Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 67966 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 340(@200wpm)___ 272(@250wpm)___ 227(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 67966 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 340(@200wpm)___ 272(@250wpm)___ 227(@300wpm)
At forty-four, Lucas should’ve known better than to mistake attention for affection.
Like the cruelest reflex, came the memory, Adam in their bed, eyes dark with passion…but not for him.
Lucas shook his head. “Yeah. I remember. Tell me, Adam, how understanding and sympathetic would you have been about my late nights if you’d shown up with dinner and found me fucking my assistant on my desk?”
Silence.
“That’s what I thought.” Lucas should’ve hung up.
“You uncompromising bastard.”
“I tried to give you everything you demanded and more, Adam,” Lucas gritted as pain throbbed behind his left eye. “You wanted to go on shopping sprees in New York, Paris, and LA every spring and fall, you wanted to drive the newest car, you had to live in the biggest house—”
“Who doesn’t, Lucas? You can’t make me sound unreasonable because I wanted to finally live nice after coming from nothing.”
Lucas almost choked. “Your mom was a dermatologist, and your dad owned his own construction business, Adam. Jesus Christ. Was your struggle up from the suburbs really that difficult?”
“You wanted me to sit home alone in a big empty house, full of stuff… but no you.”
“I couldn’t make the money fast enough, which you spent like water. You wanted me to stay home and love on you all day, but you also wanted me to earn enough money to make you the most envied man in Hampton Roads.”
“And now guess what my friends think of me?”
That you’re an ungrateful, cheating piece of shit who tore my heart out.
“That’s what you’re worried about?” Lucas felt as if Adam had sucker-punched him in the stomach.
God, he’d been a fucking idiot. And at forty-four, he should’ve known better.
“Can I just ask you one question?”
Adam sucked his teeth, but Lucas didn’t wait for his permission before he started speaking, “If I hadn’t been me, if I hadn’t been an honored guest wearing an Armani suit the night we met. If I’d just been one of the waitstaff working the gala you were throwing for the firm that night.” Lucas exhaled slowly. “Would you still have agreed to go to dinner with me?”
The silence extended so long that Lucas thought maybe Adam had hung up. He wished he had.
Lucas dropped his head. That silence spoke volumes. Therefore, there was no need to ask any further questions.
Adam had never loved anything but his money.
Had he really cheated just that one time? They’d only been married for four years, and Lucas had spent a lot of late nights at the office.
Who else knew he—one of the top ten investment bankers in Tidewater—was being played for a fool?
It didn’t matter. There was no repairing Lucas’s reputation or his marriage because he’d never be able to get the image of his husband wrapped tightly in another man’s arms out of his mind.
Even if he burned out his damn corneas, the vision would still be there, lurking, torturing him. And it wasn’t just the intense pounding Adam had been taking from that stranger in their bed. It’d been the adoring, yearning way Adam had gazed at him as he did.
A way he’d never once looked at me.
That was how Lucas knew Adam’s affair wasn’t a one-time mistake.
But at least Lucas had gotten out when he did and with his assets still intact—thank god for the infidelity clause in their prenup.
“Lucas, my love. Please. I wish you were here in bed beside me right now,” Adam begged sensuously, and despite how angry his ex made him, Lucas’s comatose dick twitched in his dress slacks.
Lucas should’ve felt nothing except rage and anger, but none of those powerful emotions protected him.
Instead, he had one feeling: pain.
“You’re a good man, Lucas. Don’t do this to me. I can’t live on five thousand dollars a month. I know you can afford twenty times that if you really cared for me. Why are you doing this? It’s not right…”
The rest of the call was just noise.
Lucas set the receiver down slowly, the way he would place flowers on a grave.
He didn’t slam it. He didn’t yell back at Adam.
He just stared at the solitary boat on the river until his vision blurred.
Lucas was sure at that exact moment that he’d never trust or love another man again.
He wanted to drive his fist through the plate-glass window, but he knew that was one, impossible, and two, pointless as fuck. He checked his watch, figuring he should probably go home. He couldn’t sleep on his office couch again. People were beginning to gossip.
“Evening, Lucas.”
“Shit.” Lucas jerked his head up in surprise before diverting his watery eyes when he saw it was one of his partners. “Sorry, Oliver. I didn’t see you standing there. What has you here so late?”
His longtime partner—previously his favorite hangout buddy—motioned to his briefcase. “I decided to stay and wrap up the waterside proposal. Since James is working the graveyard shift at the airport tonight, there’s no reason for me to rush home.”