Page 1 of His Naughty Valentine
Chapter One
Why am I such a coward?
Lacey stood in her bedroom, staring at the ring on her finger. Sunlight streamed through the window and reflected brilliantly off the surface of the two-carat princess cut diamond.
She was all ready for work, but hadn’t yet summoned the courage to walk downstairs and face her fiancé. Not because he’d done anything wrong, and not because they’d had a recent fight. If anything, they’d been getting along great lately. All was outwardly well between them, but outwardly was the key word.
She swallowed past the sudden burning in her throat.
Why hadn’t she shared her big secret yet?
She’d promised herself she would confess everything over the weekend, but now it was Monday morning and she hadn’t yet breathed a word to Kaden.
Her eventual admission would likely change their relationship, but she wasn’t sure whether that change would be good or bad. She hadn’t done anything serious, like cheat on him, or rack up a huge credit card bill, or hide a criminal record. But the secret she had harbored for months and months was now eating her alive.
She heard Kaden clattering around in the kitchen, and a few seconds later the rich aroma of freshly brewed coffee wafted upstairs. Time to go. She’d dallied long enough.
This week. You’ll stop being a fucking coward and tell him this week.
Another promise to herself. Would she break it too, like all the rest?
After taking a deep breath, she plastered a smile on her face and ventured downstairs, all the while trying to will away the knots in her stomach.
* * *
Kaden stumbled into the kitchen, groggy and still in his pajamas. He glanced at the clock and hurried to get the coffee brewing. Although he was working from home today, he had a conference call at eight that couldn’t be missed. In twenty minutes, he had to be webcam-presentable.
As he poured two cups of coffee, his fiancé, Lacey, breezed into the kitchen. Impeccably dressed in a snug black blouse, a form-fitting pink skirt, and a pair of heels, her blue eyes sparkled with energy.
“Aw, look at that sour face.” She reached for a granola bar in the cabinets. “Someone has a case of the Mondays.”
Kaden’s only response was an unintelligible grunt. Before she left though, he summoned up enough personality to give her a goodbye hug and kiss, as well as a rather hard but playful swat to her bottom.
“Drive careful, baby. Love you.”
“I always do. Love you too.”
Time to hurry. He downed his coffee and showered in record time. As he dressed, he paired the top half of a suit with a pair of workout pants. He only bothered to wear the matching dress pants on days he went into the office, a quirk Lacey found endearing. Nothing made her happier than to return home to a man wearing half a suit. Of course, that was probably because she enjoyed ripping his mismatched clothes off.
While he waited in his office for the web conference to go live, he sipped at a second cup of coffee with his mind on his beautiful fiancé. In six months, they would be married. He couldn’t fucking wait, and his heart filled with warmth at the thought of spending the rest of his life with Lacey. Caring and beautiful, as well as intelligent and successful, he considered her the most perfect woman on the face of the Earth. He also considered himself beyond lucky to have found her.
“Dammit!” Kaden hissed as he evacuated his desk area. Hot coffee soaked through his pants, covering his nether region.Sonofabitch. He eyed his watch. No time to change.
With a frustrated sigh, he stripped off the wet clothing, including his boxers. His thighs were red, but at least his manhood had escaped intact and no coffee had splashed onto his half-a-suit. But his relief was short-lived.
A sizzling noise drew his attention back to his laptop.Fuck fuck motherfuck. Half of the coffee had spilled directly on his keyboard. He cursed again and gave his computer a shake, but the screen morphed into an array of colors before going black.
He ran a hand through his hair and shot out of his office in search of Lacey’s laptop.
Through the house he hurried, nude from the waist down and pissed as hell.
The grandfather clock in the living room, an early wedding present from Lacey’s parents, chimed eight times as he ransacked the house, trying to remember the last place she’d used her computer. It was bright pink. How hard could it be to find?
Finally, he located her laptop on her bedside table. He booted it up as he rushed to his office. The web meeting had already begun.
But Kaden got an eyeful when the desktop blinked to life. Several pictures were open, the screens positioned in a rectangle, as if placed precisely in location so all of them could be viewed simultaneously. Of course it was the subject matter of those pictures that caused Kaden’s eyes to grow wide—and his pulse to race.
Porn.
