Chapter 13: Hate and Heat

I knocked on his hotel door at nine that night with the fitting still on my skin.

He opened it in his shirtsleeves with his reading glasses pushed up into his hair.

"There's a man in a gray sedan across the street," I said. "Constance pays him. He's taking my picture right now."

"Then come inside and let him have a good one."

I walked past him and he shut the door.

I held up my phone with Brooke's photo of the yellow note on it.

"She moved the wedding," I said. "Saturday. Three days, not three weeks."

He read it and set the phone face down on the table.

"Then we have three days," he said. "Say the rest."

The suite smelled of coffee and cedar soap, and his father's headstone papers lay open on the table.

"You buttoned me into that dress," I said.

"I did."

"And then you walked out and left me standing there while she asked if I was flushed."

"You told her it was the silk."

"I told her I'd marry your brother, Dominic."

"I heard you."

"You heard me say it, and you stood behind a curtain and kept quiet."

"It was the plan."

"It was my plan," I said. "You didn't get to like it."

His jaw moved.

"What did you want me to do? Walk out in front of her and tell her no?"

"Yes."

"And lose you the store?"

"I wanted you to want to," I said.

I was shouting, and I hated that I was.

I pushed him in the chest with both hands.

He caught my wrists and did not let go.

"Don't," he said, low.

"Or what?"

"Or I'll stop being polite."

"You've never been polite. You were polite at the bar for ten minutes and then you weren't."

His eyes went dark.

"You came here to fight," he said.

"I came here for you to make it stop."

"Make what stop?"

"Her voice in my head. His mouth on my cheek. All of it."

He pulled me in by my wrists and kissed me hard.

It was not a kind kiss.

I bit his lip and tasted blood, and he made a rough sound in his throat and walked me backward until my shoulders hit the wall.

Keep reading free with an account. Start He Cheated With My Best Friend, So I Spent the Night With His Brother from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.