Page 119 of Sweet Wicked Vows

Benny quickly turned the car around and took me to a hotel when my panic attack took full flight.

“What are you doing here?” I swerved from his question. “Spying on me?”

“I’m here with a friend.” He motioned to the corner of the bar where a woman sat with a baseball cap hiding her face. “You were too busy throwing your pity party. You didn’t see me when you came in.”

Was it wrong to punch him in public? The bar definitely didn’t strike me as a place that would have cared. The floor was disgusting enough that a mouthful of blood wasn’t going to make a difference.

“Go back to your friend, Olivier.”

“Whatever is going on between you and Evelyn, I am sure you can make it right.”

“It’s none of your concern,” I said firmly. “And even if it was your concern, I tried talking to her and she doesn’t want to hear it. We’re done. It’s over.”

Fuck.

It was over. The words tasted bitter. The bar swirled aroundme, the ten bourbons suddenly unleashing their fury like a woman scorned.

Olivier frowned. “Was it worth it?”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“The reason you married her,” he said calmly. “Whatever plan you and Frederic cooked up, was it worth losing her for it? Did you get what you truly wanted in the end?”

My body tensed.

A year ago, I would have paid any price to bring Lexington down because that’s what the young rage-fueled and revenge-driven me believed.

Lexington may have pushed our father toward the path he stumbled down, but it was no one else’s fault that our father blindly followed the road to alcoholism.

He chose to neglect his wife.

He chose to bask in pity and accept defeat.

I guess all it took was falling in love with the daughter of the man I once called my enemy for me to realize that Lexington was as much to blame as my own father was.

“That’s what I thought,” Olivier filled the silence. “I saw how you were with her at Christmas. The way you looked at her, Jax. I mean, you can’t fake that.”

I tried to reach for my drink, grinding my teeth together when he moved it further away. “It doesn’t matter anymore. She’s gone.”

“You love her.” He pinned me with a hard stare. “And for whatever stupid reason, you blew it all away because, let me guess, Frederic?”

Annoying shit. Why was he my favorite brother again?

“It wasn’t just Frederic,” I said tightly. “It may have started out as his idea, but I played my part in it too and didn’t stop until it was too late.”

He sighed heavily. “It’s never too late, not if she is truly whatyou want.”

“I—” A lump wedged itself painfully in my throat. She was all I wanted, and it scared the living shit out of me. Wanting her, loving her, when she couldn’t even stand to look at me, it was like drinking battery acid. “I hurt her. There’s no coming back from that.”

“You start with apologizing then.”

I scoffed with bitter laughter. “You don’t understand, an apology is pointless. I lied to her for nearly a year. She thought our marriage was for mutually beneficial business reasons when the reality was that I was ripping her father’s business apart from the inside. I was the one who was leaking files.” I slipped my hands through my hair, tugging at the roots to center myself. “I was going to strike the final blow at the right time and leave her father’s business in ashes at her feet. The Reynolds name would be blacklisted, her family’s reputation in tatters. And I’d simply walk away and leave her in the depths of my destruction.”

If anything I said horrified my brother, he didn’t let it show.

“I made her think we were friends,” my voice croaked. “I told her whatever it took at the start to get what I wanted. Hell, I wanted her to love me. I wanted her to make it easier for me. If she loved me, she’d never suspect my true intentions. My own twisted ugliness inside thrived off it.”

I know soon this will be nothing more than a bad dream for you, but I will always be your friend Jaxon.

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