Page 109 of Braving the Storm
A man turns in his seat, designer glasses perched on his nose, dark hair perfectly styled into the look he’s always favored, one that screams fortune five hundred CEO, with a maroon cashmere sweater fitted to his lean frame.
My rat bastard, cheating husband.
Antoine still has the audacity to wear his wedding band, that 18-karat gold ring gleams at me as he gets to his feet and pulls out a chair.
I’m fighting the urge to vomit all over his thousand-dollar loafers.
“You bitch.” Ignoring the man standing before me, I want to reach across the table and claw my sister’s eyes out.
“Aren’t you glad to see your husband?” She empties a sachet ofsweetener into her coffee, before stirring the contents I so dearly wish might contain arsenic.
“Briar, don’t make a scene, just take a seat.” The man I am legally chained to until I can get paperwork and lawyers and all sorts of shit I haven’t even begun to fathom handling, smiles at me with his unnervingly white row of veneers.
Or should I say fangs.
“Why are you both here?” I carefully put as much distance between myself and Antoine as possible. My skin crawls even being this close, that sickly perfumed fragrance of his aftershave gets stuck to the back of my throat.
“Like I told you on the phone, this is not a negotiation, Briar.” Cris rolls her eyes. “You’re coming home with us, and it looks like we’ve gotten here just in time. I can’t imagine the state we might have discovered you in if we’d left you squatting in that filthy hovel withhimany longer.”
If I were a Doberman, my hackles would be on end, and my razor-sharp teeth would be bared.
“I’m not going anywhere. This is home for me now. I want a divorce, and I want nothing more to do with Lane Enterprises, and—”
“That’s cute and all…” Antoine cuts me off, his finger taps on what I now notice is a Manila folder lying on the table. “But I think you’ll find yourself a little more compliant in a minute or so.”
My eyes shuffle between the folder and its mysterious contents, up to Antoine’s poker face, and over to my sister, who sips her coffee and watches me with beady eyes.
“Anything been going on that we should know about?” Cris says. “You know, the media does love a good scandal to feast on.”
“Your insinuations are boring, Crispin. Fly back to LA and focus on making someone else’s life miserable for a change.”
“Briar.” My shitty husband tries to make himself sound important, like I’m supposed to fall in line as he’s always expected me to, but I’m not in the mood for his threats.
“What, are you going to do, Antoine? Pull out a series of photosyour stupid PI has been running around snapping of me?” I jerk my chin at the folder, knowing there’s no way anyone could have taken anything incriminating of me and Storm together.
The places we’ve been are far too remote, too isolated, it’s not like we’re rolling around Crimson Ridge wrapped up in each other in a way that might be easy to spot.
Antoine gets a look on his face that says he’s already won, and the nauseous sensation really starts to build to a rolling boil.
He pulls out his phone from a pocket and lays it on the table in front of me. With a couple of taps of the screen, he brings up a video and my vision blurs at the edges, forming a tiny, dark tunnel. Sound distorts and fades into a faint buzzing in my ears as the recording starts to play.
… Your hot little mouth feels like heaven.
Just as the sound of that familiar husky voice speaks, and the sight of his name in inked lettering fills the camera frame—burying into my hair, tugging roughly, and commanding me to his bidding—I see the moment my tattoo comes into focus for the briefest second.
“You think I’d waste my time with PI’s?” Antoine leans close and sneers. “It’s called spyware, you dumb cunt. I’ve had access to everything on that phone of yours for years.”
Years. Not months. Not weeks.
This man who has been fucking around behind my back our entire sham of a marriage, had me monitored. While he was busy cheating, the asshole invaded my privacy on my own cell phone.
“How do you think Crispin knew where to find your sorry ass? We’ve known all this time, and I gave you a chance to do this the easy way. I gave you the opportunity to make a sensible choice, but you threw all that away.”
As I sit like a statue, growing more numb with every word, I see it all laid out. All the years of my life I gave up for these people. Guilted into trying to make amends for the fact my birth tore away our mother. A woman I never got to meet because the day I arrived was the day she was taken too soon. My fatherbegrudged me for destroying his whole world, and my sister allowed her grief to fester until she lost any semblance of humanity toward me.
So, I agreed to their business arrangements. I said yes and obliged their demands for subservience and shoved aside my own life because I didn’t deserve to live, did I?
When I’d taken away the person they loved so dearly.
