None of my coldness had ever felt deliberate before.
It felt like a birthright.
But this…I’d lost control instead of keeping an icy fist over it.
“I just,” I managed. “I didn’t want her thinking this was something it can’t be.”
“She wasn’t thinking anything except that she was happy,” Jonathan snapped. “And you destroyed it.”
Devin shoved my shoulder, hard enough to jolt me. “You made her cry, man.”
The words hit harder than they should have.
My chest constricted. I stared at the aisle Frankie had disappeared down, feeling something cold settle over me. Not the comfortable cold I built around myself. Something sharp. Punishing.
“I’ll fix it,” I said quietly.
Devin scoffed. “You better, or we will.”
They turned away from me, both of them furious, both of them worried for her in a way I should’ve been from the start.
I stood there alone in the middle of a shy, romantic librarian’s dream bookstore feeling like the biggest bastard alive.
And for once, the idea of that—being an unfeeling, ruthless asshole like the family I’d been born into hoped I would be—bothered me on a deeper level than I could process.
21
FRANKIE
I lied when I said I was going to the bathroom. I must have been getting better at this bad habit after all. The guys were a bad influence in that way.
I didn’t even try hard to make it look convincing; didn’t ask someone in stilted, amateur French where I could find thesalle de bain,didn’t pretend I planned to come back.
I just ducked around the nearest shelf, wove through a cluster of whispering tourists, and slipped out the front door of Shakespeare & Company with my heart rattling in my chest.
The second the cool Paris air hit me, I almost turned right back around. But my throat was aching, my face pinched tight from trying not to cry in front of them.
If I stayed, if I let Alex see even a single tear, he’d probably twist it into something humiliating. Or worse, he wouldn’t care at all.
So I kept walking. The tears started to fall, hot and fast and embarrassing, even when I was alone.
If I’d been in a better mood, I might’ve appreciated the little details of the street—the sunlight glinting off the river, the accordion music somewhere in the distance, the flutter of a pigeon hopping between café tables.
But everything blurred through the wetness clinging to my lashes. Instead of magical, Paris suddenly felt too big, too cold, too empty without the three men I’d come here with.
And I felt stupid. God, I felt so stupid. Why did it hurt so much, what Alex had said? He’d just been stating a fact.
We bought you.
He hadn’t said it gently. No regret in the words, either, or in those icy blue eyes I’d started to see as beautiful and crystalline instead of cold, almost scary.
He’d said it like he wanted to ruin me a little.
Like my happiness irritated him.
The worst part was that I knew he was right. I just didn’t know he still thought of me, of us, as a transaction.
“I should’ve gotten my money and run,” I whispered to myself pitifully, thinking back on the first night I’d stayed in the guys’ bed, the tumultuous journey we’d been on since. I should’ve tried to get away before they’d ever touched me.
