Chapter 26
Chapter
Twenty-Six
AMELIE
As I left Stefan behind, I tried to take a few deep breaths. The night air was warm, and I lingered outside rather than retreating into the cool of the car. Kai texted me, letting me know he was waiting for me inside the car, but I needed a moment.
Beirut. Stefan was in Beirut. With Ruby. It would have hurt less had I caught them in bed together.
Clearly, my priorities were misguided.
I supposed because I was sleeping with Kai, catching Stefan in bed with Ruby was no longer the worst thing imaginable.
But taking her to Lebanon—which had been my dream, while it probably meant nothing to her—was a betrayal I couldn’t recover from.
Ruby had taken great pleasure in rubbing it in my face, sauntering over with a condescending smile.
Her audacity to pat Stefan on the shoulder possessively had sent the message loud and clear.
He was oblivious and thought she was trying to help.
I didn’t bother correcting his assumption.
Why should I, when his believing her over me had become the norm?
I stood there and braced myself for tears. They didn’t come. The old me would have dropped to her knees by now. But what arrived instead was apathy. At first, I felt anger, but now, I felt nothing.
I climbed into the back seat of the car, pressed my spine against the backrest, and wished for a solid weight to anchor me.
Kai’s arm came around my shoulders before the thought finished forming.
He ordered our driver to take us to the hotel.
As the car weaved through traffic, I felt him studying me.
The partition screen slid up, and his arms around my shoulders tightened.
I waited for the old reflex that usually followed.
I generally froze at his possessiveness before I reluctantly gave in.
It didn’t come. Instead, his arm felt warm and steady, and I was achingly aware of it.
I was cognizant of one other thing. Stefan happened to be in Lebanon the same day Kai flew me here. And he wasn’t alone. He was with Ruby. Nothing was ever this big a coincidence. Kai had ruined our magical day to expose Stefan’s lies.
“Don’t ever make a fool of me again,” I said stoically.
His face went slack, surprised by the lack of emotion in my voice. “Excuse me?”
I pressed my fingers to my sternum. “You knew Stefan and Ruby were at that bar.”
He didn’t bother lying. “Yes.”
“What did you do?”
“I asked Ruby to add Beirut to the itinerary.”
“Did you force Stefan to come here?”
“I don’t have the power to bend human will, Amelie. All I did was suggest it.”
That was all it took—the mere power of suggestion—for Stefan to throw my feelings out of the window. He was the magazine’s president and could have bowed out of the Beirut trip to spare my feelings. But he didn’t want to risk looking bad in front of his subordinates and new friends.
“That’s all you did?” I whispered. There was a crack in my voice.
Kai had manipulated the situation, and while I wanted to be angry with him, the truth was that Kai hadn’t forced Stefan to come to Beirut.
He might have dangled the carrot, but Stefan was a grown man who made a choice. And it wasn’t me.
“I didn’t force Stefan to come here.” He echoed my sentiment. “He made that decision all on his own.”
“You wanted me to catch him with Ruby.”
“I did.”
“Why?”
“So you’d know he was fickle.”
“Why do you care what I think of him?”
“Because I can’t stand the way you fucking look at him.”
I stared at him, speechless.
“And because I need you to want me more than him.”
I didn’t know what to do with his honesty. It was so raw. With one sentence, Kai had bared his soul.
The numbness from the rooftop began, very slowly, to thaw.
And it was all thanks to Kai’s lunatic admission.
I’d known he was possessive, but never imagined he’d go to such lengths.
Was this another thing I had to learn about polyandrous marriage?
Your partners would always sabotage one another to be the favorite.
It should have bothered me, but apparently, I was quite tolerant as long as my husband wasn’t taking another woman to my dream destination.
I needed to revisit my standards.
My phone buzzed.
Stefan: Please, baby. Just hear me out.
It was followed by a stream of excuses, apologies, and Can we meet up tomorrow to talk?
I clicked the lock screen button instead of responding.
I’d chosen Stefan over everything since I was sixteen.
He rewarded my loyalty by choosing money, luxury, and Ruby Sarafina over me.
I was no longer disillusioned by my one-sided loyalty.
There was one man who’d never betray my trust or pimp me out for his selfish desires.
It wasn’t Stefan. It was the other man who’d been here all along.
I set my phone face down on my lap and stared at the back of the driver’s seat. My chest had gone very still. I was on the precipice of making a decision I couldn’t take back.
I was aware, without looking, of the heat of the man beside me.
He made himself impossible to ignore, while I had deliberately refused to acknowledge my feelings.
It would’ve meant admitting what I wasn’t ready to say.
I acknowledged it now, the feeling I had been fighting all day, in the restaurant, in the car to the rooftop bar, every time his hand found the small of my back, and I told myself it meant nothing.
“Did I scare you, Princess?” he asked, his voice gravelly.
I glanced at Kai and reeled back when I found him watching me with an unguarded expression.
“No,” I said breathlessly. “You didn’t scare me.” And that scared me.
He thought nothing of what he had shared with me, and I had the feeling he’d do it again.
Though he generally contained this side of himself—probably because he didn’t want to scare me off—it slipped out every so often.
He was right to restrict it because the way he was looking at me scared me.
Dark eyes that were far from bashful. He let his eyes roam my face unapologetically, as if he had every right.
The old reflex said: look away. I didn’t.
Stefan had looked through me for so long I’d forgotten what it felt like to be someone’s entire focus. Kai made it impossible to forget. His attention had a weight to it, and instead of retreating from it like usual, I held still and let it land.
A shiver slid down my spine, my breath hitching. Not from fear. Fear made you want to disappear. This made you want to be seen.
It was sick to be so turned on after Kai’s admission. The proof of his competitive streak should have me running in the other direction. But after the repeated rejection from Stefan, it was perverse how comforting I found a man who’d go to any lengths to have me.
I angled my body away from him so he wouldn’t realize I was shaking in my seat. Talking to him about my confusing feelings was out of the question as well. I was barely holding it together.
I was clearly broken.
Perhaps I was merely responding to attention from a drop-dead gorgeous man who was out of my league.
I had been cataloging his face in small, stolen glances all day.
Kai with his beautiful face. Kai with his perfect body.
Kai with his unwavering patience. I’d registered it all and filed it away because of Stefan.
But the loyalty I’d been holding on to was in vain.
It had been pointless for a long time. Stefan was in Beirut with Ruby.
I was in a car with a man so unreasonably good-looking it felt like a trick, and for the first time, I let myself feel it without apologizing.
To this day, I still didn’t understand why Kai Cavendish agreed to share me, an insignificant woman, when he could have had any woman in the world all to himself.
But tonight, I had officially stopped caring.
While I had him, I wanted to lose myself in this gorgeous, brilliant, and slightly arrogant man.
I wanted to take everything he had to offer.
We didn’t speak again until the car pulled up in front of our hotel, though Kai’s hand never left my shoulders. He reluctantly let go as I climbed out, still reeling from his confession and my shameful reaction to it.
The driver produced a room key as Kai was leading me to the elevator. We hadn’t seen the room yet since we’d been too busy exploring the city.
The elevator doors closed. Kai didn’t touch me, but his nearness felt like asphyxiation.
The floor numbers climbed as we stood beside each other in the small space, with mere inches between us.
I could see us in the mirror across from me.
I looked at his reflection instead of him.
My heart was beating at an embarrassing rate.
The sexually charged energy between us was so palpable, the desire so thick, that it suffocated me in the small space.
Our suite was on the eighth floor, with a wraparound balcony that overlooked the spread of the city.
Neither of us spoke until the door closed behind us.
He didn’t bother turning on the lights. The only illumination was the pale scatter of Beirut from below—apartment windows, the headlights of cars winding the coastal road, the dark smear of the Mediterranean at the edge of everything.
I turned toward him in the low light and looked at his face. A dark energy vibrated from him; he knew what I was thinking. His eyes were glazed with hunger.
For once, he wasn’t alone in feeling this way.