Page 5 of Inconvenient Marriage
She freezes. Something… maybe fear… flashes across her face. “No. Please. Ican’t.”
Because of him. That’s why. Because of the man she wanted to fuck me to forget… and I didn’t do as good of a job as I thought I did, huh?
That doesn’t mean we have to part right away. “Then I’ll walk you to your car.”
“No.” She steps back, shoving open the bathroom stall, putting space between us. With my jizz dripping out of her, she can’t look at me anymore.
“I have to go,” she whispers.
She has to go, and I let her. I don’t want to spook her. I hang back as she dashes for the bathroom door, lingering long enough to notice that she left her panties on the floor. I scoop them up, shoving them in my jacket pocket like the trophy they are.
I stay exactly where I am until her panicked footsteps fade down the hall, then I drag a hand over my face, trying to do my best to forget her. I have to. A woman like that… she could makea man like me want things I can never have, but how when she belongs to someone else?
I have to forget her—and I know I won’t.
Because she did the one thing no one ever does to me.
She walked away, and if that isn’t enough to snare my attention, I don’t knowwhatis.
ONE
SUMMONS
ANNALIESE
Three months after I ended things with him for good, Eric summons me back by text with the same amount of words:
EW
Come to me.
No greeting. No explanation. No apology, as if a high-ranking member of the Order—and my hidden lover for more than two years—would ever lower himself enough to apologize to the woman he ruined.
Ruined.
Heruinedme.
I believed him. When he told me he loved me, I believed him. When he told me I was special, I believed him. When he said that his wife was in hospice, unable to do her duties, and that when she eventually passed, I would be her replacement because we were meant to be… I believed him.
But Cicely Ward was never sick. Too naive… too enthralled… to question all of the inconsistencies, I let him keep me a secret, let him coddle me, let him turn me into the perfect mistress. I wore my hair the way he liked. I dressed in outfits that he paid for and approved. I lived in his house before I found an apartment of my own… and I ignored any sign of the woman who had been his Offering two decades before.
She didn’t live with him. That much I know is true. She had her own residence, their marriage one of convenience these days, one of standing. There is no divorce in the Order of the Owed. It’s ‘til death do you part, and I thought her death would lead me to my happily-ever-after.
For four years, he was my client. My mentor. My friend. Then, slowly yet inevitably, he becamemore. My confidant. My boss.
My lover—until I pushed for a marriage that would never happen, and he became nothing more than the man responsible for taking an Offering and making it so that I couldnevermarry a ranking member of the society.
He called me his ‘good girl’. He promised me forever, but didn’t hold up his end of the bargain. Helied, and now he thinks he can text me for the first time in months and I’ll drop everything to go running to him?
I should’ve blocked him. Stupid Annaliese. I should’ve blocked him, but when all he said as I grabbed my purse, abandoning everything else I owned behind me, was to make sure I left my keys behind on my way out, I didn’t see why I should. Eric made his position clear. He would never leave Cicely, and all I could hope for was my place in his bed and whatever trinkets he thought would distract his young mistress. I refused, and he let me go as easily as if the last two years hadn’t meant a thing to him.
As ifIhadn’t meant a thing to him.
Because old habits are hard to kill—even when the smarmy man who shaped them deserves to be dead and buried beneath them for his cruelty—I read the text and instantly have to resist the urge to obey. My body goes rigid, my breath tripping over itself as I stare at the three words.
For a moment, I can’t breathe. It’s like I’m twenty-three again, foolish enough to believe that an established member of Harmony Height’s secret society would love me for me, and not because I was twenty years his junior.
Come to me.
