At my wedding, the guests laughed at my groom.

“He must be blind to marry such a hideous woman with scars covering her face,” someone sneered. My husband calmly took the microphone.

“I’m not blind,” he said. “Those scars came from the fire she ran into to save my life.” Then he revealed that he owned the company employing half the room—and fired every person who had mocked the woman who’d sacrificed her beauty for him.

Part 1

The first laugh came before I even reached the altar. By the time I placed my scarred hand in Liam Vance’s, half the ballroom was pretending not to stare and the other half had given up pretending.

My aunt Beatrice leaned toward her daughter, Chloe, and whispered loud enough for three tables to hear, “He must be blind to marry something that looks like that.”

A few guests snickered.

I kept my chin up.

The scars crossed the left side of my face, curled beneath my jaw, and disappeared under the lace collar of my dress. Three years earlier they’d been raw, red, and unbearable. Now they were pale, tight, and permanent.

Liam squeezed my fingers.

“Do you want to leave?” he murmured.

“No,” I said. “I want them to finish showing us who they are.”

He smiled.

That smile was the reason I’d survived the months after the fire.

He never once asked me to hide the scars. He learned every ridge of them with his fingertips, sat through every painful treatment with me, and kept reminding me that surviving was not the same as being ugly. Beside him, I felt beautiful again. Around Beatrice, I still felt like damaged property.