one
. . .
Normal people might see tying the knot as the ultimate endgame in the evolution of a relationship, but Evander Westin wasn’t normal. Hell, depending on who you asked, he barely qualified as a person.
The product of an upbringing that taught him everything was transactional, Evan saw getting married as the means to a different sort of end. Instead of two souls pledging to love and honor until death, this would be two soulless husks pinky-swearing to behave in public while reaping the advantages of lucrative family connections.
A business partnership with benefits—and an airtight prenup.
He’d had no business courting Lucy Greene. She was brilliant and beautiful, and from an old money Connecticut family who considered someone of his breeding a necessary evil in business, but not something you’d willingly allow into the bloodline.
Winning her over had been a total coup. The look on his father’s face the first—and only—time they’d attended the annual charity auction together was a triumph burned intomemory. One of very few memories with his father he could file underpositive.
His family dynamic was… complicated. If he wanted to be generous, he might go withunhealthy, butopenly hostilewas more in line with the truth. He’d happily take a rusty spike to the balls to avoid being trapped in a relationship even remotely resembling the household where he’d grown up. Of course, he was also a man with a grudge, and some consequences were worth suffering if it meant crossing something off his revenge list.
That was precisely why he now stood in the premier suite of one of Boston’s most luxe hotels, wearing a meticulously tailored Desmond Merrion tuxedo.Thiswas his penultimate moment. Today, he would check another accomplishment off his list’s top five: Marry Up.
Well, hewouldhave checked it off—if the bride had fucking shown up.
“Damn, buddy. Tough break.”
Evan looked up from the short and perfunctory letter in his hand and shrugged. Owen, his best man, was the only person to show any hint of sympathy. His fiancée—nowex-fiancée—hadn’t even apologized for leaving him high and dry while a crowd of aspiring oligarchs drank Dom Pérignon in the Grand Ballroom several floors below.
Instead, the matter-of-fact statement in the tight, precise script she reserved for quick case notes had informed him they were over, reconciliation wasn’t on the table, and she hoped he would take this opportunity to reassess his priorities in life.
A short, barking laugh slipped free as he ripped the note into confetti. He’d already done that, hadn’t he? On his twenty-second birthday, when his father had cheerfully and smugly cut him off, he’d made a list of everything the bastard said would be impossible without his support. Then, he’d set out to achieve each one, so that he could rub it in the prick’s face.
He’d been on such a roll, too. Shit.
“Corey and Leo are going to love this,” he said, dusting the glass-topped coffee table with the fragments of thick stationery. He pulled the bow tie from around his neck and tossed it over his shoulder, not caring where it landed.
The waning evening light cast the harbor in a blaze of fiery orange and pink that rippled across the sailboat-dotted water. It glinted off the decanter of Macallan 18 in Owen’s hand as he joined Evan in front of the wall of windows and poured them each three very thick fingers.
“Oh yeah, you’re screwed. They have some decorum, though. Enough to give you a day or two before making your life miserable.”
Evan savored the expensive amber liquid, a wry grin curling one corner of his mouth upward.
“Decorum? Are we talking about the same people?”
The firm’s founding partners were masters of optical illusion. In court, they appeared as staunch professionals. Sharks in bloodied water, they cut through opponents with terrifying skill and precision. They’d rightfully earned their reputation as one of the best firms to hire if you were a corporation out to screw someone over. Outside of court, they were the embodiment of off-color jokes and frat house hazing.Mad Magazine,if run by a twelve-year-old hopped up on PCP-laced gummy worms.
“Ah, they’re not that bad.” Owen’s grin made Evan snort into his glass.
They were pricks, and everyone knew it, including them.
Evan tossed back his drink in two swallows, letting the burn blacken the edges of the words lodged in his throat. Those he’d planned to say at the altar, and a new, more colorful diatribe that he’d save for an opportunity to give Lucy’s parting words the rebuttal they deserved.
I hope someday you’re able to move on from the hollow materialism you’ve hitched your self-worth to.
Of all the self-righteous bullshit. Had she forgotten it was her own obsession with success that had brought them together in the first place?
“I told you that things felt weird after the whole partner thing.”
Evan’s jaw spasmed, and he held out his glass in a silent demand for a refill. “Really? You’re busting out theI told you sowhile I’m still wearing the fucking tux?”
The smile broadened. Owen was also a prick and knew it. “Sorry, but the way she left the firm? Then she goes and joins a nonprofit? Fucking crazy.”
The way she’d left had been classic Lucy. Quietly stewing while packing her office, and then the moment one foot was out the door, she’d unleashed a verbal beatdown for the ages. She’d raged at the misogyny and how they ran the firm like a “boys’ club.” She’d called Corey on his narcissism and informed Leo that his soon-to-be-ex-wife’s lawyer would eat him for breakfast.
