Page 21 of In Love with My Secret Husband

She had let him. That was the part that made her feel terrified and foolish at the same time. She had let him hold her and touch her and kiss her, and she had told herself it was real. That the burned dinner and the way he looked at her and the way he said her name meant something.

But Aunt Trisha's call had made everything clear.

It wasn't real. It was guilt. It was responsibility. It was Troy being the good man he had always been, too honorable to tell his wife to her face that last night had been a mistake.

Nothing has changed. Nothing.

He still couldn't speak the truth to her. He still went to his aunt instead. And if Aunt Trisha knew about last night, then she also knew what Laina had been too blind to see.

That she wasn't enough. That she had never been enough.

So when she got back home, she would tell him. She would find a way to make it clear to both of them that their marriage had to end.

Yes.

Exactly.

She spent the rest of the afternoon going over the words in her head, arranging them carefully, practicing them the way she practiced everything. By the time Marlon pulled up to the school, she had rehearsed her speech fourteen times and was fairly confident she could deliver it without crying.

She was wrong about that. But she didn't know it yet.

TROY COULDN'T REMEMBERbeing this nervous in his entire life.

Not during rookie year, when he had stepped onto professional ice for the first time and the arena had been so loud he couldn't hear his own heartbeat. Not when the Waymakers won their first championship, or when he won his first MVP award, or when he had walked into a courthouse with a girl he'd known for three weeks and saidI dowhile she beamed at him in a white sundress and sneakers.

None of that compared to this.

He stood in the middle of the kitchen in a navy apron he didn't know they owned, his sleeves rolled to his elbows, his forearms still dusted with flour from an incident he preferred not to revisit. Behind him, the counter looked like the aftermath ofa very small, very localized natural disaster. There was smoke residue on the ceiling. The oven was open because something inside it had made a sound he didn't trust, and the fire extinguisher Laina had brought with her from the apartment was standing in the corner like a silent, judgmental witness.

His heart slammed against his chest as the front door opened, and his wife walked inside their home.

She stopped dead in her tracks.

Her bag slid off her shoulder. Her lips parted. And for a long moment, she just stood there in the doorway, her gaze moving from the apron to the counter to the dining table to the smoke stain on the ceiling and back to him.

"W-What's all this?"

Troy forced himself to meet her eyes. He was six foot three. He had spent twelve seasons being hit by men whose sole purpose was to put him through a wall. He had once played an entire period with a cracked rib and hadn't flinched.

But standing in front of his wife in a flour-dusted apron with a platter of incinerated chicken behind him was, without question, the most terrifying thing he had ever done.

"As it turns out," he said, "I'm just as good as you at burning things."

She choked back a laugh. Her hand flew to her mouth, but the sound had already escaped, bright and startled and real, and something in Troy's chest cracked open at the sound of it. How long had it been since he'd heard his wife laugh? How long since he'd been the one to make her?

"And tonight," he continued, keeping his voice even, "you'll need to prove that you're just as good as I am at eating burnt things."

Laina slowly walked forward and took a look at the disaster on the table.

There were two plates. Candles that had already melted halfway down because he had lit them too early and hadn't known candles could melt that fast. A bowl of salad that actually looked edible, beside a platter of chicken that was charred on the outside and, she suspected, completely raw on the inside. Two glasses of wine, poured unevenly. A basket of rolls that were either severely overbaked or had been purchased that way on purpose, and knowing Troy, it could genuinely be either.

"The, um, wow..." Her gaze drifted to the stove, where a small pot sat with its lid askew and something deeply unfortunate inside. "Are those...boiled eggs?"

She didn't know it was possible to mess up boiled eggs, but somehow, her husband had actually done it. The shells had cracked and the whites had leaked out in strange, bulging formations, and they looked like tiny explosions frozen in time.

Troy Barrymore, who had once been named the most disciplined athlete in professional sports, had been defeated by boiling water and a carton of eggs.

"Laina..."