Johnson Family 2: Perfect
Delaney Diamond
“Love is when the other person’s happiness is more important than your own.”
—H. Jackson Brown
Chapter One
Three years ago…
A million dollars. That’s how much money he’d spent.
Daniella Barrett-Johnson stared at her husband in disbelief.
Cyrus Johnson sat in the cushioned chair in the sitting area of their master suite, legs spread wide, the top buttons of his shirt opened and the tie of his tux hanging loose around his neck. She’d held her questioning until after the dinner party, but the entire night she’d been wound as tight as rope, itching to ask him about what she’d been told.
She’d hoped he would tell her it wasn’t true. That her ex-boyfriend, Roland DuBois, had lied when he’d said Cyrus had bought his debts for a million dollars in exchange for him breaking up with her and disappearing from her life. Not only had Cyrus not denied the story, he didn’t see anything wrong with the bribe. He couldn’t understand why she was upset. Had Roland not felt guilty and come clean to her, she would have never known.
Roland had come clean to her. Not Cyrus.
She’d seen his ruthless side before, but she hadn’t considered she might become a victim of his tactics. Outside of being the CEO of Johnson Enterprises, his family’s beer and restaurant empire, he had his own private investments. As recently as two weeks ago he’d outbid other investors to purchase a family-owned company. Within days he’d slashed half the workforce and installed his own people in upper and middle management. When she’d asked him how he could be so callous, he’d simply replied, “I don’t buy these companies to make friends. I buy them to make money.”
What a fool she had been to fall in love with him in the first place. She had seen some good in him once. But the more she got to know him, what good she had seen had been overshadowed by a string of behavior that demonstrated a glaring lack of conscience. Since he’d deceived her on this point, what other areas of their lives had he deceived her in? This was the last straw. He was not the man for her.
She couldn’t spend the rest of her life with someone she couldn’t trust, teetering back and forth between being proud to be on his arm one minute and ashamed of his behavior the next.
“I wanted you to tell me you didn’t do this,” she said. Show some remorse.
“Then I’d be a liar. I’ve never lied to you, and I never will.”
“No, you’ll just deceive me,” she said.
“It was a means to an end.” He spoke calmly, as if such behavior was an everyday occurrence. For him it probably was.
“Was it worth it? Did you get your money’s worth?”
“I would have paid much more. Ten times as much to get rid of him so I could have you.” His words should have made her feel better, but they didn’t.
“Why did you have to have me? Why did you feel the need to pay someone to get them out of the way?” She waited, her stomach unsettled by the gnaw of apprehension.
“Because you have all the qualities I looked for in a wife, Dani,” he replied. “That’s why I chose you.”
His answer should have been a compliment, but it disappointed her. If he’d given another reason, she might have considered forgiving him for the breach of trust.
“I’m the perfect woman,” she said bitterly and without conceit.
She fit into the high-profile structure of his life because she’d been groomed almost from birth to marry someone of wealth.
Educated? Check. She had a masters in art history from UC Berkeley.