Total pages in book: 101
Estimated words: 94436 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 472(@200wpm)___ 378(@250wpm)___ 315(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 94436 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 472(@200wpm)___ 378(@250wpm)___ 315(@300wpm)
I was trying to digest this news, trying to heal this hurt on my own. Because even in my fury, I couldn’t spend last night without Jay, was too weak to punish him. I’d slept with him last night. I’d let him touch me. Let him try to apologize with his hands, with his body. I hadn’t said a word to him the entire time, but I’d responded, not vocally but with my own body. Because despite what he’d done to me, he still owned me.
I’d gotten out of bed this morning at the crack of dawn, showered and gotten ready all while ignoring him, leaving without even having a cup of coffee. Coffee that she had bought. Jay had watched me get ready, hadn’t said a word. Hadn’t tried to explain anything or mend anything. Maybe that’s what hurt me more. I’d had expectations on what the man was meant to do after a betrayal of this magnitude. There were meant be apologies. Groveling. Flowers. Not that any of that would make a difference, but it was the effort.
Then again, I was expecting Jay to act like any other man. I’d fallen in love with him precisely because he was unlike any other man I’d ever met.
“Stella, honey.”
Something about my father’s voice gave me pause, my blood turning cold.
“I’m just going to say it because there’s no way for me to break it to you gently. Your mother’s dead,” he told me, his voice uneven, shaky and not at all recognizable as belonging to my father.
I stared ahead at the set for the shoot I was on. It was Victorian England. Or it was meant to be. What it really was was someone who’d watched Shakespeare in Love and had no idea about Victorian England.
“But I just saw her,” I rasped, blinking rapidly, trying to process what my father had just said. “She can’t be dead. We had tea, with little flowery teacups. She was wearing slippers.”
“She had a brain aneurism, Stella,” Dad spoke slowly. “It was very sudden. Quick. She didn’t suffer.”
I tried as hard as I could to hold on to my father’s words, his voice, but I couldn’t. Everything was a dull roar, and my fingers turned numb.
“I, um, Dad, I’m at work. I have to ... deal with some corsets. I’ll be home in ... soon. I’ll be home soon. I love you.”
Then I hung up. I hung up on my grieving, heartbroken father because I couldn’t handle it. The weight of the phone was suddenly too much to hold up to my ear.
The couture and corsets I’d been holding tumbled to my feet, and I turned around and started walking. I had no idea where I was going. I’d told my father I was going home. I’d get to Missouri eventually, but for now, I didn’t have a home. So I just walked.
Jay
“Dimitri, I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, I do not want a partner,” Jay kept his voice even, kept his face blank and kept his manner as friendly as could manner in the face of a murderous psychopath.
As important as this meeting was, Jay was thinking about Stella. He needed to be focused on this, Dimitri was a slippery fucker, and Jay knew he would latch on to the slightest misstep and use it as a reason for retaliation—which was a euphemism for him trying to take over his business or assassinate his lieutenants. Jay did not misstep. Every word, every movement was so calculated it came easy to him now. Or it used to.
Before Stella.
Everything had been on unsteady ground since the second she walked into his office at Klutch that night. She had forced him to be human. Or as close to human as he was capable of. Which made being a monster an effort now. He couldn’t hold on to it when he was concerned with her. Every beat of his heart was a thought of Stella. Even during the best of times between them, which they had not had many of. They were most certainly not in the best of times now. She was not speaking to him. He’d forced her to sleep in the same bed as him because he’d made a promise that they would never spend a night apart. She hadn’t spoken to him, but she hadn’t fought him either.
Nor had she fought him when he put his lips on hers, opened her legs and moved between them. She’d come for him, but she’d stifled every moan, hadn’t spoken a single word. Not when he moved inside her, not when she clenched around his dick in release. Nothing.
Afterward, she’d gotten up to clean up in the bathroom. Then she’d come back to bed, curled into a little ball and turned away from him. Jay hadn’t allowed that, and she hadn’t fought him when he’d yanked her across the chasm she’d put between them. She’d even relaxed into him, but she didn’t speak.