Page 81 of Accidental Vegas Vows

“Don’t.” My throat ached around the word. It felt raw, sounded raw, and I almost wished I’d had the forethought to pack my things and leave before he came home. But I couldn’t do that to Noah.

“Can I explain?” he asked, a thump from his step as his legs slowly entered my field of vision.

I sniffled and wiped at my dry eyes out of instinct. “I don’t want your excuses,” I choked. “How long have you had them?”

He took a deep, noisy breath in before he spoke again. “A week and a half.”

“You’ve been lying to me for a week and a?—”

“No,” he interjected, slowly lowering himself into the leather chair that sat opposite his desk. His suit jacket, his button-up, his tie — I could see it all except his face. I didn’t want to see that, though, didn’t want to see whatever anguished expression he was pulling as if I was the one hurting him. “I’ve been lying to you for two days. I was avoiding the question before that.”

“That doesn’t make it better,” I scoffed.

“I know that,” he said, his tone far too gentle, too soft. “I do.”

A heavy, charged silence fell over us. I gripped onto myself, digging my nails into my exposed skin, wishing, wanting to have never agreed to any of this. For a shattering second, I didn’t care that it would mean I wouldn’t have what was growing inside of me, and the shocking wave of guilt from that thought only drove my emotions to a peak.

For the first time in what felt like hours, I moved, but only enough to drop my forehead to my knees. I needed to breathe, needed to get a handle on myself, but I wasn’t sure if I could. How much better was I when I was keeping something from him, too?

No. They aren’t the same. I was keeping my secret to guard him from another overbearing stress when he had so many already.

He was keeping this from me to ensure I stayed put.

“Liv,” he swallowed, the chair creaking beneath him. When he spoke again, his voice came from above, as if he’d stood up again and was leaning across his desk. “I’m so sorry. I made a horrible choice but I need you to understand that I didn’t do it to hurt you. I did it?—”

“I know why you did it,” I sobbed. The lack of tears felt so wrong when my body was doing everything else that came with crying — the stuffy nose, the shaking breaths, the urge to crawl into myself and never come out. “That’s the hardest fucking part.”

For the first time since he’d started speaking, I could hear the pain in his voice. “I didn’t know what else to do,” he croaked. “Ethan said this was the only thing that would work. And you’d already made it incredibly clear that staying married to me was the last thing you wanted. But I—I couldn’t risk losing him. I’m sorry, Liv. I’m so… fuck, I’m so sorry.”

His heavy breathing, his steps back, forced me to lift my head, to look at him.

There, across the desk from me and a few paces away, he stared at me. The same blue eyes that I saw in his son were fixed on me, reflecting the soft golden rays of sunlight that poured in from behind me, far too glossy and damp. The fine lines across his forehead had deepened, and one hand pushed back the once-styled mess of black and gray hair atop his head. He looked genuinely frightened, and I knew exactly why I’d avoided this, why I’d kept myself from looking at him.

Seeing him like that only made me want to fix it. But I was the one who was broken here.

Still, I couldn’t stop myself, couldn’t hold myself back from slipping into those people pleasing tendencies that I needed to reign in desperately. “You could have asked me, Damien. You could have told me that was what you needed. But you lied.”

“You would have said no and I would have been fucking screwed,” he shot back, a mixture of anger and anguish in his tone. I rocked back from the blow. “Shit, Liv, I’m sorry?—”

“Fuck you.” His insinuation that I wouldn’t have bent over backward for him was a low enough blow that it snapped me out of it. I moved again, finally regaining some kind of composure over myself, and forced my body up and out of the chair. “If you think for one second that I wouldn’t have put my needs aside to ensure that Noah ended up with you, then you are out of your Goddamn mind.”

“You said?—”

“You think I give a fuck what I said?” I snapped, wiping the snot from my nostrils with the back of my hand. God, my throat felt raw. “Do you understand how much I have given to you? Do you understand the lengths I have gone to, for you? I watched your son. I moved into your home.”

“Liv, please?—”

“I practically gave up my personal life, my time at the office, my reputation at the office, for you. I assumed the role of a fucking parent, for you. I gave you a part of myself that I vowed I wouldn’t give to anyone but the person I’d spend the rest of my Goddamn life with. I have kept everything bottled inside of myself, every feeling I have for you, so that you wouldn’t have another stressor on your plate. And you’re going to sit there and tell me that I wouldn’t have given a shit if you needed me to stay married to you for Noah’s sake? No. Absolutely not. If it came down to my personal comfort versus Noah having a stable, loving home, I would have picked the latter. And you should have known that, but you couldn’t even bring yourself to ask me.”

Wide blue eyes stared so intensely into mine that I thought, for a moment, that I might have broken him. Breaths came and went with at least a couple hundred heartbeats, and all I could do was stare right back.

Why the fuck didn’t I leave?

“Then I’m asking you now,” he rasped, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he forced himself to swallow. “Stay married to me, for Noah. We can schedule the court date right after the custody hearing.”

I clenched my teeth to keep my jaw from wobbling. Every part of my body screamed to run, but my head and my heart were two blaring exceptions — they still wanted to please him. And they had the most sway. “Fine,” I breathed. “But you don’t fucking deserve it.”

Chapter 32

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