there when I rang the doorbell, or that he was annoyed I was interrupting whatever the fuck they were doing. And just so I was clear, it was not a business meeting. He answered the door in pants that were barely tied and his shirt open all the way down, showing his bare chest.

I fled. I came straight home and called my lawyer and told him I was going to file for divorce. It was a big step, but I knew I deserved better, and from the way he reacted when I caught him, I knew he had no interest in changing his behavior.

He came home that night, sauntering in like he didn’t just get caught cheating on me, as if nothing had happened. He even asked me if we were having dinner together. He saw nothing wrong with him sleeping around. In fact, he made it seem like if he didn’t sleep around, it wouldn’t be normal.

When I told him I wanted a divorce, he nodded at me and then walked to the spare bedroom where he slept that night. The next morning, he again pretended like nothing was wrong. I asked him when he would be moving out, and he laughed at me.

He bent to kiss my cheek. “I’ll move out when you give me half of your trust fund.”

I scoffed at him, knowing I had a prenup which, according to my grandfather’s lawyer, was ironclad. The most he was entitled to was part of what I earned in the months we’d been together from the investments my late grandfather made, and I’d fight him getting even a single fucking dollar of that.

One day turned into two and then five. He kept acting like he’d done nothing wrong. I hired someone to find any and all evidence that would help me get a clean divorce. I didn’t know I was opening Pandora’s box. He was having multiple affairs, including some sort of throuple deal with his secretary and her best friend. He’d also told friends that from day one, he didn’t even like me; he was just in it for the money. And he still refused to leave the penthouse or agree to a divorce unless I agreed to give him half of my trust fund, at a minimum. He even had the nerve to tell my lawyer that.

It was the first time in my life that I really regretted anything. Being with Davis was that one thing in my life that if I could go back and do over again, I would not only not do it, I would run the other way as fast as I could. I thought he was everything I wanted in a man. He was handsome, charming, well connected, and came from a family where his parents doted on him. When we met, he had just moved to town to take on a junior executive role at a Fortune 500 company. He was ambitious and hardworking, or so I thought. To me, his long hours in the office meant he was working hard to move up in the company. What I only recently learned was that he was spoiled, lazy, and entitled. He slacked off, and he barely graduated from college. His father was the only reason he got the job; he called in a favor. The company was actually going to let him go for his incompetence, but then I came into the picture. Through me, he got into the local country club. Thinking about him walking in there with his shoulders back and head held high almost makes me want to laugh. He should have been hunched down and avoiding all eye contact. He made influential friends because of me and then used his networking skills to remain an asset to the company and keep his job.

My phone rings, and I see it’s Collins calling.

“Well, hello there,” I say. Collins and I met on a podcaster’s true crime forum. We both had the same thoughts, and our friendship grew from there. She knew me for me, not because of who my family was. I didn’t know anything about her family. That’s changed in the last couple of months. She’s become one of my best friends, my sounding board, someone who stood by me when my life was blowing up. Every single day, she calls or texts to check up on me, and it means more to me than I can even put into words.

“Hello there to you,” she replies softly. “It’s been three days since I’ve actually talked to you.”

“Sorry about that. I just . . .” I close my eyes. “I don’t know what else to say.”

“Have you decided what you want to do?”

“I finally have divorce papers ready to serve him when he gets in.” The pit of my stomach clenches. “I’ll call you tomorrow and let you know how he took it.”