The pen slipped from Carter’s fingers and struck the table with a sharp click.
For several seconds, nobody inside the cathedral moved.
I could hear my own breathing as I walked down the center aisle, one hand beneath my nine-month belly and the other resting on the arm of the man beside me.
Carter looked as though he’d forgotten how to breathe.
His mistress jerked her hand away from his sleeve.
The insurance representatives in the front pews were already standing.
Not for me.
For the man escorting me.
Carter noticed that too.
His eyes moved from their faces to the silver-haired man at my side.
Recognition arrived slowly, then all at once.
Everyone who had ever done serious business with the Insurance Group knew its billionaire CEO.
Carter certainly did.
He had spent weeks studying the company while arranging the policy he intended to turn into my death sentence.
What he had never studied was my history.
The CEO tightened his hand gently over mine.
“Keep walking,” he murmured.
Carter finally found his voice.
“Audrey?”
I stopped several feet from him.
His face had gone gray.
“You look surprised,” I said.
His gaze dropped to my belly.
The baby moved beneath my coat.
Carter recoiled as though he’d been struck.
“That’s impossible.”
“You should know better than anyone what happened on that cliff.”
A murmur moved through the cathedral.
Until that moment, most of the guests had believed they were attending a memorial for a tragic mountain accident.
Carter had told them the storm, the ice and my supposed carelessness had taken me.
He had accepted their embraces.
He had lowered his eyes at the right moments.
He had stood near the empty coffin and played the devastated husband.
Now those same people were looking at him differently.
Carter glanced toward the doors as if calculating whether he could leave.
The CEO spoke before he could move.
“I wouldn’t.”
Carter’s jaw tightened.
“What is this? Some kind of stunt?”
The man beside me looked at him with a coldness that made Carter’s anger falter.
“No.
It’s an opportunity for you to finish what you came here to do.”
He nodded toward the unsigned settlement papers.
“Go ahead, Mr.
Hale.
Sign the declaration that your wife and unborn child are dead.”
Carter stared at the document.
The pen lay beside it.
He didn’t touch either one.
His mistress took a step backward.
“Carter,” she whispered, “you told me they found evidence she died.”
He snapped his head toward her.
“Be quiet.”
That single command changed the room.
There was no grief in it.
Only fear.
