Page 42 of Wicked Ruin

I don’t care if she’s Cinderella and brings ten million with her. It’s not going to work. I won’t love her. I’ll be expected to court her, to knock her up, to perform everything I’m not.

Christ.

Seamus

Her family wants you to meet her at dinner tonight. They’re eager to move on this and so am I. Tell me you’ll be there and I won’t mention the fact that someone saw you leave with Bridget fucking Kavanagh last night.

Jesus.

I scowl at my phone and type my answer.

I’ll be there.

Then I throw it, hard. It hits the sofa and slides to the floor.

Bridget wordlessly pushes herself out of bed and comes up behind me. She wraps her arms around me and presses her lips to the space between my shoulder blades, standing on her tiptoes. I close my eyes and hang my head.

“You’ll always be my best friend, Declan,” she whispers. “No one will ever take that from us.”

I don’t know if she believes it.

I do know that she’s wrong.

Chapter Ten

BRIDGET

Three weeks after the best night of my entire life, and I’ve barely spoken to Declan.

I don’t know if anything could have prepared me for this. For the way the McCarthy family celebrated his engagement. For how devastatingly beautiful his fiancée is. She is refined and elegant in all the ways I am not.

So I do what any sensible woman would do. I stalk the bitch’s socials, which is incredibly easy to do because, apparently, her part-time job is posting her idyllic life and garnering followers.

And with every post I see, I hate her, brick by brick.

I shouldn’t. I know I shouldn’t. I don’t have any right to Declan—that’s what everyone would say, and they’d be right. Except I can’t quite make myself believe it.

God, their babies will be infant models.

Why should the choices our parents made years before us dictate anything? It’s unfair, and I hate it. I hate it so fucking much.

I know in my heart that I will never love anyone the way I love him.

“Hey,” Erin says, appearing in the kitchen doorway.

Even though I've moved into my own apartment, I still swing by here to work sometimes. Erin is adorably pregnant, and Cavin worshipping her bump is arguably cuter than the bump itself. He follows her in, bare-chested as usual, which means, lucky me, I get a front-row seat to my brother-in-law falling all over his wife on a daily basis. Eye roll.

I should be happy for them.

I am happy for them.

Mostly.

“Bridge, will you be home at the weekend?” Cavin asks. He pulls away from Erin and scratches the back of his neck, wandering toward the cabinet.

His voice is too casual, and I’m immediately suspicious.

“Of course,” I say. “Why?”