I would never make eye contact with Hettie again.
The silence that gripped Dallas’s bedroom when Hettie had found me at eight in the morning and untied me from the bed—sticky, melted whipped cream scarcely covering my morning wood—was deafening.
She tried to loosen the knot manually at first.
Then, after a three-minute struggle, she huffed. “Goddammit, out of all the women you could’ve gotten engaged to, you chose the one with James Bond’s combat skills?”
“Trust me, no one is less excited than me about the pending nuptials. Now go get some scissors, and while you’re at it, drape the blanket over my nether region.”
File under: a sentence I never thought I’d tell someone I hired to steam my broccolini.
“Nether region?”
“My cock, Hettie. By God, does anyone under thirty have a vocabulary not borrowed directly from TikTok?”
She’d seen my scars.
I was certain of it.
So had my fiancée. Both had the good sense not to probe, though.
Still, I didn’t like that people knew. I didn’t like that they could guess. I didn’t like the reminder that once upon a time, I was weak, too.
My first stop was the shower, where I scrubbed off any remains of sugar and cream and punched the tiles until at least two of my knuckles bled.
Afterwards, I wore my best suit, slipped three gums into my mouth, and grabbed my phone, informing the world I was, much to its disappointment, still alive.
I’d never gone MIA for over four consecutive hours to sleep. Work thought I’d accidentally driven myself off a cliff.
No doubt Costa Industries’ employees were saddened to discover I was still among the living.
My bedside manner didn’t win me many fans and admirers.
While Jared drove me to work, he also informed me that my cunning fiancée was lodged in The Grand Millennium Regent. One of von Bismarck’s high-end elite hotels.
In a fifteen-thousand-dollars-a-night suite, of course.
It took me less than five minutes to cancel all of her credit cards, relocate her Henry Plotkin books from her room to a locked safe in mine, and wipe the kitchen and pantry of anything savory.
Needless to say, whipped cream was permanently banned from the premises.
I also cut Netflix and the Xfinity package, then the Internet, for good measure. My tantalizing bride didn’t need entertainment. She needed to think about what she’d done.
Next time I saw her, she was going to promise me her forever.
And I was going to take it.
Just to fucking spite her.
