Page 85 of Plunge into Obsession

He didn’t have to.

I was effectively, irrevocably, hopelesslykept.

13

BIANCA

A teamof beauty experts knocked on the door of the room I shared with Gabriel the next morning.

I was told they were coming, but that didn’t make their presence any less overwhelming.

I looked around the large space, made that much smaller from all the people moving about, all wanting my attention in some way, all wanting me to make a decision on this and that, and out of all those people, one woman took my attention more than the others.

Chloe Finley, the wedding planner.

From the way she looked, talked, and dressed, I could tell she was expensive.

Gabriel probably paid her a pretty penny to make this into “the wedding of dreams.”

Those were her exact words to me when we first met.

Would she have known the wedding of my dreams didn’t include Gabriel as the groom?

Not anymore.

Perhaps there had been some small naïve part of me that had, at some point, thought Gabriel could be the man of my dreams.

It would have been so easy for him to make me fall in love with him.

The physical chemistry was there already.

I could have fallen in love with the man I thought he was.

But the man he’d revealed to me now…

I wasn’t so sure, but it didn’t matter, because I was still sitting in this room while a whole bunch of strangers moved around me.

They all wanted my attention, yet I didn’t think I had ever felt so invisible.

So unheard.

“Mrs. Cadorna. Are you listening to me?”

My gaze flitted from where it had been fixated on an empty space on the wall and to Chloe's big brown eyes, highlighted by soft-pink eye makeup that made her dark lashes and thick, dark eyebrows stand out in her small face in the most attractive way.

Her lips were painted a bright red that went well with her dark skin tone, and her light-brown hair with golden highlights flowed down to the small of her back.

Chloe was an attractive woman.

Older than me.

Probably as old as Gabriel.

I imagined she would have looked better standing beside him.

I grimaced over the image for reasons I refused to acknowledge.

“It’s Hansley.”

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