Chapter 65

I fucking love when she falls asleep on me while watching TV. How her soft pink lips part a little and she scrunches her cute button nose when she’s dreaming. I love that when I came home from work today, she was here. Her presence pervades every inch of my penthouse—the lingering scent of her perfume, her books in the kitchen, the food she likes in the fridge, the stack of magazines on the coffee table. Even in my bedroom, the place she hasn’t set foot in for months, she lingers there, and the memories of all of the nights she spent in my bed are starker now with her here.

I only have three more nights until Tyler comes back and she goes home, and I’m no clearer on what the fuck I want to do. No clearer on what she wants. We share this space like we’re best friends, but the reminder that we were so much more than that is never far away. The chemistry is still there, and if I’m honest with myself, I would have had her in my bed by now if she wasn’t recovering from a miscarriage. I would be fucking her every goddamn night and day.

Our divorce papers sit in the safe in my office, waiting for me to file them to make it all official. I guess I have three days to figure out if I’m going to. Or if she wants me to. I look down at her beautiful face. The lies she told me at the start of our marriage seem so far away from where we are now. And if she’s telling the truth about her part in all that, those lies are insignificant compared to the hell we’ve endured the past couple weeks.

My phone vibrates beside me, Drake’s face lighting up the screen. I answer with a whisper, careful not to wake her. “Hey.”

“Hey, I have all that paperwork drafted. I’ll email it over and you can take a look.”

“Already? I only asked you this morning. Don’t you ever take time off?”

He laughs. “You already know the answer to that, bro. Besides, it was an easy fix. Provided the current CEO agrees to the terms, nothing is contentious.”

“Oh, he’ll agree,” I say with a low growl.

“Well, yeah. You got him trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey.” Drake laughs again. “You need me to do anything else with this right now?”

“No. I’m going to sit on it. Just wanted to have the option if we need it.”

“Okay.” Drake yawns loudly. “In that case, I’m gonna call it a night.”

“Good night, buddy. And thanks.”

He mumbles a good night and ends the call.

I brush a strand of hair back from Mel’s forehead, and she smiles contentedly. I’ve missed that fucking smile.

But her eyelids flicker open, and the smile fades. My heart aches for her. It’s like each time she wakes up, she remembers again, and I wish I could stop her pain. “Did I fall asleep on you again? I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

She sits up and stretches. “I’ll have to stop getting used to this. Tyler hates it when I fall asleep on him.”

I don’t want her falling asleep on anyone but me. A phantom clock ticks away the minutes in my mind, reminding me that I only have three more nights of her sitting on this sofa with me. Yeah, I need to figure out what the fuck I’m gonna do because I know exactly what I want.

I stand on the front porch, waiting to be shown into the house, rolling my neck to ease the tension tightening my muscles. I tap my foot and grind my jaw. Is she fucking kidding me? I bang on the door again, and a few seconds later, a housekeeper answers.

“I’m here to see Miranda.”

She blinks at me.

“I called ahead,” I growl.

The housekeeper nods and allows me inside, leading me to a sitting room where Melanie’s mother is perched on an armchair, sipping what looks like sweet tea.

She casts her eyes over me, not bothering to disguise her disdain, which is fine by me because I fucking hate her as much as I hate her son.

“Nathan James.” She sneers. “To what do I owe this pleasure?”

I sit down in the armchair opposite her and brace my elbows on my knees. “All I want is the truth, Miranda. If you have a single ounce of motherly love for your daughter in your body, then give me the fucking truth. Did she know anything about what Bryce was planning? That he was still going ahead with his plan to set me up?”

She lights a cigarette and takes a long drag, her narrowed pale green eyes scrutinizing my face. Blowing out a long stream of blue smoke, she crosses her legs. “Melanie wasn’t involved.”

“With any of it?”

She flicks the end of her cigarette into an ornately jeweled ashtray. “He told her about the honey trap idea before you two were married, but she wasn’t aware of how far Bryce was willing to go.”

The memory of that night in the hotel has rage simmering beneath my skin. “She didn’t know he was planning to have me drugged?”

Miranda shakes her head.

I snarl. “Did you?”

She rolls her eyes. Of course she fucking did.

“Did she know something was going to happen in Chicago?” My heart stops beating while I wait for what feels like eternity. I believe Mel knew nothing about the drugs, but did she come to my office that afternoon knowing that her brother was setting me up?

She takes another long drag of her cigarette, her eyes boring into mine. “No.”

I sink back into the chair, running a hand through my hair. Relief and regret roll in my stomach. Mel has been telling me the truth. In my heart I knew that, but I guess a part of me needed to hear it.

“A few weeks after you were married, Melanie told Bryce that there was no need to go ahead with his idea, and when he refused to back down, she begged him. He promised her he wouldn’t go through with it to get her out of his hair.”

“Did she tell him why she had a change of heart?”

Miranda scoffs. “My daughter always was a dreamer, Mr. James.”

I clench and unclench my fists, barely able to contain my rage. “What did she say?”

She purses her lips, the fine lines around them becoming more pronounced on her otherwise taut, surgically enhanced complexion. “It wasn’t so much what she said as the ridiculous notion that she had about the two of you.”

I bare my teeth. “Which was?”

She rolls her eyes. “That it was love.”

Love? I frown, and she laughs. “Silly girl thought the two of you were falling in love.” She snorts. “Tried to convince us you’d loan us any money we needed if she simply asked you nicely.”

I suck in a deep breath, so many feelings racing through my head, but there’s one thing that I’m more sure of than I’ve ever been of anything, and Miranda should know it.

I stand and straighten my jacket. “It’s a shame you don’t have as much faith in your daughter as you do in your useless prick of a son, Miranda, because Mel was right.” She tips her head, her lips set in a thin grimace as she glares at me. “I would do anything for your daughter. I would have even financed you and your bottom-feeding son. Looks like you backed the wrong fucking horse.”