And…the words just pour out of me.
“I got the first letter the night after I put a ring on your finger. You were in the bath, doing whatever it was you did in there.” I try to smile, but I know it’s a fucking facsimile by the way the anger fades from her face.
“What?”
“I went to grab something from my office. It was sitting dead center on my desk. At first I thought my assistant left it there for me. Found out pretty quickly that wasn’t the case. That’s when I started investigating.”
“And adding security,” she whispers.
I nod. “It didn’t matter how many guards I added or monitoring systems we installed…they kept coming.”
“What did they say?”
Rage crawls up my spine, through my shoulders, along my neck, into my jaw. “What did yours say?”
She shifts closer, eyes searching mine. “They threatened me?”
“My businesses at first, but they were too protected.” My dad might have been a right bastard, but he’d made sure they were ironclad…except for the journal. That could have ruined all of his carefully made plans, if he was still alive—and if I hadn’t done everything in my power to protect the businesses since his death.
Thousands of people rely on what he built, on their jobs at the company, on the research they conduct.
But I can’t lie and say I’ve turned into a philanthropist who’s going to donate every penny to charity and live off the land.
The money gives me power, strength, flexibility?—
And I still walked away from the woman I loved.
And…put her through hell in the process.
My temple throbs.
But I push that aside, stifle the regret before it can eat me alive.
I can let that happen later, when I’m awake and staring at the ceiling, sleep too fucking far away.
“Then you. I doubled security and they sent me a close-up picture of you reading in the garden. Tripled it and it was a photo of us kissing in the kitchen.” I’d been wiping away a dollop of whipped cream from her top lip, had been unable to resist leaning in and tasting it on my tongue. “Turned the place into a fucking fortress and I found a picture of you sleeping in bed tucked into my nightstand.”
She gasps.
And for a second, I’m right back in that moment.
The fear—the complete and abject terror—feeling out of control, unable to fix it, even with so many resources at my disposal, and the slow, inexorable crawl of knowledge that to save her, I was going to have to give her up.
“And in the car…” I close my eyes, almost able to feel the paper of the envelope on my fingertips again.
“What?”
“There was a picture of you getting ready.”
“For what?”
Slowly, I reach out and take her hand, needing the feel of her skin instead of the sensation of that fucking memory.
The small slice of pain as the paper cut into my thumb.
The horror of the image…and the beauty of the woman I loved.
Part of me expects her to pull back.
