Playboy's Secret Wife novel · Chapter 17 of 24

Chapter 17: Lake House

I got in the car.

He didn't argue, and he didn't speak until we'd crossed the Wisconsin line.

The house sat at the end of a gravel road in Door County, in a stand of pines.

It had a grey porch and a long dock going out into a lake the color of slate.

It was smaller than I'd expected.

There was a wood stove, two mismatched armchairs and a shelf of paperbacks with cracked spines.

Somebody had actually lived here.

"I bought it at twenty-five, before the money," Lucas said.

"My mother has never been inside."

He stood in the middle of the room with his hands hanging.

I put the kettle on, because I didn't know what else to do.

"Ask me," he said.

"Ask you what?"

"Why a man like me has never had a wife."

"You'll hear it from the tabloids otherwise."

I turned around and leaned against the counter.

"Why?"

"Because the first girl I loved sold my texts to a gossip site for six thousand dollars."

"I was twenty-three."

"The second sold my mother's address."

"The third was lovely, and kind, and she cried when I found out she'd been feeding Chad's paper my schedule for a year."

"Every one of them had a reason."

"Every one of them was paid by somebody in my family."

He laughed, short and dry.

"So I stopped giving them anything to sell."

"I became the man in the photographs, because nobody can sell a thing they've already published."

"A playboy is just a man who doesn't have a secret worth stealing."

"Until a girl in a sequined dress held on to my lapels and told me to say yes."

I crossed the room.

"I didn't sell anything," I said.

"I know."

"Every woman before you had a number in her head."

"You were the first who named one and wanted it smaller."

"I've waited nine days for the catch."

"There isn't one," I said.

Keep reading free with an account. Start Playboy's Secret Wife from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.