Chapter 10
Ten
Present
My hands shookas I removed the Stella McCartney dress from its garment bag. The glittering Grecian gown matched my warm golden skin. It was the perfect choice for the New Year’s Eve party Henry had me put together. When I first tried it on, I thought, So, this is what it feels like to be the charm on a golden charm bracelet.
Delicate. Precious.
Now, I felt like another object my husband had turned into gold.
Whatever tension was chafing our marriage was like sandpaper on glass. It left grievous abrasions on our once polished relationship, revealing all the cracks I hadn’t noticed before.
I tried telling myself that he was busy with company matters. The new acquisition had him working around the clock. However, this felt like more than that. There was a distance between us. Ice-cold distance. I could see it in the way he looked at me, and I felt it in the long hours he kept. It had grown like a surfacing glacier, and his son’s arrival seemed to have brought it all to a blisteringly frozen head.
Perhaps that was the reason behind Xander’s actions—he wanted to stick it to his father.
We…oh God. I couldn’t even think it, let alone say the words out loud. The image of him shoving me against the door, his hand in my hair, under my dress, all of it had slammed into me repeatedly since yesterday, no matter how many times I dismissed it. There was something in his eyes—dark, resolute—that scared me.
What overcame Xander? What possessed me? Because after a while, I didn’t fight him. Why didn’t I fight him?
Confusion and shame warred within me, shame coming out victorious. Legally, he was my stepson. What happened was sick.
I’d stayed holed up between my room and my office. While avoiding Xander, I secured two more brand endorsements for him and put my virtual assistant in charge of his social media. We were cc’d on emails about new opportunities, though we hadn’t spoken in person. I had blanked the entire incident from my mind, chalking it up to Xander experiencing a temporary psychosis.
What else could I do?
Telling Henry would be pouring gasoline onto the fire. Xander’s relationship with his father was rocky at best. This family’s bond was already teetering at the edge of extinction. Jasper barely visited, and if I told Henry about Xander, it’d tarnish whatever was left of their relationship.
No.
I couldn’t wreck their father-son relationship for good. I had to take this dirty secret to my grave, and I wondered if Xander felt the same inclination to keep it between us. Or was this a game to him, and he had already bragged to Henry about seducing his wife?
The one time I saw Henry, I braced myself for a confrontation, but he blindsided me by asking me to put together a last-minute New Year’s Party in Xander’s honor. Then he said, “Here is Xander’s contract with the NHL. Look it over.”
“How did you get this so quickly?”
“He’s agreed to have you represent him, and I’m not allowing him to rethink the decision. I need you to fix the public’s opinion about his relationship with his family. You,” he went on, stabbing a finger at me over his plate of bacon and eggs, “will make sure everything is as sterling as—” Henry broke off, shifting his attention to the fork in his hand. “Well, maybe not this silverware,” he said nastily. Even when everything went perfectly, Henry could find a flaw. “Make sure all the silver is polished for the party.”
An image of his son’s intense eyes in the car flashed into my mind. My sense of unease grew as a frisson of something like fear rippled over my exposed skin.
He’d left Xander’s NHL contract on my vanity. His reputation in the hockey circuit was airtight, making him easy to manage. The lid would only blow off if someone were to expose him for coming on to his stepmother…
I shook my head as I slid the dress over my head, smoothing out the glittering silk fabric over my curves.
It’d be all right. Perhaps it had all been a grave misunderstanding—a figment of my imagination—because Xander had never struck me as impulsive. He had a facade as smooth and as cold as the rink he played on.
And that was a good thing, I decided, clipping on a pair of gold Van Cleef and Arpels Alhambra earrings.
The music swelled as I walked down the stairs. I had hired a string quartet, and they were playing classical renditions of top 20 hits, the saccharine strains of violins piercing my eardrums.
I skirted the champagne fountain, lingering just long enough to clear away a misplaced empty glass and hand it off to a nearby waiter.
I hastily worked my way through the crowd and exchanged pleasantries with people I didn’t know, accepting compliments on the food, the music, and the wine.
Inside, a storm was raging.
What would these people say if they knew what happened with my stepson? The guilt was tugging at my heart.
A wave of nausea hit me, and I grabbed a champagne flute from one of the servers with a round, black tray.
Perhaps Xander had succumbed to a moment of alcohol-induced confusion. It was also likely his emotions were running high. How could he not be resentful? Relegated to his childhood bedroom like a misbehaving child, openly scorned by his father at every turn.
Everyone here walked a tightrope because any slip up left you on the receiving end of Henry’s wrath. Being happy with someone breathing down your neck and discounting your every action was difficult. And when people lived inside a pressure cooker, the stifled emotions were bound to explode.
What happened was a mistake, I decided, taking another long sip of the champagne and swapping out the empty flute for a filled one. Alcohol swam in my veins by the third glass.
Christ. I needed to shove the dirty secret deep inside me and focus on my marriage instead. Henry was my future. This was the perfect night to celebrate my renewed hope for a family, except where was my family? Where was Henry?
Finally—I caught a glimpse of his midnight blue suit. Italian-cut because of how it minimized the shoulders and made everything streamlined. He was migrating toward our grandiose corridor.
I had the staff build a champagne tower in that hallway because guests liked to take Instagram-worthy photos there. Paintings adorned both sides of the opulent walls, along with rich tapestries and gilded mirrors. The polished marble tiles and soft rugs added to the allure, though everyone had filtered out when I entered the empty corridor.
Henry was at the far end of the hallway. Relieved, I moved toward him…and then froze.
He wasn’t alone. He was with someone by the champagne tower, though I couldn’t see the other person without rounding the corner.
It felt as if I were being propelled by forces beyond my control to take the plunge and bear witness to the scene under the soft lights flooding the space.
Standing beside him was a slender brunette in her early twenties, wearing a sheer dress that left very little to the imagination. My husband’s hand was on her shoulder, toying possessively with the strap of her dress. I recognized the gesture; it was the same casual, fidgety way that he played with the wristband of his Rolex whenever he was bored.
He’s touched her like this before, I thought, feeling sick.
“—I can’t wait to take this off you later,” he murmured. “I was thinking I’d save a bottle of champagne to take to the office, maybe tonight. I could do shots of Dom off these big, perfect tits while you?—”
The blood in my veins froze. I cleared my throat. Henry and the brunette jumped simultaneously, her big, perfect tits jumping with them.
“Jordan!?” Henry quickly recovered. “This is my wife,” he said to the brunette, who hadn’t lost that doe-eyed look of shock. “I thought you were seeing to the guests, babe,” he said to me. He never sweet-talked unless he had fucked up.
I stood there, staring at my husband with another woman, my nails digging into my skin.
I should be devastated. After all I had done to gain my husband’s love, only to be left emptier than before, this should have knocked me to the ground, or I should have been crying my eyes out.
I did neither.
Given our rocky marriage, the adultery didn’t come as a surprise. I had an inkling he was no longer faithful to me. Of course, thinking about it and seeing it were two different things.
My insides were numb rather than exploding in pain. Oddly, I was more miffed than sad. He was flaunting his infidelity at the New Year’s party he made me put together at the last second.
Anger bubbled inside me like the champagne I drank. I strode up to them right as he had shoved his mistress aside. The brunette made a squeal of guilt.
“How could you do this at the party you asked me to whip up?” I hissed.
“We’ll discuss this later.” His eyes flicked over me dismissively. He was ending the discussion as if catching him with his mistress didn’t warrant a conversation.
“We’ll talk about it now!” Perhaps this was the alcohol talking, but I refused to be ignored. “What did you think you’d do? Sneak away to play champagne slip ‘n’ slide with your mistress?”
“Jordan,” he warned. The condescension dripped from him in spades.
But I was done. I hadn’t been happy for so long; this was the icing on the cake. Public humiliation turned out to be my breaking point. “You know what? I want a divorce,” I announced bravely.
Anger flashed in Henry’s eyes. “Excuse me,” he told the brunette without looking her way.
The brunette complied wordlessly, unsurely lingering on the sidelines.
“Do you remember when I rescued you from that looney bin?” He lowered his voice to cloak the menace hiding in his words.
My heart sank.
I tried lurching away, but he gripped my bicep. “Talk about divorce again, and I’ll ship you back to that nut house and keep you drugged up around the clock.”
Henry tucked a strand of hair behind my ears with his other hand. I recoiled.
“I chose you as my wife for a reason, and it’ll stay that way. Do we understand each other?”
“You’re disgusting.” I jerked out of his grasp. “I don’t know how I ever fell for your act.”
“You’ll calm down.” He traced a finger along my face. “And when you do, you’ll see what we have is better than being locked up.” His hand moved to my chin, the touch firm and foreboding.
A bitter laugh fell from my lips. “You’re a joke. You think you’re so much smarter than everyone else, yet you’re making the same mistakes as every other scared middle-aged man.”
The dim lighting in the hallway cast shadows that matched his eerie mood, enhancing my sense of foreboding. I shouldn’t have pushed him at that moment, but I was on a roll.
“Maybe I should be grateful. A mistress is cheaper to maintain than a Lambo when it comes to fulfilling the inadequacies of a small dick?—”
Pain lit up the side of my face, the sharp crack of a strike reverberating through the air. There was a strange ringing noise in my ears.
What was that?I thought as something hard hit my knees.
The alcohol coating my mind decelerated the effect. It took me a moment to realize my knees had been knocked to the floor.
Henry had struck me.
The salty tang of blood in my mouth mingled with the lingering taste of champagne, creating a sickening contrast between elegance and brutality that seemed to have been my life for the last few years. The strains of classical music from the string quartet had faded into a distant memory, replaced by a deafening silence broken only by the sound of Henry’s approaching footsteps.
The shock had barely worn off when I was struck again. This time, it was a kick to the side of my body. He loomed over, menacingly staring down with cold eyes that pierced through the alcohol-induced hazy veil.
Something had snapped inside him at being humiliated in front of his young sidepiece, who shrieked upon witnessing Henry’s violence and made a quick exit.
My pupils blew wide when he drew his leg back and kicked me again. Then again and again.
Each kick he delivered carried a weight of unresolved anger, tearing through the delicate fabric of what remained of this marriage, the opulent surroundings offering no comfort against the onslaught of violence. My hands struggled in a futile attempt to shield myself from the relentless assault.
The metallic aftertaste of iron withered. The hallway felt suffocatingly small as he rained down more kicks. The veneer of sophistication in the pristine hallway was stripped away to reveal his dark aggression unraveling like a twisted waltz of destruction.
My lip split open, my side screamed in agony, and my face felt numb against the floor.
Then, there was a flash of black, and Henry, still flushed from exertion, flew into the champagne fountain with the resounding sound of broken glass. Glistening droplets of champagne scattered from the impact, and the dim lighting cast a surreal halo around the figure that had come to my rescue.
Xander.