Shattered Vows: Falling For His Worst Enemy

The door to the private lounge was ajar by three inches.

Christen Craft noticed it. She stopped walking.

She heard her friend Kaelynn Hudson before she saw her. A laugh she knew. Breathless. Wet. Christen had been hearing that laugh for years.

But she had never once heard that laugh behind a half‑open door on the St. Regis's second floor. And even more coincidentally, her husband Brendon Jimenez had slipped out of the company reception in the hotel's ground‑floor banquet hall just minutes earlier, claiming he needed to find the men's room upstairs. Her mind was already racing toward the worst possible conclusion.

Christen put two fingers on the door and pushed.

The first thing she registered was color. A spill of burgundy silk on the Persian rug. Kaelynn's dress. She had complimented it three hours ago at the charity auction. Vintage Dolce, Kaelynn had said, twirling for her. Found it at a consignment shop in Tribeca.

The second thing was the watch. Brendon's Rolex, the limited-edition Cosmograph she had spent four months saving for. The lamplight caught the dial. His hand was moving up Kaelynn's bare spine.

"You know what? You're really a lot more passionate than that law school nerd Christen," the words reached her through the gap in the door, low and lazy.

"Am I?" Kaelynn giggled. "You poor thing, Brendon. Let me make you feel better."

Christen pulled the door shut. The latch clicked into place. She stood in the hallway, balled her hands into fists and waited for the feeling to come.

It didn't come. No tears. No scream clawing up her throat. Her mind had gone very still, the way it used to during the final ten minutes of a law school exam, when every fact she had memorized arranged itself into a single clean line of attack.

She memorized the room number: 214. She memorized the position of the dress, the angle of the lamp, the exact words Brendon was murmuring. Then she turned and walked toward the stairs.

At the VIP bar on the ground floor, she ordered a dry martini. The bartender's hands were quick and practiced. Christen watched the gin cloud as it hit the vermouth.

She didn't drink for courage. She drank because her mouth was dry and her hands were shaking and she had maybe four minutes before the two of them finished upstairs and Brendon came down looking for her. She needed to decide what she was going to do with the information she had just acquired. She craved revenge.

The answer came in the form of a man sitting alone in the corner booth.

He was too still for the room. Everyone else was performing. Laughing too loudly, leaning in too close, flashing watches and necklines and business cards. This man simply sat, one arm stretched along the back of the leather banquette, a glass of whiskey on the table in front of him. He wasn't watching the crowd. He was watching the door.

Christen's vision was swimming from the gin and what she had just seen upstairs. The man's features blurred at the edges. Dark hair. Dark suit. The kind of shoulders.

She thought: Rich. Arrogant. Here alone. She thought: Brendon would hate him on sight.

She picked up her glass and walked over.

Two men in black suits materialized from the shadows before she had taken three steps. They didn't speak. They didn't need to. Their shoulders formed a wall.

The man in the booth raised one finger.

The wall parted.

Christen slid into the booth. The leather was cold. She could smell him now. Something sharp and green, like crushed juniper, and under it the faint chemical bite of dry-cleaned wool. Not cedar. Not tobacco. Just money, cleaned and pressed.

She leaned in close. Her lips nearly touched his ear.

"I have a proposition for you. I found out my husband is cheating on me. Before the divorce, I need a man who can help me get revenge on him. You're in much better shape than he is."

The man turned his head. His eyes met hers. They were the color of wet slate.

He spoke, and his tone held a note of flirtation. "Really? That's my honor, Miss Christen Craft."

He knew her name, and he used it, spoken in a voice that suggested he had been waiting for her to walk over all evening.

The gin evaporated from her bloodstream. Her vision snapped into focus.

She recognized that face. She had seen it on the cover of Forbes, on the monitor behind the reception desk at her husband's office, in a feature spread her mother-in-law had left open on the coffee table last Christmas.

Kile Barrett. CEO of East-Ring Partners. One of the most dangerous businessmen in the Wall Street. The man who had gutted three Fortune 500 companies in the past eighteen months and bought the bones.

Christen opened her mouth. Nothing came out.