Page 15 of Best In Class
Why did he have to cheat on me?Seriously! Anything else I could forgive and maybe even forget, but he was fucking another woman! My heart is still hurting from that wound.
My father cheats on my mother.Still.
They’ve been married forever, and he sleeps around. It’s like an incurable disease. And my mother pretends it’s nothappening. She takes her Xanax, her bottle of wine, and whatever else her doctor has prescribed, and wanders through life like a freaking zombie.
Jenn Steele checked out of being a wife, mother, and human a long time ago. She just couldn’t handle the devastation of loving a man more than he loves her. I promised myself I would not be her.
I will not be my mama. The frail ghost who laughs too hard at my father’s unfunny jokes, and looks away when everyone in Savannah knows he’s got a new side piece.
My father—the great Nathaniel Steele—is a prick, and then some. He nearly squandered the generational wealth handed to him on a silver platter. If it weren’t for Lev and me using the trust funds he couldn’t touch, there wouldn’t be a Steele Corporation any longer.
The company now sustainably manages vast tracts of southern pine and hardwood forests—thanks to Lev. And while our father still holds a few shares and reaps the benefits, the only reason he can afford the life he leads—living on the estate, funding his mistresses—is because Lev allows it. Lev pays for both his life and our mother’s.
I avoid my parents. Both of them.
Lev still sees them, mostly because he can’t bring himself to abandon our mother. I had to. I couldn’t keep watching her dissipate into nothingness, slowly vanish under the weight of pills, silence, and disappointment. She became just another casualty of the rich and callous men that Savannah society was built to protect.
She was once elegant, sharp, even loving in her brittleway. But years married to my father hollowed her out until all that was left was a beautiful ghost, drifting through cocktail parties and prescription refills.
I love her, but it’s in the way you love someone who stopped choosing you a long time ago.
So, I walked away.
Because watching her fade while my father continues to win will eventually break me.
I know it.
Forgiving Dom, accepting that he cheated on me, will also break me.
I know it.
As tempting as it is to fall back into old patterns with Dom—to let him be my home, especially when he calls me Moonbeam—I can’t. I won’t. Because I refuse to become Jennifer Steele. I refuse to become my mother’s daughter.
Which, of course, means Dom and I clash. Hard. At every opportunity.
Just yesterday, we met to finalize the blueprints, and if Stella hadn’t held me back, I might have punched him. It didn’t help that, once I’d cooled off and actually reviewed his notes with a clear head, I realized every single one of his suggestions made perfect sense.
The man is fucking with my head!
I’m cool at work; I get the job done with no nerves. Steele is not just a last name but part of my identity. Enter Dom, and I’m a mass of contradictions.
Maybe I need to get laid, I think as I go into Nina’soffice. My boss and friend has summoned me. I think I know what this is about.
“Close the door,” Nina instructs without looking up from her laptop.
She’s perched behind her minimalist desk, wearing a navy silk blouse and a power bun. Savannah Lace’s glass-walled conference room might have been designed for intimidation, but Nina owns it like a throne room.
The CEO of Savannah Lace is so sharp that she could slice through drywall.
I push the door shut and sit across from her.
Nina peers at me over the rim of her reading glasses, the kind of look that means trouble’s coming. “Care to explain why the two lead architects on the most high-profile project in Savannah are also starring in what appears to be a slow-burn workplace rom-com?”
I inhale sharply and let it out in an exasperated huff. “What on earth are you talking about?”
She doesn’t even blink. “Drop the ‘who, me?’ routine. I’m talking about you and Dom Calder.”
I open my mouth to protest, but she cuts me off with a raised hand.
