as humanly possible in these damn heels into the Belladonna offices.
“Oh Mama, it was awful,” I cry, tears leaking down my cheeks. I sit, legs folded, beside her grave and the beautiful statue of her likeness, just like I used to do by her bedside. Thornfield, my childhood home, looms in the distance like a comforting monument to sameness in the midst of all this change. This small ancestral graveyard is at the east edge of the property.
“I’ve made a mess of everything.” I look up at her, beautiful and serene, the sunshine lighting the cold planes of her stone statue. It’s nothing like her and yet better than anything else I have. Right now I’m clinging to anything of her I can get. I need her so much right now.
“Adam wanted to talk after the board meeting but I ran away like a coward after a few minutes. He’s sincere and nice but he treats me like he’s just going to come in and fix everything. Like I can’t do anything myself. And gods, maybe I can’t. Look at how I screwed it all up when I was CEO.”
“And when I tried to tell him I couldn’t marry him for real, he just said I was exhausted and that he’d take care of everything. Instead of fighting, I said he was right and I was going to go home and sleep. So then I was going to go straight back to Logan’s to explain everything but instead I came here.”
Thunder rumbles in the distance and clouds cover the sun, casting my mother’s beautiful face in shadow. Like she, too, is turning her face away from me, wherever she is in the heavenly fields of paradise.
I bend over her grave, my tears falling and salting the ground. “Please,” I beg. “Don’t leave me alone. You always knew what to do. You knew how to handle Daddy when he was being impossible and you always made me feel better no matter how bad things got and I—”
“So now you show up at your mother’s grave.”
I choke out in shock at the voice and swing around. Logan! He’s standing not five feet behind me. I jump to my feet and start to run towards him when I notice his face.
His features are cruel and angry.
He saw. He saw the news.
When he grabs my hand and holds it up, exposing Adam’s ring still on my finger, I know for sure. He throws my hand away roughly in disgust.
“You lied to me,” he spits.
“No, wait, Logan, it’s not what you think—” I start but he swiftly cuts me off.
“Are you engaged to Adam fucking Archer?”
“I- I mean, well technically, but not—”
Before I can get another word out, though, Logan’s crossed the few feet between us and his hand is at my throat. “Faithless whore,” he spits. “Our bed wasn’t even cold before you were off spreading your legs for him. I was just practice, I suppose, to break you in like a bitch in heat?”
I slap him. Hard. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
His hand at my throat squeezes and he moves so that his face is only an inch from mine. And I can’t help it. My body is trained to respond to his dominance. I liquify beneath him. My curves soften to his hard muscle.
And he feels it. For a second, I see a glimmer of Logan, my Logan in his glittering blue eyes before they turn back to ice. “Is this how you were with him? Did your cunt soften and squirt when he touched you?”
He reaches down, roughly shoves up the skirt of my dress, and grabs my crotch. I have to fight my back arching into his touch.
“I ought to slap you again,” I grit out through my teeth.
“Is that a yes?” he all but yells, gripping my sex harder as fury flashes in his eyes.
“No one but you has ever touched me there, Master!” I yell at him, just as furious. I know it looks bad, but doesn’t he have any faith in me? In what we shared together? He wouldn't even let me tell him my side of things!
He just shakes his head at me. “I can’t believe a word out of your lying mouth.”
I deflate. So that’s how it will be. The truth doesn’t matter to him. Only his stupid, misguided vendetta. I shove him in the chest. “Then let me go,” I shout, rallying again. “If you won’t believe me, then there’s no point