Chapter 2
I pull into the driveway on Rossmill Lane and roll my car window down to type in the code on the gate keypad. Before my fingers touch the buttons, the large wrought iron fence begins to open on its own. I look up to see our groundskeeper, Xavier, approaching.
I smile brightly and give a jovial wave as he makes his way past me in his white utility truck.
He doesn’t wave back. I lean my head out to say hello to him, check in on the family, the usual, but he doesn’t stop.
In fact, he looks like he’s trying to avoid eye contact with me completely.
That’s weird, I think to myself with a sense of unease overcoming me.
Xavier is usually so friendly. I wonder what’s wrong?
Granted, he wasn’t always so kind in the beginning.
He and the rest of the staff all thought I was crazy.
I can’t say I blame them. A bright, bubbly American moves into a Manchester, England mansion with her rich British husband and asks ridiculous questions about how they like their coffee and the kind of pastries they prefer for breakfast. It’s definitely not the way most wives in this neighbourhood behave, so it’s understandable that I was a little off-putting at first. Not to mention the British are a bit less open.
They don’t dig the sharing. The connecting. The peopling.
I, on the other hand, feed off of it.
But I thought Xavier and I had gotten way past the whole British coldness. Just last week we were talking about his baby’s colic and how he can be more supportive to his wife. He never avoids saying hello to me now, no matter how bad of a day he’s having.
My thoughts are distracted when I spot an unfamiliar car parked in front of the house. The staff usually park on the east side of the estate, and I know this little silver Audi doesn’t belong to any of them.
I park alongside it and slide out of my car to make my way inside, ignoring the chill running up my spine.
My eyes are cast downward as I dig for my keys in my bag, so I don’t see the person standing before me right away.
I don’t see them when I reach the first step.
I don’t see them when I reach the second step.
The third. The fourth. The fifth. It isn’t until the eighth step that I realise another human is watching me.
A human who just came out of my house.
A woman.
My eyes land on her feet first—platform, red-soled, Louboutin ankle boots.
They are covered in crystals, and I know instantly I’m staring at a six thousand dollar pair of shoes.
As a clothing and accessory stylist, it’s my job to recognise expensive things.
I dress some of the wealthiest soccer players in Manchester, as well as their partners.
I style for executive wives, plastic surgeons’ mistresses, even some London movie stars.
I buy expensive clothes for people. It has been my career since moving to England three years ago, and I’ve embraced all that the job entails.
However, in all three of those years of working with the most affluent residents of Manchester, I have never, not once, had a desire to style people in crystal-encrusted footwear.
This is definitely not a client of mine.
My gaze passes the shoes and slides up a pair of bare, feminine legs. I wonder briefly if she’s naked on my doorstep in six thousand dollar boots, but I see a hint of a leather skirt at the very top of her thighs. Just enough to cover her pussy lips. Good for her.
Her appearance doesn’t get any more modest as I raise my eyes up her torso and take in her ten inch line of cleavage. Is that dark spot an areola peeking out? Wow, what a brave soldier we have here. A modern-day Lady Godiva on my doorstep!
When I steel myself to glance up at her face, I know exactly what I’m about to see before I even see it. The shocked expression of a blonde, barely twenty-something-year-old with smeared makeup and freshly fucked hair, wearing six thousand dollar shoes. Blondie here is not from these parts.
You see, I didn’t grow up with a lot of money. My mom was a single parent who worked two jobs just to live paycheck-to-paycheck. I remember thinking my sisters and I were rich when she gave us each a fifty dollar bill for school clothes at the end of the summer.
Perspective is everything, though. And after working for people who come from wealth that would make the Queen of England envious, I know when someone comes from money and when they don’t. Neither is better than the other. Just…different. There’s a sixth sense you get about it.
Suffice it to say, Blondie did not buy herself those shoes.
“I was just—” The blonde begins to speak, but I raise my hand to cut her off mid-sentence.
“You were just leaving,” I grind, wincing at the sound my clenched teeth make inside my head. I could say so much more, but this woman—girl—doesn’t deserve my words. The man who bought her those boots does.
Without another look at her, I swing the front door open and walk up the grand, eighteenth century staircase to our bedroom.
The whole house creaks with every step, like it’s moments away from crumbling to the ground.
It’s the oldest in the neighbourhood. And rather than tearing it down and building something modern like most estates in this area, it’s been restored to its creepy, Edwardian baroque glory.
My steps are slow and steady. My breathing is even to match them as I prepare myself for what’s about to happen.
If my husband, Callum Coleridge, was a gentleman, he’d have used one of the seven spare bedrooms we have.
It’s the decent thing to do when you decide to cheat on your wife of six years.
It’d be impolite and cliché to fuck the whore in the master suite.
Wealthy Brits are all about propriety, aren’t they?
But lo and behold, before I even reach the doorway to our bedroom, I hear my husband’s voice call out, “Did you forget something, Callie, baby?”
Callum and Callie. That would look oh-so cute on stationery.
I push the master suite doors open and my eyes land on our bed—a huge, four-post, hundred-year-old monstrosity.
This morning, it was perfectly made up. I took care to ensure that all four corners of the mallard duck bedspread that Callum’s mother picked out were tucked with neat hospital corners despite the fact that we have people we pay to do that sort of thing.
Now those duckies are rumpled and tossed, squished together like the photos of the carnage Callum brings home when he comes back from a weekend of shooting in the country.
Freaking mallards.
My gaze shifts from the bed to my husband who’s standing in the doorway of the en suite bathroom, shirtless and buttoning his expensive, tailored trousers. Trousers that I bought for him. Trousers that I had custom-fitted for him. Trousers that look fucking fantastic on him.
He looks up with a smile, but his face drops when he sees me instead of his beloved Callie Baby.
He winces like he’s been kicked in the balls.
Did I kick him in the balls? I look down at my feet, both planted firmly on the floor in modest black stiletto boots.
No sparkles on mine. That’s probably what our marriage has been missing. Crystal-encrusted footwear.
“Sloan, I—” he falters.
“Yeah, it’s Sloan. I met your Callie Baby, was it?
” I hook my thumb toward the door. “I saw her downstairs. She seems fun. Did she forget her pants up here?” I look around the room, scowling over how the cream fitted sheet is popped off of one corner of the bed.
“I wondered if she forgot her pants because I don’t think that leather strip around her vagina classifies as a skirt.
She really should consider hiring me to style her.
Her footwear indicates she can afford me. ”
Callum clears his throat and straightens his shoulders. “I was going to talk to you about all of this.” He approaches me with the same swagger he always has.
How does he have swagger right now? I literally caught him with his pants down, yet he’s walking toward me like a businessman at a board meeting. I shake my head as his words sink in. Did he say, “all of this,” like there is an actual this? Not a one-off thing?
Stepping away, I decide to continue my quest for Lady Godiva’s clothes.
Mostly because avoiding eye contact seems vital to my mental state.
If I really stop to think about what he means by “all of this,” then I’ll know that what I’ve suspected for years is coming true.
And I didn’t want it to come true. I’m living in a foreign country, in a mansion owned by my mother-in-law, styling people who have the kind of wealth I didn’t even know existed in real life.
I’m in way over my head, and I refuse to accept another change in my life right now.
“Stop walking away from me. We need to talk,” Callum barks in his demanding, bossy voice. The same voice that I’ve been listening to for the past six years from the mouth that only speaks and never listens.
I swallow past a painful lump in my throat and look up. “You want to talk about the cheating? Or the reason Callie Baby doesn’t wear pants outdoors? Because both should be addressed at some point.”
His lip curls at my sarcasm. Callum hates sarcasm. Can you believe that?
“This has been coming on for a while, Sloan.”
I love that he doesn’t have a term of endearment for me. In our six years of marriage, he’s never once called me anything other than Sloan.
“So you’re telling me that this isn’t the first time you’ve cheated on me, your wife?” My eyes are wide and blinking, barely concealing the pit of despair in my belly.
“For the last few years, you and I haven’t been—”
“Haven’t been connecting much?” I narrow my gaze at him. “Yeah, I’ve noticed.”
“Our marriage has been a sham and you know it,” he scoffs. “What happened between us was an accident, and I thought I was doing the right thing. But I have needs, Sloan.”