Page 160 of The Bet
Chapter 45
She heard the sound of the front door slamming, and then Cara knocked on her door. “He’s gone, Izzy. It’s only me.”
She opened the door.
“You okay?” Cara asked as Izzy sat back down at her desk.
“You’re studying?”
“I’ve got a lot on.”
“Hey.” Cara stood behind her and placed her hands on her shoulders. “Do you want to talk about it?”
There wasn’t much to talk about. She’d told Cara everything and hadn’t left her room since yesterday. It had been difficult, trying to hide her grief from Jacob as Morris drove them back, trying to put on a brave face to Savannah when she returned Jacob home.
She shook her head. “I’m done going over and over with it.”
It was worse than she imagined. She’d been holding out for the hope that Xavier would say it was all a mistake; that maybe Jacob had gotten his facts wrong, or misheard the conversation.
She had been banking on that.
But his denial never came.
Instead, he had confirmed her worst nightmare.
The bet was real.
A $10K bet.
Who in their right mind placed that kind of a bet?
People like these. Filthy, rich, dirty assholes. Like the man who had screwed her father over.
Never in her darkest nightmares had she imagined this would happen to her.
Never.
And what hurt more than Xavier’s deception, more than his cunning, more than all those intimate words and private moments they had shared, was that he had been playing her all along.
She had opened her heart up to him and told him everything. He knew things about her family and her father that Cara had no clue about.
How stupid could she have been? How blind, and so easy to dupe?
She had become one of those vacuous airheads, the girls who lost their mind over a guy—the kinds of girls she used to feel sorry for. And now she was one of them, except that she was the main character in her own romance-gone-wrong horror movie.
A tear rolled down her cheek and she wiped it away quickly. She had tried to be brave in front of Cara yesterday when she returned. Hadn’t wanted her friend to see how deep the deception had cut. How much it had broken her.
“You look rough, Iz,” Cara said, leaning against the wall, facing her. “A good cry will get it all out of your system.”
“I’m not going to cry over that asshole.”
“That’s my girl.” Cara smiled.
“I never expected this from him. Even now, when I think about everything he ever said to me—”
Everything he ever did to me.
“I can’t get my head around it. He was such a good actor.” She would never trust another man again.
