Page 11 of Broken Vows

A moment passes, then two. Each second more excruciating than the last. My heart pounds so heavy in my chest that if he doesn’t step back soon, I’ll pass out. I want to scream that he shattered my world, and if his wedding day is ruined, it’s just a taste of the payback he deserves. “Why…” My chin verges on trembling. I bite the inside of my cheek until it relaxes. “Why did you ask me to be your planner? Why not leave the second you heard me say those things?”

He plants his palms on the wall beside my head, caging me in beneath the breadth of his body, and I hate that he smells so good. I rise onto my toes, a useless attempt to make myself taller—bigger, stronger—anything but what I feel right now. It fails. He’s so close now that the air between us hums, a crackle of static jumping between our chests.

“Because no one gets the better of me, least of all someone like you. As they say, keep your friends close,” he murmurs, his face now only inches apart from mine. His eyes flick to my lips before moving up, locking onto my eyes with a piercing intensity. “But your enemies closer.” His voice is a low, icy drawl that sends a sickening wave of goosebumps crawling over my skin. As if he realizes our proximity, he pulls himself back and his tone sharpens, each word cutting like a blade. “Let me be crystal fucking clear. I don’t trust you. Not even a little. Right now, you are a threat. Believe me, you do not want to find out what I’ll do to neutralize a threat. If you even think of hurting Anna, of hurting this wedding, of fracturing what we’re building, I promise you’ll regret it. And I always keep my promises.”

My throat tightens as I force down a hard swallow. Inside me, there’s a relentless tug-of-war, a chaotic triangle pulling me in three directions at once. One side wants to kill him. Another urges me to play it cool—be friendly, obedient, treat him like any other client. But then there’s the third side, the one itching to break free, the one that wants to fuck with him.

He moves away from me, adjusts his cuffs with a sharp tug, and smooths his expression into something almost pleasant. “Now, I’m going to head back out there, grab my fiancée and tell your boss how excited we are to be working together.” His gaze sears into mine. “And you’re going to do nothing but be a fucking gem.”

Gem. My whole body goes still.

Oh my God. Does this mean he remembers me after all?

Back then, after everything fell apart, I disappeared. I had to. I needed distance—from the person I’d been, from the name everyone knew. So, I buried Gemma and started using my middle name instead. Lexie. Maybe it was naïve, maybe dramatic—I was only twenty at the time—but I couldn’t risk anyone Googling my name and uncovering what happened in Boston.

Still, a flicker of vindication curls through me. No matter how indifferent he acted when he first arrived, this has to mean he remembers me. Right? Could someone who ruined a life really forget the person they destroyed? Maybe to him, I was just a passing amusement or a sadistic distraction. To me, he’s the villain who stole my future.

Revenge is a sweet, dirty intoxicating little bitch. One that has been coursing through my veins for close to a decade. Flickers of memory surface—every dead-end job, my mother’s deteriorating health—fueling the fire burning in my chest.

I lower myself from my tiptoes and cower under his invasive stare, purposefully, giving him the illusion of control.

“Absolutely,” I say, blinking up at him through my heavy eyelashes, wondering if my green eyes that an ex referred to as “hypnotic” will have the same effect on Theo. “I’ll be whatever you need.”

A moment passes where he studies my face and sizes me up. I swear I can see behind those dark eyelashes and know exactly what he’s thinking. He doesn’t trust me. And for right now, that’s okay.

I raise my chin, straighten away from the wall, and school my features into casual politeness. “I’m looking forward to working with you and your beautiful bride-to-be.” For all the power he holds, that his family holds, I can’t be scared. I refuse. I’m no longer a quiet, shy, nineteen-year-old terrified of her own shadow. I’m an adult woman, presented with the opportunity to turn the tides. Theo’s already taken everything. There’s nothing else left to lose.

Theodore James Astor may have thought he buried me all those years ago. But I assure you, he hasn’t. The time has finally come.

Starting today, I become judge, jury, and executioner.

Game on, motherfucker.

5 Theo

Gemma.

Seven years later, and not a goddamn thing has changed. The feigned innocence. That sinful mouth. The predatory smile she disguises under playful grins. The way she moves. Fuck, the way she moves. She’s a master at masking her identity. No one would know the vixen that lies underneath those innocent, beautiful, spring-green eyes.

How dare she whisper I’m looking forward to working with you and your beautiful bride-to-be as she tugged in that juicy bottom lip? She gets off on teasing and luring, on breaking people. She knows exactly what she’s doing. She knew it back then, and she knows it now. Gemma Welch may now be Lexie Welch, but that’s the only thing that’s changed.

I repeat Lexie’s name over and over in my head, so I don’t slip up and give myself away. Lexie was always good at toying with people and I saw how it gnawed at her that I didn’t recognize who she was. I fucking loved it. She hasn’t earned the right to know the depth of the marks she’d left me with all these years, how she hooked beneath my skin like barbed wire, ripping me open from the inside out.

I thought I’d done a good job of pushing her from my mind. From my soul. After everything that went down in Boston, I moved on. I graduated early, top of my class. Finished residency with the highest evaluations possible. Became the youngest attending physician in my clinic’s history. I was good.

So fucking good.

But then, six months ago I ran into her again by chance, on a random Sunday in an unfamiliar neighborhood. She was sitting by the window of a coffee shop with her long, lush red hair piled on top of her head, reading a book, and sipping on a drink. The sunlight beaming through the window haloed her like an angel and time stopped. Suddenly everything I’d once buried came rushing back. I thought I was hallucinating. I’d stared for so long, taking in the slope of that pale neck, the plush mouth, the way her eyes showed every emotion of whatever she was reading.

I’ve been unsteady ever since.

But I’m no longer the man I was back in Boston. All the pressure, the eyes, the family legacy weighing on my shoulders, has lifted. She has no idea what I’m capable of now.

I push my chair up to my desk and try to focus on reading lab results, but she’s distracting me again, just like she did back then. I wanted to know everything about her. Her thoughts, her secrets, her mouth, the way she moved, how she tasted. I wanted to know her dreams, her hates, what scared her, what made her laugh. I could read everyone, but I couldn’t read her. I couldn’t even get close enough to read her. She was an impenetrable vault, and I was desperate to break in.

It comes in waves. Chronic pain is like that. Good days and bad days, like I tell patients before I hand them off to the surgeon. The bad days will overpower you to a point where you can’t breathe. The good days, when it’s dulled and muted, you can breathe, you can function, but you still feel it festering beneath the surface. Even on those days, it’s never forgotten. Lexie is always there. She’s always been there.

As I give up the lab results review and instead open an email from the medical director, I flash back to the first day Lexie and I met. Maybe it was the naturally bright red hair that struck me or that familiar doe-eyed expression of a first year out of their comfort zone. I didn’t notice a lot of first years. They were young, immature, and uninteresting. I was a senior then, elbow-deep into applying for medical schools and fighting the societal pressure of being the son of the great Dr. George K. Astor. My father and I had just engaged in one of our frequent screaming matches, and I’d stormed out of his office, determined for the millionth time in my life to never speak to him again.