Page 35 of Prince Cheating Charming

Fuck.

I was going to have to submit to. . .marriage counseling.

CHAPTER 15

Alexander

It felt really shitty to walk into the room the next day for marriage counseling and see all of Delilah’s friends there, and realize they were her rocks. They were the ones supporting her without question. Not me. In fact, they were supporting her from any distress that I might cause her. The pain of my failure was like a jagged tear across my skin.

Everything she had said to me since announcing we were done had felt shitty, and her refusing to let me touch her, even to hold her, was shitty and made me sick to my stomach. And this was another painful, grueling blow to my ego and my heart.

I wanted to be the one supporting her. I wanted to be the one she looked to for advice and unfailing support and loyalty.

But instead I had repeatedly publicly betrayed her trust in me, making me the last person on earth she would confide in or look to for support.

For a moment, my knees almost buckled under me, the consequences of my incredibly shitty behavior washing over me in waves.

Numbly, I pulled the chair out across from Delilah.

I hadn’t eaten much this morning out of nerves, and it felt like I was stuck in a nightmare. This couldn’t be my life, sitting across a table from my stony-eyed and cold wife. It was only a few weeks ago she had looked at me with love in her eyes.

I desperately wished there was someone, anyone else I could blame for this. But I had to sit with the awful truth that it had all been my own goddamn fault. And I couldn’t even blame thinking with my dick. My dick was barely interested in the women I had fucked. I had just been wrapped up in the power, the prestige of being the prince. For my entire life, I had barely had to lift a finger to get what I wanted, and I was used to indulging myself with the smallest half-ass impulse.

Well, now things were different. I had thrown everything I had at Delilah.

And it had all failed.

She was unmoved. She didn’t love me anymore. She didn’t want to be with me. She only touched me to taunt me with what I couldn’t have.

And I deserved it all.

It was hard to control my memories to try to brainstorm ideas for getting her to give me a second chance. The memories came at me differently. Some memories burrowed under my skin with a prickly, needy heat. Like the time she had fallen to her knees after rock-climbing, pulling my cock out as her eyes sparkled with the naughty thrill of fucking each other in the woods. The way she had wrapped her legs tightly around my waist when we had sex, like she wanted to imprint me under her skin.

Some memories left me with an aching emptiness, like the memory of her curling into me in the middle of the night, which was so painful now that I woke up by myself every morning. And some memories were just painful jagged glass scrapes across my skin. The expression on her face when I had been caught fucking Jewel. The way her lip had curled when she caught me fucking Julia.

“I want to save this marriage,” I croaked out before any of them had the chance to say anything. “I want to save it more than anything else in the world. I’ll do anything, Delilah. I am desperate to fix this. I can’t accept that it’s over. I can’t let you go.”

“Silence, degenerate adulterer,” Magnus said irritably, lowering his spectacles down to his eyes and scanning the big ancient book I had found with this loophole, as if he was trying to figure out what the minimum effort on his part was.

“Are you all right taking notes?” he asked Roger as the big man reluctantly sat down in the chair. Great. That meant there were three reluctant people here who thought this marriage shouldn’t be saved, with one desperate man who would do anything to save it.

Me.

And before I knew it Libby was in there, too, bringing in mugs of steaming tea as an obvious pretext for snooping on the counseling.

“Let’s see the passage,” Delilah said coldly. “Make sure it isn’t another thing he’s lied about.”

“Nothing I’ve said is a lie!” I cried desperately, feeling tears already starting to prickle behind my eyes.

She ignored me, scanning the passage.

“It’s legit,” she said reluctantly.

Magnus sighed, and then took several long slurps of his tea. Did the old savage Archbishop guess how close I was to tears? Fuck fuck fuck.

“How did you feel learning that Alexander was a liar?” Magnus asked Delilah, fixing me with his steely gray eyes behind his spectacles.

I let out a strangled gulp.

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