Page 56 of Accidental Groom
I move before I’ve decided to.
My hands brace against his shoulders, pushing once,hard, shoving him back half a step. His eyes go wide as he catches himself on the wall.
“You don’t get to talk to me like that,” I hiss. “You don’teverget to talk to me like that again.”
He scoffs, moving to the side to get out of my reach. “God, who gave you confidence?” he spits.
“Youleft me!” I shout. “You detonated everything. You made my parents look at me like I was defective, like I was so unappealing as a bride that you couldn’t stomach it. You let them think I wasn’t worth marrying, that Sarah would be a better choice. Do you have any idea what that does to a person? Do you understand how it feels to have your father think you’re worthless because someone elseran?”
He blinks, genuinely frowning like I’ve started speaking a different language. “Who the hell is Sarah?”
The temptation to punch him square in the jaw surges through me, and I dig my nails into my palm, trying to curtail it.“My sister,” I seethe. “Which you would know if you’d ever paid more than five seconds worth of attention to me in the lead up to the wedding.”
He laughs, hollow and disbelieving. “Jesus, I didn’t have a fucking spreadsheet on your family tree. Sorry I wasn’t keeping track.”
“No, you just had a flight plan and your fucking passport,” I snap. “While you were halfway across the Atlantic, I was watching my father eye my sister like prey. You vanished, and suddenly she was the next bargaining chip. You started a war and left me stranded in the trenches.”
He flinches like the word war offends him, as if he couldn’t possibly be guilty of something that dramatic. “You really think this was easy for me?” he fires back, his voice rising, his arrogance creeping back in. “I didn’t ask my father to marry you. I just needed time, Elena. Do you really think I wanted this to happen? That I wanted my dad?—”
“Oh, please,” I cut in, my hands trembling in front of me now, the temptation to slap him or shove him again eating away at me. But I don’t. “You wanted out. You just didn’t have the guts to say it, so you ran. You went to Croatia like a spoiled brat, fucked god knows who, and let someone else clean up your mess.”
“Don’t pretend like you were some helpless victim,” he sneers, leaning toward me just enough to make me step back. “You could’ve said no.”
“To what, exactly?” I laugh, but my voice is breaking, the sound bitter and ragged. “To watching them hand my sister off like a consolation prize? To the insinuation that I was too broken to be marriage material unless I clawed my way back into their good graces with a ring on my finger so Sarah wouldn’t have to?”
The backs of my eyes burn, but I refuse to let the tears come.
“I begged your father to do this. I didn’t do it because I was weak, I saidI dobecause it was the only way to stop them.”
He’s silent. For once in his fucking life, he doesn’t have something to say.
“I married your father because I had to. But staying? Living here, on the property, instead of keeping my distance and living a separate life? That was my choice.”
His brows raise. “You’re happy?” he laughs. “Withhim?”
I take a breath, steadying myself. “I’m just saying that I’m glad it happened. I obviously married the better Highcourt.”
The air between us crackles as he stares at me, lost for words. He looks almost like I’ve gutted him, and for a second, just a flickering second, I see the boy I’d agreed to marry at sixteen — lost, small, pathetic.
And then the mask is back on.
He scoffs and stands back upright. “Right. Good luck with that,” he says. ‘You think he’s going to love you? Mydad? I’m not sure he’s loved anyone in his entire life?—”
“I don’t need him to love me to be better than you,” I snap before the words he said hit.
What the fuck did that mean?
He opens his mouth, probably to spew some different poison at me, but the door wrenches open. Harry stands there, silent as a storm, staring at his son.
George stares right back.
“That’s enough,” Harry says, his gaze hard as steel. “This conversation is done until you learn how to take some fucking accountability.”
Harry reaches for me, his arm sliding around my waist before tugging once, a little too harshly, pulling me back toward the house.
“Unless you’re going to apologize to mywife,” Harry adds.
George’s jaw clenches. He doesn’t say a word.
