Total pages in book: 19
Estimated words: 18755 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 94(@200wpm)___ 75(@250wpm)___ 63(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 18755 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 94(@200wpm)___ 75(@250wpm)___ 63(@300wpm)
Aargh.
Kendra did her best to look innocent. "I don't know what you're talking about."
Her husband only smiled, and dear, oh dear!
She knew now wasn’t the right time to think about anything but her survival, but Dario’s calmness was contagious, and more importantly than that, the way that smile was playing over his lips...
It just made her toes curl so hard because she knew.
Now that she had been married to him for over a week, she had of course taken the time to secretly gobble up anything and everything that was written about him, and that was why she knew Dario La Rocca had never been photographed smiling.
But here he was.
Smiling.
At her.
His wife.
Dario looked surprised when she suddenly raised herself on her toes and kissed him on the cheek.
"What was that for?"
"A secret."
He shook his head. "You never fail to surprise me."
"Good."
He laughed. "You look like a proud little kitten."
"Meow."
The word simply slipped out of her, but the moment it did, and the moment she saw his gaze gleam—
"Ah, cara.”
Why did it feel like she had just done something really, really bad?
“I'll have to reward you for that later."
"I'm good!" Because she totally was, with how he was saying reward like it was a punishment. The kind of punishment that involved his hands and his mouth and approximately zero clothing, and she needed to stop thinking about this immediately.
"But I insist."
She hastily looked for a way to change the subject and turned to the screens and—
Kendra almost gasped when she saw something move on one of the feeds.
That was...the bedroom.
Why was there someone else in the penthouse when it should only have been the two of them—
"You've finally noticed."
Dario's voice had changed. Not the tone. The temperature. Like someone had opened a window in winter and the cold was coming from inside him.
He tapped the zoom key. Once. Twice. Three times.
And Kendra's blood went cold.
Thelma.
In their bedroom.
And she was rummaging through Kendra's clothes.
Again.
It was happening all over again.
Why?
The word covered everything and nothing. Why the clothes. Why their bedroom. Why here, why now, why again, always again—
"Do you trust me, cara?"
Her heart. It was breaking into pieces all over again.
But this time...
This time...
Kendra had already decided.
And that's how she heard herself whisper, "Yes."
For one moment, Dario simply gazed at her.
She swallowed hard. "I trust you."
He yanked her close, his mouth crushing hers in a kiss that tasted like a vow, and when he lifted his head, every shattered piece of her heart had been put back together.
"There's something I need you to watch."
Her husband gently sat her down in front of the screens before he started typing again and they went a full hour back.
The lobby feed came first, and Kendra felt sick to her stomach at the way Thelma was just so confident in the way she pretended to be her, and even crying about losing her key and that was how she gained access to the penthouse apartment.
“They knew it wasn’t her,” Dario told her.
What? Then why—
“But we let her in because we wanted to see what she was up to.”
Dario played the living room feed next, and that was when she saw her twin start hiding cameras all over the penthouse. Why was Thelma doing these things?
She watched Thelma find the breaker panel—
Ah.
So that was why the power was out.
Kendra could feel her heart breaking all over again as her sister sauntered back to the bedroom she shared with Dario.
Her husband turned away when Thelma started to undress, but all she could do was stare. It was the worst kind of déja vu, watching Thelma slip into one of her nightgowns before smoothing it down.
I don’t understand.
Kendra only realized she was crying when her husband wiped her tears.
"I'm sorry," she managed. "I'm just so stupid. I don't know why she keeps doing this. And I just...I just can't make myself hate her and I don't want to, I'm sorry."
"You do not have anything to apologize for, cara."
"So you like me stupid?"
"Not stupid, but kind."
She was sure he still meant stupid, but it was adorable how her husband had changed, considering he had pretty much called her an idiot the first time they met.
"What do you want us to do about your sister?"
Afterward, Dario gave instructions to Bonnie, and when Bonnie walked into the bedroom feed, Kendra watched her twin's face change in real time.
The cheerful woman who ate too much pasta and wanted to scout the library was gone. In her place was the Bonnie from the car, the one with the closed-door face, and Thelma—Thelma who was never rattled, Thelma who had smiled from Porter's bed like she owned it—actually stumbled getting out of the sheets.
It was Kendra's first time seeing her twin clumsy.
Thelma's face lost all its color when Bonnie pulled up the footage on a tablet and held it in front of her. Every second. The lobby. The breaker. The cameras. The nightgown. All of it, timestamped and recorded, playing back at her like a mirror that showed what you actually looked like instead of what you wanted to see.