PROLOGUE
HELL HATH NO FURY like a woman whose husband faked his own death.
Freja Catalano smiled with appropriately bedazzled delight as she took a selfie in the mirrors that surrounded where she stood on the small, carpeted dais in the back of Milan’s most exclusive bridal boutique.
“I can take the photo,” offered the designer, Teresina. She paused in her reverent arranging of the abundant and infinitely delicate chiffon overskirt. Every inch was tastefully embroidered with white flowers and swirling vines, seed pearls and sequins. The train puddled out for six feet behind Freja’s reflection.
As Freja ran her image through different filters, a tiny prickling awareness swept across her scalp and into her shoulders. She lifted her head and glanced toward the closed curtain across the archway into the front of the shop, but there was no one there, just the sound of a bridezilla complaining about a swatch of organza.
“This is fine, thanks,” Freja replied absently as she tapped out her selection and started typing her caption to post online. Her stomach remained full of unsettled butterflies, though.
#FinalFitting #BigDay #OneMonthAway #CantWait
As Teresina pinched seams and took in the narrow band of pearl-bedecked satin that formed the waistband of the gown, she asked around pins in her mouth, “Is the photo for your mother?”
“My social feed. My mother passed when I was young.” Freja added several more hashtags about bridal nerves, first love and winter weddings in New York.
“I’m so sorry. I presumed she was in Sweden and would be attending the wedding.”
“No, both of my parents are gone.” And the wedding that had crushed Freja’s soul for them to miss had already happened. Freja had worn a simple ivory sheath and held tulips stolen from a public garden. It had been perfect.
Or so she’d believed at the time.
And since that had been a short four and a half months ago, and since her first groom had “died” three weeks later, Freja’s name was dominating the click-bait headlines with variations of Gold-Digger to Grave-Digger troll droppings.
Not that Freja’s notoriety had bothered Terasina. Freja had earned Terasina’s undying loyalty by stating, “Everyone knows Milan is superior to Paris.” The fact Freja had taken possession of her husband’s wealth and could buy this boutique thousands of times over didn’t hurt either.
Freja didn’t mention she had only come here because she was confident Giovanni was in his home country.
This is what I’m spending your money on. Do you like it? She didn’t write that, just finished tagging Teresina, the boutique and—
“Does your fiancé follow you?” Teresina asked with concern. “It’s bad luck for him to see the dress before the wedding.”
“I guess it is, isn’t it?” Freja finished tagging Nels and hit Post.
Nels was a recent graduate of business law who was drowning in debt and firmly in the closet for family reasons. In exchange for stepping into Giovanni’s nonexistent shoes, Freja had promised to assure Nels’s terminally ill grandmother that she loved him passionately and eternally.
It was a match made in screamingly civilized practicality.
“Tell him not to peek,” Teresina suggested as she straightened and gently tested the hidden banding that secured the off-the-shoulder sleeves. The bodice was made of Venetian lace exquisitely crafted to plunge in both front and back, painting Freja’s torso in white flames that danced down both arms to her wrists. “I can’t imagine any man seeing you like this could resist you, though.”
Freja smiled weakly, not revealing that the one man she had hoped to get a rise from had very firmly resisted.
She completely ignored the agonized whisper in the back of her head that asked, What if he’s really dead?
He wasn’t. Snakes of anxiety slithered in her middle over his continued absence, but she had plenty of reasons to believe he was still alive. Okay, more like a handful of subtle coincidences and one decent piece of evidence that wasn’t solid enough to prove anything, not even a robbery. When she had tried to tell Nels she thought there was a chance her husband could be alive, however, he’d given her a look of pity and suggested she was stuck in the denial stage of grief.
Maybe she was. She had fought seeing Giovanni’s true feelings toward her, right up until that final conversation.
Do you love me? Do you even want to be married?
You’re behaving like a jealous shrew. Wait for me in my hotel room. I’ll join you when I’ve finished my meeting.
He hadn’t. And dead or not, Giovanni had left his fortune in her hands. She was wholly unequipped to manage it. Nels had lived on her floor when she’d been at university and had been kind enough to look over her book contract and, later, her prenuptial agreement. When she’d gone to him with the volumes of legal documents that were coming her way as a result of her husband’s supposed demise, he’d been alarmed by the overreach some of Giovanni’s top executives were attempting.
Freja was a millennial with pale blond hair, blue eyes, and no formal schooling until her degree in creative writing. Obviously, that meant she was a certified bubblehead who couldn’t so much as recognize when a fast food outlet was trying to upsell her a supersize of fries. Her knowledge on running a multinational corporation was zero, but she was smart enough to see phrases like “irrevocable power of attorney” as the horrendous red flags that they were.
Another woman would have snatched up the reins and stared down the sexist pigs trying to take advantage of her. Freja might have, if she hadn’t been brittle with grief. Meanwhile, every meeting had been full of vultures making advances, baldly trying to flatter her into a relationship as a shortcut to Giovanni’s money. It was exhausting. She didn’t have the stomach for it, especially not for a fortune she neither wanted nor needed.
Nels had trusted her with his secret back when she’d shyly asked him on a date because he felt so unthreatening. He had minored in corporate ethics and longed to effect change at the highest levels. Remarrying would offer her protection from the vultures, so their grand bargain had been struck.
Was it bigamy if her first husband was secretly still alive and the second marriage was only on paper? She had asked Nels, but he had given her that pitying look again and said, “I need to know you’re of sound mind or we can’t do this.”
Giovanni was the only person who could prove it was illegal. If he wanted to burst in at the last second to stop it, fine. But she wouldn’t hold her breath. She really would be the clichéd dumb blonde if she failed to get the message that her husband didn’t want to be tied to her after he had staged an explosion to end things.
No, she accepted that their whirlwind romance had fizzled as quickly as it had flared. If that left her feeling as bleak and wraithlike as a wisp of smoke, well, she only had herself to blame. She had known there was no such thing as forever, but she’d gone ahead and fallen for him anyway. Her heart had been broken into a thousand pieces for her trouble.