He wanted to tell Adrian that Adolfo and Isabella Mancini happened, but he couldn’t truly blame them for the horror-movie scene that played out when he’d come home to his loving wife, making dinner in the kitchen, and unloaded his rage, feelings of helplessness, and frustrations on her.
“I was an asshole to her,” he finally admitted, the words like acid eating away at his tongue.
Adrian snorted derisively. “What’s new there?” he drawled flatly. “You’re always an asshole, especially to Kendra—hell, I’m surprised that woman didn’t leave your ass years ago.”
Sneering, his voice a dark rasp, he accused, “Coming fromyouthat’s like the pot calling the kettle black?—”
“We’re not talking about me,” Adrian broke in, snarling, defensive. “We’re talking about how you’ve treated Kendra like a pretty accessory with a full Stepford Wife package. She is a lovely woman, inside and out, and she loves you like crazy. So much so that she became the cliched billionaire’s house wifey—cooking, cleaning, decorating, running fundraisers, volunteering at homeless shelters and food pantries—doing everything she could to live up to the nearly impossible expectations you have of her.”
Growling, Gideon snapped, “The only expectations I had were for her to be my wife and give me an heir?—”
“Oh ho! How fucking medieval—the bought bride, required to hold down the keep and pop out an heir and a spare, while her lord husband fights battles, rules with an iron fist, and fucks the scullery maid?—”
That made every nerve ending in his body fire at once—and it stirred rage within him. “I havenevercheated on Kendra?—”
“Let me tell you, brother, it doesn’t take much to fall off the treacherous cliff…and you’ve been teasing the edge with Isabella Mancini for years now.”
At the sound ofthatwoman’s name, Gideon cursed. Isabella had never been a temptation for him, even when he was single. He’d watched her grow up, from child to teen to woman, and he hadn’t liked her at all. With her, it was like the slow, hideous metamorphosis of tiger cub—claws and teeth, but still mostly harmless—into a vicious, rabid, man-eating beast that ripped open bellies and tore out throats.
Adrian, the shark in a man’s body, smelled blood in the water, because his next words were, “What did she do?”
It wasn’t just her; it was also her father…and him—three toxic chemicals, poured recklessly into a glass jar, shaken, andthen thrown into a gasoline fire—and the explosion had been catastrophic…and he’d taken that damage, the still throbbing, bleeding flesh wounds, home to his wife.
And she’d borne the brunt of the poisonous fallout.
Fuck.
Kendra…what the hell did I do?
All too late, that question circled his battered mind, like a wash of blood and regret down a storm drain.
Chapter Seven
Kendra hadn’t really ever believed in blackout memory fugue until she’d found herself on the porch of her agent’s house, freezing cold, empty-handed, and heartbroken, and hadn’t remembered how she’d gotten there.
LaKeisha Easton had opened the door after the third knock, her hair and clothes rumbled, telling Kendra that she’d woken the woman from her warm bed.
“Kendra?” LaKeisha had blurted, obviously surprised to find her client on her doorstep at midnight. “What happened?” she’d asked, concern blanketing her familiar, warm chocolate features. “Come inside—where’s your coat?”
Numb all over, even on the inside, Kendra had allowed LaKeisha to pull her inside, drag her to the couch, and there Kendra had opened her mouth and all the truths spilled out unchecked—what Gideon had said that night, how their “romance” had begun, and about the pregnancy.
Like the professional she was, and the friend she’d become over the years, LaKeisha listened, her expression morphing from shock to anger to sympathy to determination.
After handing her tissues, forcing her into a shower and a borrowed pair of sweats, LaKeisha tucked Kendra into bed with a promise that tomorrow would be better.
It hadn’t been, and none of the days since had offered her even a modicum of relief or happiness or joy—not even the sudden reminders of the baby nestled in her belly.
That next morning, LaKeisha had given her a prepaid Visa card, a prepaid cell, and drove her upstate to the Schroon Lake house, which had previously been shuttered for the winter. That meant no housekeeping staff, no cooks, no grounds crew, no Gideon minions to tattle about where she was, not that Gideon gave her a second thought.
Why would he? She meant nothing to him.
That was three days ago.
Three long, achingly hollow days and nights without the man she loved, the father of her baby, the man who’d taken every hope and dream she’d had for her future and set them on fire.
Now, quietly ensconced in the only place she could think of hiding away, she sat on a soft, pillowy armchair, facing floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over what would—come spring—be a full English cottage garden.
She’d designed it herself, along with all the features in the Schroon Lake house Gideon had bought after they were married. He’d told her to remodel and then decorate to her heart’s content, and so she had. She’d turned it into the ideal dream home she’d always envisioned when she was a lonely, heartsore yet whimsically hopeful outcast kid in the group homes. She’d lie awake on her bunk bed in a room with three other bunk beds, staring into the ceiling, dreaming about the home she’d build just for herself. It would be warmth, welcome, smell of apples and cinnamon, have a vibrant garden with all the flowers and butterflies, and it would have a family to go with it….
