“At first. But I have grown to care about you. You’re a great person. The best woman I’ve ever met. I respect the shit out of you, Kaye. But all the flirting and the moves I made, those were made up. I actually admire you and your ability to put a man like me in my place. But I don’t want you. Not sexually. Not that you’re not a knockout, but I know where your heart is.”
I was stupefied. I had been duped so completely by two men at the same time. I was beyond naïve. I felt so stupid. So completely fucking stupid it made me think I had brain damage I’d never been aware of.
How could he do this to me?
And what was I going to do about it now?
David
My hand touched nothing but smooth, cool sheets when I rolled over the next morning. I expected to find Kaye, warm and fragrant and sleepy, but she wasn’t within the grasp of my groping hand.
I opened my eyes, expecting to see her lying just inches away from me in bed, out of reach of my hand, or to see her brushing her long, dark waves of hair.
But I saw nothing.
Frowning, I woke up completely. It was strange to not find her there. It was early yet and I knew she didn’t have to work. She would normally wait for me in the bedroom, because more often than not, we breakfasted together.
A sense of foreboding stole through my entire body, trailing icy fingers up my spine. Only, I was being ridiculous and I knew it. Kaye had probably gone to go start breakfast herself.
She probably didn’t want to be around me much, and I couldn’t even blame her. I was being ridiculous about this baby thing. I did want a child with her. More than one, if she was okay with it.
Any child she had any part in would be nothing but an utter delight. I had never had much interest in having a child before, but with her, I wanted kids.
So why was I waiting, anyway? I shook my head as I grabbed a pair of sweats and pulled them on. I had no idea. Probably for the same stubborn reason I’d kept insisting to myself, and to Brent, that I was only after Kaye’s money.
Long after I had known it wasn’t true, I had kept on with the charade. Maybe it was time to break this cycle before it got even more ridiculous than it already was. What was I trying to prove here, anyway?
Kaye and I were together. For life.
So maybe it was time for me to go prove it to her. To both of us.
With a huge smile on my face, I left the room. I probably looked like an idiot, but I didn’t even care. I would find Kaye and we could talk—maybe get started on the baby right away. Though she would probably have to stop taking her pills first.
I had no problem with practicing, though.
“Kaye?” I called out, walking down the stairs toward the living room. There was no smell of coffee and I shook my head. Kaye was, if anything, more addicted to caffeine than I was. It was the whole nurse thing, she’d told me.
Whenever she woke up, she put on a pot of coffee. Always.
“David?” Her voice was sleepy and it came from the living room. Remorse gripped me. She must have come downstairs to sleep on the couch, unable to handle being in the same bed with me after how cruel I had been to her.
And then I saw Brent.
My so-called best friend was lying on our couch, dead to the world and snoring softly. On the other couch, my wife was just sitting up, rubbing sleep from her lovely green eyes. She looked startled to see me.
“Oh my God,” I whispered, looking between the two of them. Brent was only slowly waking up, and as he opened his eyes, I felt my anger growing, bursting a dam deep in the pit of my stomach, and flooding me with white-hot fury and something close to hatred.
“What the fuck is going on right now?” My voice thundered through the room and it was enough to wake my best friend up. My former best friend, that is. Kaye looked at me, obviously startled, but she didn’t recoil back the same way Brent did. “Someone answer me immediately,” I hissed, approaching Kaye. To my stunned surprise, Brent got up off the couch and stood right in front of her.
Protecting her.
Protecting my wife. From me.
“I won’t let you hurt her anymore.” Brent stood firmly in front of Kaye, who poked her head around him so she could see me. There was a distance in her expression—one I wasn’t used to seeing. Not from her.
It was like she was already pulling away from me.
The anger I’d felt before was nothing. It paled in comparison to what raged through me when I realized what was going on. Brent was protecting Kaye, who was pulling away from me. “You fucked her, didn’t you? You son of a bitch, you fucked my wife,” I screamed, and my hands clenched into fists at my side, hard enough to leave little bloody marks. I had to keep myself under control. I knew that, at least on some level. Otherwise, I might just kill Brent.
And how badly I wanted to at that moment. I would gladly rot in hell before I saw him with the woman I loved. He was in for the fight of his life if he thought for one second I was going to let him have her.
“No, we didn’t,” Kaye whispered, and her face was very pale, other than two patches of color high on her cheekbones. For the very first time, I was seeing my wife furious.
“You did!” I shouted at the top of my lungs. I knew what I was witnessing here in our living room. I knew she’d left our bed and come down here to meet him. Why else would they be down here? When had they concocted this little rendezvous?
Unlike me, she didn’t get loud. She didn’t scream. She got very quiet instead. Terrifyingly quiet. I had to listen very closely to be able to hear her at all when she spoke. “We didn’t. I would never have touched another man,” Kaye continued, her voice still so soft and quiet that I had to lean forward to listen. “I love you. I loved you.”
Loved?
Past tense.
She had loved me, which seemed to imply, with the way she said it, that she didn’t love me any longer.
I think I knew then. Deep down, in a place I didn’t acknowledge at the time, I knew that she knew. I didn’t know how, but what else could it be? What else could have taken my devoted wife from me?
“I’m going to file for divorce.” Kaye’s voice was still so terrifyingly cold and calm, and her words stabbed into my brain. “I know, David. I know what you were trying to do to me, and since money is all you care about, it should really hurt you to know I’m going to get all of it. Every last penny.”
“How?” The rage was gone and I stammered out the one word. How had this all happened, was what I meant to ask, but Brent didn’t take it the way I intended.
“If you think she can’t make it happen,” he told me firmly, “he can. If you fight this, I am more than happy to tell a judge what we had planned. I can’t do it anymore, David, and I won’t let you do it either.”
My whole body clenched with agony, as though all of my nerves sang with the pain of my sudden realization.
It was over.
Oh, it had been over either way, because I had come to the same conclusion as Brent had. But my way, Kaye never would have known and I could have kept her. I would have stayed wealthy, and I would have had everything Kaye had been offering me—stability and a real family. They were things I’d never had before and hadn’t known how much I’d wanted until they were abruptly taken away.
I stood there, frozen, the icicles of her words having paralyzed me to the ground. I couldn’t even open my mouth and my throat refused to work. I just stared at my former best friend and my wife, no hint of the heat of rage anywhere in my body anymore.
My wife--soon to be ex-wife—looked at me with cold eyes that told me what we had was over. I had ruined it. It was entirely my fault. The woman would take me to the cleaners for hurting her like this, and she deserved every fucking penny I had. I knew that then. I wouldn’t even fight her. I was a bastard, I didn’t deserve one God damned thing, and I knew it.
But was it really all my fault? Hadn’t Brent been the one to come up with this plan? Wasn’t Kaye a smart woman, capable of seeing through thing
s like this?
No matter how much I tried to convince myself that this wasn’t all my fault, I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t. I could talk about building a grand legacy in my grandfather’s name, I could mention my mother and how faithless she’d been, but none of it mattered.
My grandfather had wanted the money to go to Kaye. It hurt to accept it, but it was nothing but the truth. And that, too, was my fault, for my inability to handle my father’s death.
In that one moment, it all became clear to me—all the things I had been trying to deny, and not just over the last few months, either. Hindsight, they say, is a bitch. I could vouch for the statement.
Just as I was paralyzed now, so had I been for the last decade. More than a decade—ever since my father had died, yes, but even before. Ever since my mother had left me.
I’d let it shape my view of women. All women. I had been too wrapped up in my pain. It all seemed so shallow as I looked at the face of the only woman who had ever broken through all of it—the walls I’d put around myself, the pain, the sorrow, and the distrust.
“Oh my God,” I whispered, barely audible enough for me to hear my own voice. There was no way she would be able to pick any of it up. “I’m an idiot.”
Such a ridiculous idiot.
Yes, bad things had happened to me, but they had happened to Kaye, too. She had been just as alone as I was, but she’d been willing to let herself fall in love without reservation.
She trusted too much, and now she was paying the price. I wished to God I hadn’t been the one to demand it of her.
Maybe it would be the biggest tragedy of this whole thing. Kaye would lose some of her innocence because I hadn’t been willing to just call this off sooner. No, even calling it off wouldn’t have been enough.
I should have been brave enough to tell her about it myself so Brent wouldn’t have had any chance to.
Now I’d lost everything because of my greed and my cowardice. I’d lost the money, yes, but somehow it seemed the least important thing.
I’d also lost my best friend, which stung. Brent had done the right thing before I had, and I felt even more like an asshole knowing that. Of course, he’d gotten drunk to do it, which must have made it easier.
The biggest blow was Kaye.
I’d lost her. The only woman I had ever loved and the only woman loyal enough to stand by me even when I was deliberately being a dick to her—she was gone. I could see in her eyes the distance that had widened between us.
We were strangers.
No. We were less than strangers, because I had hurt her. I didn’t have her trust, and I didn’t have her love.
My legs went out and I fell onto a chair, pretty much collapsing onto it. I could try to lie, I supposed, but what was the point? She was smart enough to put the pieces together, especially with Brent having told her what he had.
I didn’t want to lie anyway, even if she would believe me. She knew me for what I was, and maybe it was for the better.
For a moment, we were all just frozen there. Frozen in place and trapped in this moment in time by the horrible situation.
The situation I had caused.
Chapter 22
Kaye
Part of me had hoped David would deny it. Part of me had hoped he would look me right in the eyes and tell me I was crazy—tell me Brent had made it all up and I was a fool to believe him.
Please let him tell me that.
If he had, I probably would have believed him. If I hadn’t read the truth in his eyes anyway. What I’d read in those dark eyes instead had shaken me right to the core, until I felt I had been robbed of my breath—possibly of my very soul.
Brent was telling the truth.
As I lay on that couch after Brent’s confession, I kept praying that this was all just a terrible nightmare and that I would wake up on our bed, in David’s arms, and everything would be okay.
Or I might wake up and find my husband hadn’t lied and Brent had. I was okay with hating Brent, but not with hating David, my husband, the man I thought I knew.
But the sad and sorrowful truth was that David had never loved me. He had lied to me—used me—just for money. He was nothing more than a ruthless capitalist who had been willing to do whatever he had to in order to get what he wanted. He had married me for money, not for emotion. Not for love, the way I thought he had.
Love was the reason I had married him. I didn’t care about the money that his income would give me if our marriage didn’t work out. I always knew it would work out—I would never let it go. But I had been dead wrong, hadn’t I?
“How could you?” I whispered, and the only thing I could think of to do, suddenly, was to get out of there. Watching David collapse onto his chair as his plan came undone around him should have been deeply rewarding.
It wasn’t.
Even after everything he’d done to me and everything he’d tried to do—even with how he’d tried to cheapen me and use me and ruin me, I couldn’t hate him. I knew I should. I knew what Angela, or Joan, or any of the other women I worked with would say.
They would tell me to get mad. To get revenge. To take the man who had hurt me for everything he was worth.
I got to my feet, walking around Brent, but on the side that was furthest from David. I couldn’t look at him. I couldn’t speak to him. I had really said all there was to say, and maybe it would be best to leave with the tattered remnants of my dignity.
What little there was left of it, anyway.
I walked up the stairs, still so stunned by how quickly everything could fall apart. There was anger there, too, but it was cold and remote, not lending me any of its strength or fury to do what I had to do.
“Kaye! Wait!”
David was on his feet as I turned back around. My heart was completely broken, but it still recognized the sound of his voice. I was going to have to watch that.
“Damn it, you’ve done enough,” Brent hissed, and he launched himself between the stairs where I still stood and David, who was walking toward me. Brent actually pushed himself between us before David was even close to me.
“Get out of my way.” David squared off against his best friend and my shattered heart lurched in my chest. God, no. Please let this not evolve into a physical altercation. On top of everything else, I wasn’t going to be able to handle it.
Brent threw the first punch, and I let out a startled little shriek. In my line of work, I’d seen the end results of more than a few of these quarrels and I knew it wasn’t headed anywhere good.
Something broke through the chill of betrayal when I saw Brent’s fist connect with David’s face and when I saw David clench his hand into a tight little ball and start to swing it at the man who had been his best friend.
I still loved David.
I cared about Brent, too, but David held my heart. I didn’t want either of them hurt, though, and I ran down the stairs so fast it surprised me when I didn’t trip and go flying down them.
Without hesitation or conscious thought, I wrapped my arms around David and swung my body around his, deftly inserting myself between the two of them before either of them could land another blow.
“Brent, get out of here,” I yelled, with my arms around my husband’s body, which was shaking with rage. The muscles of his arms were bunched into tight little knots with the desire to hurt Brent. Possibly to beat him to death. No, I couldn’t let David or Brent do anything that might rob them of their freedom. I didn’t want to see anyone in prison, or worse, over me.
“No way. He might hurt you,” Brent shouted back, trying to duck around me to get a clear shot at David.
“He’s hurt me as much as he can,” I replied, my voice quieting a little, but I was no less resolute. “What else can he do to me? Just leave. I can handle David.”
I was sure I could, too. He had never hit me, after all, and I’d never even been slightly concerned he might. Even now, he could push me away if he really wanted to, but he wasn’t.
> “Kaye …” Brent sounded reluctant, but when I turned my head to look at him, I saw he had backed up a few steps. I was getting through to him.
“Go!” I demanded, and I heard his footsteps retreat as he left the room. The front door slammed shut, and only then did I cautiously, very cautiously, release David. Maybe he would go running after Brent, but somehow, I didn’t think so.
I was right. Once we were alone, he slumped down, coming to rest on the bottom step. He covered his eyes with his hands, and if he hadn’t utterly betrayed me, I would have felt sorry for him. He looked so miserable. So desperately sad.
Was it because he actually had come to love me and now he was going to lose me? Or was it because I was going to take everything away from him? Every last cent of even the money he had worked hard to earn on his own.
“So this was all about money,” I whispered. “That’s all I’ve ever been to you.”
He glanced up at me, and I had to harden my heart to keep from feeling for him. His eyes were bleak and it seemed like he couldn’t form words at that moment. I sighed softly as I looked at him. I didn’t—couldn’t—approve of his methods, but I’d always been a sucker for someone who was suffering.
“Did you tell me the truth about anything?” I asked, settling down on the step with him and feeling too weak—too utterly worn out—to even make it over to the couch. “Your parents? Your mom? Or was it all just a lie to get me to fall for you?”
If it had been, he’d done a really incredible job of it. I had fallen ridiculously hard and fast.
“Yes. I told the truth about my parents.” All the life seemed to have gone out of David’s voice, and I frowned slightly.
How could I believe him? How could I know if anything he ever said again was true?
Searching his face, I had to shake my head. I had no way of knowing. I’d been so sure he loved me and I’d been completely wrong. I had thought I was a good judge of character, but then I found out Brent and David had plotted against me this whole time.
My marriage was a lie. It was just that I had apparently been too stupid and trusting to see it.
Vengeful Seduction_A Submissives’ Secrets Novel Page 22