Reborn to Dodge the Bad Marriage novel Chapter 5

Chapter 5 Dig the Hole and Wait

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Yvette stopped short and did not buy a word of it. “That can’t be right. Where did you even hear that? Is Nora feeding you a line?”

Mandy reminded herself that she was the one who had been handed a second chance, and a smug little sound came out of her. “How would she know any of this? I’m the one who…”

She almost said she knew it from her last life, then caught herself. A gift like this stays with me. If anyone else finds out, it could ripple out and change everything.

So Mandy gave her a different story. “An angel came to me in a dream and showed me pieces of what’s coming. Julian Weston is dying. I marry him and he’s gone inside a month. After that the Westons tear each other apart and go under, and Adrian Pierce ends up the richest man in the country.”

Yvette still was not having it. “Nora got in your head, that’s what happened. There’s no such thing as angels, and there’s no such thing as seeing the future.”

Mandy dug through her memory for something big that had happened on this exact day, and something lit behind her eyes. “Wait. A little after nine tonight, there’s a magnitude 3.5 quake in Ashvale County. Watch it happen, then tell me I’m making this up.”

It was a small quake, and Mandy only remembered it because a starlet she knew came from Ashvale County and had been sleeping without a stitch on when it hit, and the video of her running out of the building trended everywhere.

To seal it, she added, “There’s an actress named Skylar Devon. She runs out of her building with nothing on and it’s all over the internet by morning.”

Yvette watched her deliver every word of it with a straight face, and she stayed half convinced while the two of them sat there waiting for the nine o’clock news.

At 9:17, the quake broke on the news, and Skylar was trending right beside it.

Nobody on earth could predict a thing like that.

That settled it for Yvette, and the excitement caught hold of her. “Mandy, you really can see it. You really can.”

Mandy nodded, and her voice went serious. “If I ignore the dream and marry Julian Weston anyway, he dies, the family goes bankrupt, and they push me into hostess work to reel in clients.”

She left out the kept man and the gambling entirely and let the Westons carry the blame for all

of it.

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10:51 Thu, Sep 17

Chapter 5 Dig the Hole and Wait

Finished

Then the sourness crept back into her voice. “Meanwhile, Nora marries Adrian and that family puts her on a pedestal. Adrian’s the worst of them. Can you picture it? The richest man in the country standing in front of a bank of cameras, joking that his wife scares him and he’ll be sleeping on the couch tonight.”

That was beyond anything Yvette could imagine. She had enough on Victor to bury him and she still would never dare talk to him that way.

Yvette was sold, and she smiled. “All right. You skip Julian and take Adrian. My girl was born to be the richest man’s wife. Let Nora marry into the Westons and end up working a bar.”

The Westons had put up 100 million dollars for this engagement. Yvette got to keep the money. hand Nora over, and watch her suffer for it, and every piece of that sounded good.

God, this is going to feel good.

The next morning came around fast.

At the breakfast table, Yvette set a plate of eggs Benedict down in front of Nora with great care and apologized like she meant it. “I was wrong yesterday. I didn’t know the whole story and I jumped to conclusions.

“Don’t hold it against me.”

Nora had slept straight through the night and woken on her own for once. She glanced at Yvette working so hard to please her and understood that Mandy had gotten to her.

She nodded, in an excellent mood. “Fine.”

The first time around, Yvette had tried to sell her a secret for cash, and something happened to Yvette before the trade ever went through.

Until that secret surfaced, Nora was in no hurry to move against her.

Yvette saw how easy she was being, nothing like the animal from the night before, and the relief loosened her enough to come straight to the point.

“The Westons are delivering the engagement gifts today. It’s a good match, and your sister has her heart set on someone else, so I thought you could marry into the Westons instead. What do you say?”

Nora knew exactly how the Westons ended. For Mandy that marriage was a pit with a fire at the bottom, but for Nora it was a soft place to land with a springboard bolted to the far wall.

She would marry in, her husband would drop dead, and after that she would answer to no one and collect one million dollars a month for doing nothing but deciding how to spend it.

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Chapter 5 Dig the Hole and Wait

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Julian’s grandma, Constance Weston, had also gone out of her way for Nora once, and Nora had met Julian’s parents and found decent, generous people there, nothing like the pair of monsters who had raised Adrian.

As for the bankruptcy, that was a different matter.

With her in the house, the Westons were not going under.

She could build something of her own on the back of that fortune, and she would need it if Adrian ever turned his sights on her again.

There was one more reason, and it went deeper. Her grandmother had not been an ordinary woman, and Constance had once handed Nora every connection the family owned along with one quiet remark. “You’re her granddaughter. I trust what you can do. Live well, and find out who killed her and who gutted this family.”

Her grandmother’s death and the collapse of the Weston house were tied to each other by something, and Nora meant to find out what.

She was marrying into that family no matter what it took.

Still, if she was going to do it, they would beg her first, because a family that begged had nothing to say about it later.

Nora looked at Yvette without much expression and let the mockery show. “Weren’t you the one telling me yesterday that I’d never take Mandy’s marriage?”

Yvette raised a hand and slapped her own cheek. “That was a misunderstanding. I was talking out of turn because nobody told me anything. Besides, the Westons never named Mandy. You’re the older daughter, and you’re not married yet, so how would it fall to Mandy in the first place?”

Victor pushed too. “The Westons sit at the top of everything, and Julian Weston is the heir. They say he’s tall, they say he’s good-looking, and half the women in this country would climb over each other for him. You’re not losing anything here. Your mother could rest easy over a match like that.”

Mandy sniffed at that. “If I weren’t in love with Ace, I’d never hand the Westons over to you.”

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