Page 1 of Between Commitment and Betrayal
1
EVERLY
“She won’t be coming over,”I heard from the doorway of the yoga studio room. The smile on my face dropped off like a ton of bricks.
It’d been only two months of me living in sunny Florida with my estranged father, but it felt like two lifetimes. I met his blue-eyed gaze with my own. The color of them was about the only thing my father had handed down to me. “Carl, seriously?” I whispered.
“Mr. Milton, don’t you think your daughter can make the decision herself?” Wes Bauer rolled up his yoga mat and stood up near me.
“Icanmake that decision myself,” I pointed out, combing a hand through the waves of my hair that had succumbed to the rigorous workout.
My father scoffed, his face turned beet red. “I agreed to you working here at the fitness center for us to build a relationship, Evie. This isn’t the way to do it.”
I sighed, “Can we talk about this later, Carl?”
“We’ll talk now.” He shook his finger at me.
This was why I hadn’t seen him in eighteen years. Carl Milton was truly a baby, an only child that had inherited a fortune from grandparents I had never met. He’d gone on to live a life where no one defied him, leaving my mom and me when I was just six years old because we “weren’t good listeners.”
He’d actually only agreed to have me come work for his fitness center after my mother guilted him into it. She’d said I needed to escape my hometown and start a new life away from the graduate school I’d dropped out of.
She was right, of course. I knew that. I was drowning under a deep sea of pain that I couldn’t swim above. I’d planned to leave and start anew somewhere else, but I’d never wanted it to be here.
Yet, Carl insisted. Said he was going into heart failure, that he should be getting to know his only biological daughter.
I’d given in to the naive hope of the little girl still wanting her father’s love and relocated halfway across the country to Florida two months ago.
Like an idiot.
“If you go, I’ll call Declan.” Carl announced, and Wes groaned as he tightened the dark man bun on his head.
“Call me for what?” Declan Hardy’s voice was always strong. Deep. Authoritative enough that it commanded all the attention in the room even as all six foot three of him leaned casually against the doorframe. With chiseled muscle and a famous, beautiful face, the retired NFL star had not a care in the world—even though he’d intruded on someone’s private conversation.
My seething father huffed as he walked over to his business partner. “Evie thinks she’s going to a party at this asshat’s house again. Please, for my sake and our business, take care of it.”
With that, he walked out, leaving me with that wordagainbouncing around in my head.
Again.That was the real problem. This wasn’t the first time my father had intervened in my dating life. He’d called Declan a month ago and had himfly into retrieve me from Wes’s house.
Fly. Like in an airplane.And Declan had just gone along with it, knocked on Wes’s door, and demanded I leave. That was the world I was living in. To them, I was Carl’s precious daughter, breaking a cardinal rule.
Wes chuckled and winked at me before he said, “I’ll swing by and pick you up at the end of your shift, Evie.” He stalked out of the studio, holding Declan’s gaze as he murmured back to me, “Maybe you can stay the night.”
My father’s business partner flicked his vivid green eyes to me with that comment, capturing my stare and holding it hostage like he owned it. I saw the spark of anger, the question, and the entitlement.
“Everly,” he ground out, his voice rumbling so deep in his throat before it emerged that I shivered.
Tension ricocheted off the windows and the mirrors as I stood nonresponsive, the silence engulfing us. I let the quiet stretch on and on, unwilling to give him an iota of the information that I knew he must want. He didn’t deserve it nor was he entitled to it. Yet, even still, my whole body practically shook with the need to submit to him, to give up control to him.
Did he have this effect on everyone? So dominating and attractive that he could bend most people to his will? He thought he could just silently lean against a doorframe and make a person to answer a question he hadn’t even asked yet.
His jaw ticked up and down, up and down before he dropped the question so casually, I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right. “How many times have you slept with him?”
I blinked once. Twice. Three times before the words registered. Anger, hot as molten rock, flowed through my blood as my mouth dropped open at his audacity.“Are you serious?” I breathed out, twisting the towel I held in my hands. Then I wiped it over my face, trying my best not to freak out. With a wet sports bra that had the HEAT logo on it, my curls frizzed out, and only twenty minutes until my next one-on-one training session, I shouldn’t have even been entertaining the ridiculous conversation.
And yet, it was technically with my boss.
“Yes, Everly.” He pushed off the doorframe and stepped toward me. Hissing my full name like no one else would was another show of him trying to grate on my nerves. I just knew it. And on top of that, he came close to tower over me like he could intimidate me. “How many times did you sleep with that fucker?”
