Total pages in book: 29
Estimated words: 28033 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 140(@200wpm)___ 112(@250wpm)___ 93(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 28033 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 140(@200wpm)___ 112(@250wpm)___ 93(@300wpm)
Behind her, Lydia watched her go with barely concealed triumph.
Idiot.
Leonidas’s wife might be hailed as a genius in the world of racing and engineering, but in this world—the real world, the world where women fought for men and the ruthless always won—idiots like her always lost. Too nice, too trusting, too pathetically—
Lydia’s eyes widened.
Was that Leonidas?
Was that him bursting through the cafe door like a man possessed, his gaze fixed on his wife with an intensity that made something cold settle in Lydia’s stomach?
Was that him going after her like he was desperate to keep her?
Like their marriage had become something more than a business arrangement?
Like she actually meant something to him?
No.
No, that wasn’t possible.
That wasn’t—
But Leonidas was already gone, chasing after his wife without so much as a glance in Lydia’s direction, and for the first time since she’d set this plan in motion, doubt began to creep in.
****
Leonidas had known something was wrong the moment Sienah told him where Lexy had gone.
The cafe she’d named was one of Lydia’s favorites—he’d taken her there himself, years ago, back when their arrangement was new and he’d still been foolish enough to think that keeping a mistress was simply a practical solution to a physical problem. The coincidence was too perfect, the timing too convenient, and even as he ran through the facility and out into the Monaco morning, he knew he was already too late.
The damage was done.
He could see her through the cafe windows as he approached—his wife, his Lexy, tears streaming down her face as she stumbled between tables like a woman who had forgotten how her own legs worked. She was clutching something to her chest, a manila envelope, and even from this distance he could see the way her shoulders shook with barely suppressed sobs.
No.
No, no, no.
He didn’t know what game Lydia was playing, but he could not—would not—let her win.
Lexy just wanted to go home.
It didn’t matter where. Athens, New York, anywhere. She just needed to be as far away from Leon as possible, away from the evidence of his hands on another woman’s skin, away from the proof that everything she’d thought they were building was nothing but—
She crashed into something solid.
The impact knocked the breath from her lungs, and for a disoriented moment she thought she’d walked into a wall—but then the wall spoke in a voice that was hoarse and raw and heartbreakingly familiar.
“Lexina.”
No.
Not him.
Not now.
She tried to step back, but shock had made her clumsy, and her fingers loosened without her permission. The envelope slipped from her grasp, and a silent broken cry escaped Lexy’s lips as she watched the photos spill across the cobblestones like a wound tearing open.
Leonidas looked down.
And went completely white.
Because there they were—image after image of him and Lydia, captured by some paparazzo with a long lens and no conscience. Lydia draped across his lap at a restaurant. Lydia pressing a kiss to his cheek outside her apartment building. Lydia’s hand on his chest, her smile catlike and possessive, while he looked at her with an expression that made Leonidas want to reach back through time and shake his past self until his teeth rattled.
Not explicit. Not scandalous in the way tabloids craved.
But intimate.
Undeniably intimate.
And his wife had just seen all of it.
God, please.
It was Leonidas’ first time thinking of Him.
And praying.
His first time to feel so desperate that he’d call out a name of someone he had never seen. Someone he didn’t even know he believed in until he realized that he needed someone larger than himself.
Please, God. Please.
Praying was all he could do because it was also Leonidas’ first time to truly understand what he had done.
Not in the abstract, not in the careful rationalizations he’d built around his arrangement with Lydia, but in the concrete reality of his wife’s tear-streaked face and trembling hands and the way she was looking at him like he’d taken something precious and ground it beneath his heel.
He had hurt her.
He had been hurting her for six years, and he hadn’t even known it, hadn’t even cared enough to find out, because he’d been so certain that their arrangement was fair, that she’d given permission, that none of it really mattered because their marriage wasn’t real anyway.
But it was real.
It had always been real.
And he had failed her in every way that counted.
Lexy dropped to her knees, bruising them against the cobblestones as she scrambled to gather the photos, to hide them, to make them disappear—but her hands collided with Leon’s when they both reached for the same image at the same time, and his touch—
His touch, which had given her so much pleasure just hours ago, which had made her feel cherished and wanted and finally, finally seen—
It burned now.
She jerked back like she’d been scalded, and she watched something shatter in his expression, watched him withdraw his hands and hold them up in a gesture of surrender that made her heart crack even further.