side of the bed.
But I do my best thinking in the evening.
I fumbled around again for the snooze button then dozed back off.
My alarm started beeping again. I fumbled around, but instead of hitting my alarm, I hit something soft…and angry.
“Are you freaking kidding me!” Grace shrieked. “Your stupid alarm has been going off for the last hour and a half! Since five a.m.! I’m trying to work.”
“No, you’re not,” I murmured. “You came in here because you want to sleep with me.”
“I’m not having sex with someone who hits the snooze button twenty times and disturbs everyone else in the house,” she said, indignant.
“You’re the first person to complain,” I replied, taking a deep breath and opening my eyes.
Grace was standing over me, hands on her hips, wearing a loose T-shirt and yoga pants.
It may not have been as sexy of an outfit as she had been wearing yesterday, but I would have still totally hit that.
“I have a system,” I informed her as she pried the batteries out of the alarm clock. “I’m weaning myself off the snooze button. I’m pretty sure I hit it for two hours yesterday before I got up.”
“It’s crazy,” she said flatly. “If you actually want to get up early, you need to put the alarm clock far away, get up to turn it off, then actually stay up.”
“See, that’s the problem,” I said, sitting up. “I’m not actually a morning person. I’m just trying to become one.”
“Maybe if you didn’t stay out until four in the morning.”
“Hey!” I protested. “I don’t come into your house and tell you how to live your life.”
“Thank goodness for that.”
“And why are you still here anyways?” I shot back.
She glared at me.
“This”—I pointed between us—“was only a twenty-four-hour thing for the Marriage in a Minute filming. They don’t need more footage for another week, so you and your stuffed shrimp plushies need to be out of my penthouse.”
“I want to be out of here more than you want me to leave,” Grace retorted. “I already have the movers scheduled.”
Grace was gone by the time I had showered and put on a suit for my lunch meeting. The movers had arrived to take all of Grace’s things away as I headed into the private elevator lobby. For a brief moment, I thought about stealing one of her plushies, just so I had something that smelled like her.
“Stop being crazy,” I scolded myself as I took the elevator downstairs to the waiting town car. “You’re already on thin ice with this marriage. You need a wide degree of separation from Grace.”
As the town car took me to Midtown to the Svensson Investment tower, I replayed in my head all of the horror stories Eric, Josh, and my father had ever told me about marriages gone badly. I had worked hard growing my net worth and building my company. I was not going to lose it.
The Svenssons were assembled in the conference room on the eighty-fifth floor of the Svensson Investment tower when I walked in.
“And if it isn’t the walking, talking cautionary tale of why gambling is a terrible idea,” Greg Svensson said. Several of his younger half brothers nodded enthusiastically and took notes as he spoke.
“It was not my fault,” I protested. “It was your brothers! They screwed me over.”
“It never would have happened if you weren’t gambling. Now we have to hold on our investment deal with your hedge fund,” Greg said.
“Do we?” I said desperately. “We’ve been working on this deal for months.”
“Yes. However, I will not have my money tied up in your divorce.”
“We’re working on an annulment,” Josh assured him.
“Good luck with that,” his brother Hunter, also a big-shot lawyer, remarked. “No judge is going to grant him an annulment.”
“We’re working the no-fault divorce angle as well,” Eric said.
“Have you been friendly with Grace?” Josh added. “You want to stay on her good side.”
I thought back to this morning.
“I may have been a bit grouchy.”
“Dude,” Josh said, shaking his head. “You don’t want a situation where she hates you so much that she goes after your money.”
“Also,” his half brother Beck added, “you need to bring her to the TechBiz event tomorrow.”
“Uh, no I don’t.”
“You’re supposed to convince your grandfather’s friend Horace to invest the endowment he manages for his family’s foundation in your hedge fund. You did not secure it at the wedding you were at over the weekend,” Greg said, pen running down his notepad.
“I had a lot going on,” I