by Brogan Riley
Tyce
She should have commented, right?
I just told her I love her.
She tilts her head, disappears into her mind, and steps out of the shower cabin. No word has come out of her mouth.
Alright. She doesn’t love me. I’m not surprised.
She loves our sex though.
She loves it enough to be blind to my appearance.
That’s a good foundation of our marriage.
I rinse the foam off and grab a towel.
I walk out into the room and take a white shirt out of the bag. Rhue stands by the mirror and smartens up her dress. It has a strapless bodice and a ballerina tulle hem.
My heart leaps. “Rhue, I’ll be a good husband to you.”
She turns to face me, smoothing a hand down the hem of her dress. “I know.”
Uneasiness sits on my chest.
I should ask her.
I don’t.
I don’t want to know the reasons for her desperate decision. They would shatter my illusion.
She needs a husband.
I need her to keep me alive.
In my illusion, Rhue loves me and wants to marry me because I’m a nice guy.
She doesn’t love me. That’s fine.
I will love for the both of us.
Chapter 11
Rhue
The chapel is a very elegant rotunda with cream walls and burgundy rosettes. The sun’s rays penetrate the tall narrow windows and create a dazzling reality all around us.
Our marriage officiant Marta is a petite blonde woman in her thirties. Her blue eyes have cheeky flickers and her short form exudes pure joy. She’s wearing a white suit and a pair of burgundy shoes. Yep, she looks like an angel on a job.
We stepped into the jewelry shop at the back of the chapel and chose our wedding rings merely half an hour ago.
Marta, please hurry.
Pronounce us husband and wife before a snap of lightning strikes me.
“You may kiss the bride,” Marta says.
Relief washes over my heart as two witnesses of our union clap their hands. They’re two retired women who attend the wedding ceremonies for fun.
Tyce puts his hands on my hips and covers my mouth with his.
I’m his wife.
I’m Ethan’s wife.
I’m Tyce’s soul mate, and he is mine.
God, it hurts so much.
We move toward the door adorned with five drapes of burgundy fabric and two wreaths of white flowers, our fingers laced together. We enter a small reception room and stand by a side table. A white vase stands on the tabletop and holds a bunch of roses. My hand reaches down for a glass of champagne. The silver string wrapped around it feels like frost under my fingers. My heart leaps.
I want to go ice-skating with my kids and my husband.
But I won’t.
I want to go to the beach with my family.
But I won’t.
I want to live and enjoy my happiness.
Focus, Rhue. Your kids will do all those things if you’re focused.
I lean toward Tyce and brush my lips against him. “More champagne or more sex?”
“More of everything.” He tears the glass away from my hand and puts it on the side table, spilling the bubbly richness.
I sigh as his hands land on my waist and he lifts me up. He throws me over his shoulder.
I erupt into laughter. “You’re a caveman, darling.” I rest my hands against his hard butt and raise my head.
Tyce slaps my ass, and Marta shakes her head, but one corner of her thin mouth quirks up.
“I am the most savage of cavemen,” Tyce says with pride.
He strides out of the reception room and carries me across the road and then along the pavement. Palm trees guard a side of it as it leads us to the hotel where we’re going to spend the night. My high heels fall to the ground before we enter it. Tyce doesn’t bother to pick them up. He strides across the hall and then enters the elevator. It’s very stylish and reminds me of the scenery of 1930s crime movies. Tyce presses a red button and the elevator takes us up, giving me that unpleasant drop sensation.
“Put me on the floor,” I say. “I’m heavy.”
He massages my ass with his hand. “You are not.”
The elevator dings and the door swishes open. Tyce steps out. We move along the narrow corridor illuminated by the light emitted from sconce wall lamps and then we tumble into our hotel room.
Tyce throws me onto the bed and straddles my hips. He slides his hands under my back, unclasping my bodice and tearing it off. My naked breasts wave as it lands on the floor with a quiet puff. Tyce lowers his head as his wet tongue circles my nipple. A jolt of pleasure surges through me, my flesh pebbled. Impatience fills me. I pull at his shirt, helping him remove it. He tosses it onto the floor.
I wiggle out of my ballerina skirt as Tyce shakes off his trousers, shoes, and socks. He holds my breast, running his thumb around my nipple and takes my other breast into his mouth. I feel so beautiful.
I feel myself leak between my thighs. His mouth moves down to my tummy and he rips my panties off. Putting my calf on his shoulder, he plants hot wet kisses up and down my inner thigh.
He sinks his face between my thighs. I moan as his tongue laps over my clitoris.
“You love it, don’t you, Rhue? Tell me.”
“I love… you, Tyce,” I gasp.
He freezes for a split second. I blink a few times and his mouth is on my pussy back again.
His mouth devours my pussy.
I moan, my insides melting, as I spread my knees and my heels dig into the mattress. My pussy is a temple that he worships with ravenous fury. God, it’s never been this good.
“Oh God,” I gasp. “Tyce, oh my…”
His tongue penetrates me and he rubs his thumb against my clitoris. I’m a shivering hot mess. My pussy is drenched and he’s drinking, licking, sucking.
I come with a long moan, my body trembling.
Tyce lays his naked body on top of mine. His hot lips touch mine. I taste my own arousal. Our tongues stroke each other and he sucks on my lower lip. He bites me gently. I’m on fire. My body is all insane fever.
I run my hands down his muscular back, caressing every scar with my fingers and then grab his butt, urging him to give me more. His ravaged skin is so mine.
His thick cock slides into my pussy. His burning eyes lock onto mine. He moves his hips against mine. Our bodies dance, clenched tight together. Dance faster and faster, slap against each other, and tremble in satisfaction. We’re not corporeal for an instant. We’re the ultimate connection. My husband moans my name as I come from my high.
Tyce kisses me on the mouth. He eases his weight onto his elbow as his cock slips out.
He strokes my head. “I’ll buy a nice house,” he says. “I’ll send your kids to good schools. You won’t have to work, Rhue. You can if you fancy but our family is and will be my responsibility.”
He looks so happy. Pain grips my heart.
I can’t.
I can’t fucking do this to him.
No, I have to do this to him, to myself, to my kids.
“Can you adopt my kids?” I ask in a hoarse voice.
“Tomorrow. I’ll do this first thing in the morning.”
“Promise me.”
“I promise, Rhue.”
I feel light and dizzy. He is an honorable man. He’ll keep his promise.
“You’re great, Tyce.”
He pulls me into his arms and I allow myself to sink in my happy fantasy. We drop off to sleep.
Tyce
It’s been busy for two days. Emily’s trying to find a house for me; Sally’s interrogating me and Rhue, and scolding us for our unexpected wedding ceremony, kids are deliriously happy. I’m drunk on happiness.
We’ll have a proper wedding ceremony when everything’s sorted out. Yeah, I want to marry Rhue once a year to remind her of my mad love for her.
I’
ve filled out all the forms required to start the adoption process. I signed them as Ethan Smith.
Florence, I fucking hope you were right about that fake identity of mine.
She sent me all the forged documents four days after I had awoken from my coma. I called her and she swore the documents were of an excellent quality.
I didn’t ask questions. I wanted to vanish at any cost. I didn’t give a fuck whether it was legal or not. I wanted to be dead to the whole world.
I had three bank accounts in Switzerland at that time. I withdrew the money from one of them and bribed a detective and a forensic doctor to fake our deaths. Florence had written down their names in her letter.
How did she know they would take the money? I decided not to think about it.
I will think about it when any shit happens.
Now, I just want to be happy.
It’s crazy, but it feels so damn good.
Colleen and Jaclyn have started calling me a dad. Caspar hasn’t decided yet. Diana just keeps smirking at me. She wants her life back. She’s been worried sick about her mom and siblings for so long. She’d been scared of Charlie for years. She wants peace and safety even though she doesn’t know this yet.
Diana doesn’t talk much but watching her while she’s around her siblings and mom is enough to know what’s been eating at her. She wants to be accepted and wants to have a real dad. I’ll fucking put in five hundred percent of effort to give all those kids a good family.
Rhue
I teeter between his apartment and my little house on Caroline’s land. I teeter between happiness and mortal fear. I teeter between decisiveness and indecisiveness.
I choose being blind over acknowledging the dreadful reality each time his mouth closes mine.
His skilled lips strip me of rationality. His tongue makes a brainless teen out of me. His stiff cock makes a wanton woman out of me. I want to fulfill all my sexual fantasies with him. Hell, I’m a tired mom, but I have some fantasies. And that would be only with him by the way. I’d kill every woman if they as much as looked at him.
With Tyce, everything is so easy, so hot, so beautiful.
I’m so happy. So unhappy at the same time.
My phone buzzes and I look down at the screen. It’s a reminder that I have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow.
Tyce needs to know the truth.
His lips capture mine, stealing my rationality once again.
I tear my mouth off his. “We need to talk.”
“Sure.”
He braces my waist with his hands and moves them up, circling my nipples through the fabric of my top with his thumbs. His eyes are glued to my cleavage.
I wiggle out of his embrace even though my traitorous body demands his closeness. “Sit down, Tyce.”
“Why so serious?” One corner of his lips quirks up. He buries his face between my breasts, shoving his hand between my legs. His lips touch my neck. “Let’s have more fun, sweetness. To relieve that seriousness of yours.”
I take his hands off my body. “Tyce, please. I need to tell you something.”
He perches on his bed as I lean against the wall.
I take a deep breath. Dread fills my veins as sadness layers my mind. How do you crush other people’s life? I’ve never done this before. I suspect I should be straightforward.
It’s the end of my fairy tale. It’s a very sad end.
“I have metastatic breast cancer,” I say. “It’s already too late.”
Time stops but my words seem to be slicing the air repeatedly. Something gathers in the air and thickens.
Tyce shakes his head as though he wants to shake my words off. “No.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“No.” His fingers roll into fists as his face turns into a cold mask. His eyes? They’re like two dark flames of fury.
He rises to his feet in one predatory motion. His arm sweeps through the air. The bedside lamp hovers toward the wall and shatters.
Everything jumps inside me as the clinking sound drills into me.
Tyce growls and slams his fist on the wall. Blood splashes against the floor.
“Tyce, baby, I’m so sorry.”
He bends slightly forward, his face dark. “You’re not gonna die, you understand?”
“Tyce, please.”
“No,” he growls as he strides over to me. “No fucking way. Give me your doctor’s phone number.”
“Tyce—“
“Now, Rhue. Give me that fucking phone number.”
I take my phone out of the pocket in my hoody and he tears it away from my hand. It’s not locked with any password so he checks my contact list.
Tyce
My heart pounds in my chest as tears blind me. Her gasps and words drift to my ears like I’m underwater. The fucking letters on the phone screen blur.
I hold her phone in both my hands, but they shake so much I can’t find the fucking doctor’s name. The blood trickling out of my wounds floods the screen.
“Tyce, please.” She takes the phone from my hand and runs her knuckles up and down my cheek. “Tyce, baby, please stop.”
I can’t stop.
I can’t lose her.
She’s my beloved wife.
I raise my eyes. “That’s why you wanted me to marry you?”
“My kids need a good daddy.”
She thinks I’ll be a good daddy. She trusts me with her kids’ lives.
I nod. “How much… time?”
“A year. Maybe a bit longer.”
A flame of defiance burns inside of me. There’s a lot of time.
I have money. I can find the best private doctors. I can find the best cancer researchers. I can take her abroad.
I can’t lose her.
God, no fucking way are you going to take her from me.
Chapter 12
Rhue
The phone rings and my heart jumps up into my throat.
I answer the call as Tyce’s blood moistens my cheek.
It’s the head of the oncology ward. Tyce locks his eyes onto mine, but I shake my head and walk out of his room.
“It’s me on the phone,” I say as I walk down the stairs and then hurry across the bar.
“We’re really sorry,” the man says, “but there was an error.”
“An error?” I walk out of the bar and walk over to the bench that stands between two tall trees.
“One of our junior doctors put someone else’s results into your folder.”
My heart stops beating. “The fuck what?”
The man clears his throat. “That doctor will have to take a period of refresher training.”
“What error?” I yell.
“Your lump is benign. It’s a small fibro-adenoma. I’ve already booked you in—“
“Benign? You mean I’m not gonna die?”
“No. That lump needs only a simple surgery.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure. We’ve checked it three times, the four of us. There’s no error this time.”
My knees bend and I lower to the ground. My heart thumps in my ears. I see Tyce in front of me. He tears the phone from my hand and starts talking to the man. His words turn into a sharp torrent of curses and questions.
I take a deep breath.
What a fucking mess.
My God, I should have asked the doctor questions on that day. She just talked her monologue and I was so shocked, so scared that my kids would end up in foster care, that I just sat there and let those dreadful words of hers strip me of rationality. I’m no medic, but now that my brain is clearer it’s obvious to me that the biopsy result is not enough to say the patient has metastatic cancer.
But they had my recent chest x-ray and my foggy, frightened brain somehow pieced it together and created that ridiculous mess.
I huff out.
I have a future.
My breath stops in my throat.
Tyce is going to dump me.
Tyce
We saunter along the path, two walls of greenery sheltering us like we’re in a magical passage. The sun’s rays filtering past the leaves burn the nape of my neck. “I won’t give you a divorce,” I say.
Rhue raises her hands in a dramatic gesture, bouncing off me. “I don’t want to force you into a marriage with a liar. It shouldn’t be like this.”
I stop and grip her wrist. “You said you loved me, Rhue.”
“I do love you.”
“So why don’t you want to be my wife? I can take care of you, of your kids, of everything.”
“Tyce, I did something horrible to you. I feel horrible.”
Dread jabs my heart as my hands tremble. “Are you sick again?”
“No, Tyce, I’m not sick. I’m a horrible person. You deserve someone nice. Someone… I don’t know. Someone like Emily.”
“Why would I want to be with Emily? Fucking hell, Rhue, she’s lesbian.”
Rhue bursts out laughing. Yes, laughing. She hugs herself as tears trickle down from her eyes.
I take her wrist and plant a kiss on her knuckles. She’s jealous. That means she wants to be in a relationship with me and regards Emily as a threat to our marriage. Good. I guess I should say a big thank you to Emily.
A mean voice in my head reminds me that I didn’t tell Rhue the truth about myself either. “So, are we good, Rhue?”
“If you don’t want to dump me then we’re good, I guess.”
A dizzying wave of relief rolls over me. Right, now my piece of honesty.
“Rhue,” I start. “I need to tell you something.”
“You’re laundering money for the mob, right? I knew it.”
Now, I erupt into laughter. “No, but I’m not in witness protection either.”
She sucks in a breath. “Is this something dangerous?”
I shake my head. “No, but I might end up behind bars in the future.”
She hugs herself but then puts her hands on her hips and looks at me sternly. “You bribed someone, right? You wanted to be free and your fake death gave you the ultimate freedom. But there must have been other people involved. There must have been big money involved.”
“The detective working on my case and the forensic doctor to be precise.” I grip her wrist. “You’re not in any danger, Rhue. It’s just that you need to keep quiet.”
“Or I’ll be making food parcels for my husband.” She hisses like a snake. “No way in hell. I’ll keep very quiet, don’t worry.”