Chapter 1 - THE CEDAR KENNEL
My husband called me disloyal before he shoved me into the kennel, but he never explained what I had supposedly betrayed.
“Tonight you sleep where disloyal wives belong,” Damon said, laughing as though humiliating an eight-month-pregnant woman were some private joke I had failed to understand.
My knee hit the cedar floor first. Pain traveled up my thigh, but terror went directly to my belly. I wrapped both arms around it and waited for movement. A second later, our baby kicked beneath my ribs, and I nearly sobbed from relief. The cashmere blanket I had carried from the living room landed beside me, half in the dirt, while Damon shut the kennel door and fastened the latch.
Through the slats I could see Lacey Monroe standing at the patio entrance in my ivory silk robe. My robe. The one Damon had bought me for our fifth anniversary. She held a wineglass in one hand and wore the earrings I had spent twenty minutes looking for that morning.
I stared at her. “Get out of my clothes.”
Lacey took a slow sip. “Technically, Damon said I could borrow anything in the bedroom.”
The bedroom.
Not guest room.
Not spare room.
My bedroom.
For three weeks Damon had treated me like an intruder in my own marriage. He had accused me of giving confidential company information to my father, refused to tell me what information he meant, changed the passwords on our home office, and moved into the guest suite “until I admitted what I’d done.” That afternoon he took the final step. He moved Lacey into our room and told me I could sleep somewhere else.
I had assumed he meant the guest bedroom.
Apparently he meant the dog kennel.
Then a black sedan stopped beyond the gate.
I knew it before I saw the driver.
My father.
Orson Calder had been overseas for nearly six weeks negotiating the restructuring of one of his shipping businesses. He was not supposed to return until Monday.
His travel bag fell from his hand when he saw me.
“Raina?”
I tried to stand too quickly and caught the cedar frame.
“Dad… he gave her my bedroom.”
Something changed in my father’s face.
Lacey raised her wineglass. “Relax. The dogs never complained.”
Damon stepped between them. “This is between my wife and me.”
My father’s hand moved once.
The slap knocked Damon sideways into the kennel door. The latch came loose under the impact, and Damon fell onto the patio. I crawled out before anyone could stop me.
Dad caught my elbow.
“Easy.”
Then he looked at Damon.
The next several seconds happened too quickly and too angrily. Dad hauled Damon toward the open kennel, shoved him inside, and locked it.
“From now on, this will be your home.”
For one breath, satisfaction flashed through me.
Then it vanished.
“Dad. Open it.”
He looked at me.
“Now.”
Damon had put his pregnant wife in there. That did not give us permission to become him.
Dad’s jaw clenched, but he unlocked the kennel.
Damon stumbled out, furious and humiliated. “You’re both finished.”
My father ignored him and turned to me. “Are you hurt?”
“My knee. I need the baby checked.”
That ended everything else.
On the way to the hospital, I noticed my father’s phone vibrating repeatedly. He declined three calls. The fourth time I saw the caller ID.
CALDER FORENSIC ACCOUNTING.
I looked at him.
“Why are they calling you?”
Dad stared through the windshield.
“Because I didn’t come home early by accident.”
My chest tightened.
“What happened?”
He hesitated, then said, “You were right not to sign Damon’s waterfront sale.”
I went still.
May you like
I had never told my father I refused to sign anything.
And suddenly I understood that whatever Damon meant by “disloyal” had started long before he dragged me toward that kennel.
