The deed was done.
All I needed to do was remember…he chose her over me.
Would it be his precious new fiancée, Madison, who found him?
I hoped so.
I wanted her to see the future she stole from me slip from her fingers.
I tilted my head and watched the color drain from his face and his mouth slacken.
All the careful planning hadn’t prepared me for this.
For howordinaryit felt. How quiet.
I’d done it. I’d killed him. I was a murderer.
Jameson claimed he had a plan to cover my guilt, but I knew with certainty it was a lie. Jameson had no reason to protect me.
I’d just become the next loose end.
CHAPTER 48
MADISON
Agorgeous, well-dressed woman with impossibly high heels pushed past me in the entryway. She stopped to look down her perfect nose at me.
I recognized her condescending demeanor from the gallery at the trial.
I grasped the lapels of my borrowed terry cloth robe. “Who are you?”
She chuckled as she pulled a gold diamond-encrusted compact from her purse and then a tube of Chanel lipstick.
She touched up both overly filled lips and gave the mirror a duck-lip pout, running her tongue over her perfectly white teeth before barely glancing over her shoulder at me. “I’m the woman Pierce desperately wants to marry. The one he will be thinking about every time he sleeps with you.”
My hand pressed against my stomach, trying to stop the nauseous twisting.
It was ludicrous.
This was good news.
My escape.
And yet…
The woman shrugged one elegant shoulder.
“Poor thing. I had to turn him down.” Her gaze swept over me. “I couldn’t possibly be with a man who slums it with the lower class. He is just going to have to settle for someone more…common.”
My foot shifted back as I physically recoiled from the vile woman.
With a flip of her hair, she tossed her compact into her purse. It clinked against something that sounded like glass.
She then smoothed her hand over her dress before giving me a final dismissive glance. “You may want to check on him. The poor thing was utterly devastated—I’m afraid he may harm himself, not that anyone could blame him. Losing me and then having to settle for you, it has to be devastating.”
Pivoting on her spiked heels, she sauntered out the front door with a swing of her hips. Her obnoxious perfume clung to the air in her wake.
The servants and that hovering butler were nowhere in sight. Like animals scattering after sensing a disturbing change in the atmosphere.
