by Naima Simone
“Wh-what?” she stammered.
Another of those mocking half smiles. But the mockery seemed to be aimed at himself, not her. “Sydney, before the dating and engagement, we were friends first. It’s one of the things I truly enjoyed about our relationship. You rarely find the true companionship we shared, which is why I could see myself marrying you. Even though we didn’t love each other.”
“Tyler,” she said.
“No, I knew you didn’t and had agreed to the marriage for your own reasons. Namely, pressure from your family. I get it. More than you know,” he murmured, almost to himself. “Yes, I was shocked when you broke off the engagement, and I would be lying if I said I wasn’t hurt and embarrassed. But in a way I was…relieved.” His lashes lowered, and his low exhale shuddered from between his lips. “And envious. You were strong enough to stand up and go after what you wanted. A fulfilled life with someone you love instead of an empty one without passion or true happiness. I”—he cleared his throat—“I had that. And because of family obligations, I lost her and my shot.”
She gasped, rocking back on her heels. “Are you saying…?”
“Yes. I had a woman I loved, but because she didn’t have the connections, wealth, and name recognition that you and your family had, my father ‘persuaded’ me not to marry her. Sydney, my father’s company is…suffering.” He huffed out a rough chuckle. “That’s an understatement. It’s in serious trouble. But the Blake name would’ve been sufficient to obtain unsecured loans from several banks with ties to your father and Blake Corporation. My dad was counting on our marriage, and for me to go through with it. And threats of disowning me, leaving me penniless, and withdrawing his support from me worked. I caved. And lost the best thing that’s ever happened to me in the process.”
“Tyler,” she breathed. “I’m so sorry.” Especially considering her father’s company was in the same straits as Mr. Reinhold’s. Maybe worse—Wes Reinhold hadn’t been embezzling funds for years.
He shrugged a shoulder. “I have no one to blame but myself. When you broke off our engagement, I kind of saw it as karma with no one to blame but myself. I could fall back on the excuse of allowing myself to be used, but that would be lying. I was too much of a coward to lose my lifestyle. Anyway.” He heaved a sigh. “You won’t have to worry about any more situations like the ambush at lunch or the reception. Old habits die hard, so I agreed to go along with it at first. But when you didn’t show up, I was glad. You deserve your happiness, Sydney, and I or my parents will no longer interfere with it.”
“Thank you,” she whispered. Tears stung her eyes for his loss, his pain…hers. She hadn’t ended their engagement for love, as he believed, but she did love now. With a strength that transformed her knees to wobbly columns of water. She grappled for the end of the banister, leaning against it, truth slamming into her with the force and subtlety of a sledgehammer.
She loved Lucas.
And knowing the fullness of it, the ache of it, the consuming power of it, she would have ultimately resented Tyler and grown bitter. Ironic how she’d been set on marrying him to avoid ending up like her mother, and that would have been the likely outcome anyway.
“Sydney.” He darted over to her, cupping her shoulder. “Are you okay?”
Mute, she nodded, while inside she raged, hell, no! She wasn’t okay. Far from it. She was angry, scared, hurt, disillusioned…and in love.
Oh, shit.
“You don’t look well,” he said, concern drawing his brows down in a frown. “Here, have a seat.” Lowering her to a step, he hunkered down in front of her, his hands clasping hers. “Is there anything I can get you?”
“The fuck out of my house,” a dark voice rumbled from the doorway.
She jerked her head up. Met a menacing, glittering gaze.
Lucas was home.
Chapter Twenty
Rage poured through Lucas. It pounded against his senses in relentless waves, growing stronger and wilder with every second Tyler Reinhold remained crouched before his wife, holding her hands.
Sydney snatched free of her ex’s grip, guilt flashing across her face.
“I’ll go,” Tyler said, his wary gaze never leaving Lucas. Smart man. “Sydney, are you going to be okay?”
“Yes,” she murmured. She, too, studied him with those lovely hazel eyes—lovely, deceitful eyes. He clenched his fist until he swore the skin would split over his knuckles. “Please go. And thank you for coming by.”
“Of course.” Tyler skirted past Lucas and ducked out the door. Though every cell in his being roared he beat the shit out of the other man, Lucas didn’t move, didn’t take his scrutiny off the woman who’d made him promise fidelity only to betray that promise herself.
He should’ve known.
“Lucas.” Sydney rose from the step, holding a trembling hand out toward him. Tired. She appeared tired, worn down…and hurt. He bit back a bark of laughter. What a hell of an actress he was married to. “It’s not—”
“No, no, wait. Let me finish. I’ve heard it many times, after all.” In the beginning, his mother had tried to offer up excuses. After a while, she’d stopped pretending she wasn’t cheating, and the explanations stopped coming. “It’s not what I think. I should believe you, not my lying eyes. Or how about, ‘we weren’t doing anything’?”
She dropped her arm, shaking her head. “Lucas, he came by to apologize. That’s all. I would never betray you. Certainly not after…” She inhaled. “I wouldn’t.”
“Wouldn’t return to the man you had lunch with behind my back? The man who you’d been ready to spend your life with? A man whose memory was so precious to you, you couldn’t bear to have sex with me on our wedding night? Is this the man you wouldn’t go back to?”
“I didn’t love him. I’ve never loved him. I lo—” She broke off, wrapping her arms around her chest.
“You what?” he demanded. But she just shook her head again.
A part of him wanted to grab her, demand she supply him with a good reason for Tyler being in his home—their home—and make him believe her. But that foolish part of him had also convinced him to leave work, go home early, and reconcile with her. Tell her he no longer wanted the distance that had sprung up between them. While he’d been intent on reaffirming what they’d shared, she’d been with her ex-fiancé.
For years, he’d had a ringside seat to the clusterfuck that had been his parents’ marriage. And yet he’d still started to trust, to believe a woman could be loyal…faithful. Maybe he was too much like his father after all.
He strode past her toward his study and the bottles of bourbon waiting for him.
“You don’t get to walk away from me yet,” she stated, and the soft, stark command plummeted into the room like a meteor slamming into earth. Slowly, he pivoted around. Sydney lowered her arms, and that’s when he noticed the papers clutched in her fingers. “You don’t want to listen to anything I have to say because you’re intent on punishing me for a sin committed years ago. I’m not your mother. I would never take something so precious between us and pervert and twist it by sleeping with another man. You’ve never let go of what she did, never forgiven her for it. And now I’m paying the price. That’s one strike.” She shifted closer to him, her chin notched high. And fury, not sorrow, darkened her gaze. It blazed up at him, hot, accusatory. “But don’t you call me a liar or tell me I’ve betrayed you when that’s all you’ve done from the first day we met.”
She slapped the papers into his chest, and he had no choice but to catch them or they would’ve fluttered to the floor. Oh, damn. The contract pushing Jason Blake out. But how…? He curled his fingers into a tight fist. They’d been on his desk in his study when he’d left the house this morning.
“You lied to me,” she rasped. “You promised me you would leave my father alone if I married you. And all this time you’ve been planning to steal his company right out from under him, with me beside you. You. Used. Me.”
“I promised you I
wouldn’t report your father to the authorities, and I haven’t. I kept my end of the bargain.”
“You lied by omission, damn it. Don’t split hairs with me.” She paced away from him, rubbing her hands over her arms as if chilled. “Were you going to tell me?” Before he could reply, she laughed. The brittle edge of it scraped over his skin, pierced his heart. “Of course not. That would be truthful, and as you warned me, the only way to fight is dirty.”
“Sydney, this has nothing to do with you,” he gritted out, wondering why he bothered to explain. She was going to leave. They all did.
“Nothing to do with me? Are you serious? You’re planning to ruin my father, and it has nothing to do with me? God, Lucas. Do you think this is what your father wanted for you? To turn around and inflict on someone else the same pain and betrayal he suffered?”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he snapped. “You know nothing—”
The peal of his cell phone reverberated. He snatched it from his pocket, saw Aiden’s name, and sent the call to voicemail. Seconds later it rang again. Aiden.
“Damn it,” he growled, punching the answer button. “What?”
“Turn on the television, Luke. CNN.”
None of his friend’s usual humor carried through the line. No smart-ass remark for the manner in which he’d answered the phone. His stomach dipped as if he’d just zoomed down a steep hill on a bike without brakes. Terrifying.
He stalked to the den next to the living room. Without removing the cell from his ear, he jerked up the remote and turned on the television. An eternity seemed to eke by before he found the correct channel.
“Oh, Jesus,” he breathed.
“…arrived at the Boston division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Our information is limited at this time, but it has been confirmed that Jason Blake of Blake Corporation is being investigated for accounting fraud. This morning…”
A cry ripped through the air. He whipped around. Sydney leaned against the door, her eyes like dark ovals in her pale face.
“Sydney,” he whispered.
“No,” she cut him off, her voice as sharp and serrated at a knife. Anger, pain, and what might have been grief swirled in her eyes. For a moment, her mouth trembled, but it firmed, her expression hardening. “Did you do this?”
He should’ve expected the question, should’ve known she’d assume he would be behind her father’s arrest. And yet…yet her obvious mistrust burned him raw. “No,” he rasped. “I promised you—”
“You promised me several things, Lucas.” She straightened, shifting away from the door frame. “You vowed that I wouldn’t walk alone. You swore that as long as we were together, you would spend every day proving how special I was to you. Special? Today you’ve proven that I’m not any different from the other women you’ve had in your life, in your bed. I’m renting your last name, but I’m just one of many women you’ve never trusted. You can’t accept that I might be worthy of that trust, of that faith, because then you would have to admit you’ve been living the past fifteen years in a prison of bitterness for nothing.” She wrapped her arms around her chest, but in the next moment dropped them to her sides, curling her fingers in fists. “Our contract is null and void. It was broken the moment you set all this”—she flung a hand toward the television—“in motion. I won’t live my life in your prison—I won’t live the next eleven months like that. By marrying Tyler, I would’ve settled for a shallow, anemic existence. But with you? I’m consigning myself to a sentence of losing myself to your hatred and lust for revenge that will only end up destroying both of us. I refuse to do it, Lucas. I want more than that. I’m worth more than that. We could’ve been more than that,” she whispered.
Shaking her head, she whirled around. Disappeared.
And he was alone.
…
“And God said, let there be light,” Aiden declared, throwing open the door to Lucas’s study. He stretched his arms wide, but when the room remained as dark as ever except for the low lamp on his desk, his friend shrugged. “I guess that only works for God, then.”
“What are you doing here?” Lucas snapped as he poured himself another drink. The third—fourth, fifth?—that morning. He’d been a slow riser today.
“Coming to make merry with you, of course,” Aiden drawled. “How does it feel to finally obtain everything you’ve slaved, plotted, planned, and schemed for? I have to tell you, for a man who has won, you don’t look very, uh, celebratory.”
Celebratory? He didn’t feel anything. Triumph, sorrow, anger, happiness. Thanks to the barrels of bourbon he’d downed in the three days since Sydney had left him, he’d felt nothing but the burn and numbness of liquor.
But even the alcohol couldn’t erase the image of the devastation and accusation on her face before she’d disappeared. And it didn’t matter that he hadn’t turned her father in; the guilt still gnawed at him with razor-sharp, ravenous teeth.
“You’re an asshole.” Aiden slapped his palms on the desk, sloshing the liquor around in the tumbler.
“You’re going to have to be a little more specific,” Lucas advised, picking up his glass.
“Okay, how about for fucking up the best thing that has ever happened to you? There’s one.”
Lucas sighed, sipped, and tipped his head back against the office chair. “She left me.”
“As well she should’ve,” Aiden snarled. Then, falling into the visitor’s chair with a sigh, he pinched the bridge of his nose. In a drunken stupor, Lucas had relayed to his friend what’d happened the day he arrived home to find Tyler with Sydney. About the fight. The accusations. “You were a grade-A bastard, accusing her of cheating with no proof. If there’s a woman who is more loyal, sacrificing, and kind than Sydney, she’d need to be nominated for sainthood. She was perfect for you. If you would’ve let her. Luke”—Aiden leaned forward, waiting for Lucas to meet his gaze—“she loves you. A blind man could see that. And I have damn near twenty-twenty vision.”
Lucas tried to, but he couldn’t block out the pictures that bombarded him like BB gun pellets. The hurt in her eyes. The quiet pleading. The anger. Love? He rubbed his forehead with the heel of his hand. If she’d harbored any affection for him, he’d killed it with his all-consuming desire for revenge.
And it had consumed.
His childhood. His vision. His integrity.
His marriage.
The woman he loved.
He set the glass on the desk with a hard thunk and scrubbed his palms over his face, stubble from his unshaven jaw scraping over his skin.
It’d been the seeds of love—planted when she’d kissed his scar, listened to his ugly history and accepted it, gave her body so freely and without inhibition to him—that had scared the hell out of him.
Son of a bitch. How could he have been such a fool?
So obsessed with revenge, he’d lied to her, betrayed her. So terrified he’d end up like his father—weak and broken by love—he’d pushed her away, rejected her. So blind to his own guilt and grief, he’d lashed out, seeking to lay blame, and destroying her trust in the process.
And the entire time, he’d missed one important, blaring, obvious truth.
He and Sydney weren’t his parents. She wasn’t selfish or narcissistic, concerned with her own pleasure and desires. He wasn’t his father, needy, defeated, also so self-centered that he abandoned the one person who needed him most. He couldn’t imagine inflicting such suffering on someone he loved—and he couldn’t imagine Sydney allowing him to sink to that depth. She made him stronger. Wiser. Better.
And he didn’t want to spend another day without her.
He rose from his chair and rounded his desk, mind churning.
“’Bout damn time.” Aiden grinned, shooting from his seat as well. “What are you going to do?”
“Find my wife.”
“Welcome back, Luke.” Aiden clapped him on the shoulder. “Can I offer you one piece of advice, though?”
“What?” Lucas strode past him, headed for the door.
“Wash first.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Sydney climbed the steps to her parents’ Beacon Hill home, keeping her head ducked as she wedged through the throng of reporters camped on the sidewalk and street. Nearly a week had passed since the news about her father’s financial fraud broke, and the media frenzy hadn’t abated in the least.
“Sydney, did you know your father was stealing from his company?”
“Sydney, over here! Over here!”
“Sydney, is it true Lucas Oliver left you once he found out about your father?”
She detested how the reporters used her first name with such familiarity. As if they were friends. As if they had a right to her answers and feelings. Especially regarding her family. And her husband. The husband she hadn’t seen in five days, two hours, and some-odd minutes. She could ignore the reporters, but she couldn’t dismiss the hollow pit that had leased space inside her since then.
God, please don’t let me walk into another ambush.
Her parents knew about her leaving Lucas’s house—as, apparently, did the media. She cringed, hating that her personal relationship and hurts were fodder for the national news stations as well as the society columns. If this request to visit Casa Blake entailed another round of Operation Tyler, it would be a short visit. Yes, Lucas had hurt her with his disbelief and accusations about Tyler, as well as his mistrust and duplicity regarding her father. And yes, she’d been staying with Yolanda, the youth center director willingly offering her guest bedroom to Sydney while she figured everything out.
But one thing she didn’t have to reconsider or puzzle over: she loved Lucas. With every fiber of her being, with every bit of her soul. She loved him. And since he’d appeared in her life, she’d grown stronger, more self-confident. Sure of her worth and value. No one had ever fought for him. Not his mother. Not his father. And she would have—would’ve been willing and proud to be his champion—if he’d let her. If he’d trusted her. If he’d been honest.
