Page 288 of Now and Forever

Chapter 105

Stella

“Callum.” His large frame ensconced my body as I regulated my breathing back to normal. We showered, but we hadn’t had sex whilst in there. In fact, I had never been so erotically charged as I’d watched him soap my body, avid with curiosity.

“Stella.”

Call it a gut-inkling or what of it, but the moment I came into his home and found him passed out on his desk, I knew something was wrong. A person wouldn’t intentionally get that inebriated unless something had happened; a critical matter. Especially having an idea of what kind of man Callum was, something was going on behind those guarded, dark eyes.

When he took me this time, he was the same. His usual hunger was apparent, but it somehow felt less passionate, more like he was being haunted by something. I felt like he truly was fucking me then. The shift was monumental. Don’t get me wrong, he was still dynamite in bed, but it lacked meaning.

The thing was, I didn’t know how to approach the subject without sounding like a nosy person. Whatever was bothering him, I wanted him to know that I was here, too. Apart from sex, I could be here for him to lean on. Like a person he could use as a crutch if he needed a friend to be there for him or simply because he needed to vent it out.

“Do you want to talk about what’s bothering you?” I took a deep breath before I pulled away a bit, needing to watch his reaction. “You can talk to me, you know. Whatever it is.”

Callum instantly looked guarded. He took a quick glance at me before he blew out a deep breath. He looked discomfited before his gaze concentrated on the wall across the room, deep in thought.

I was now on my side with my knuckle against my head, holding it up as I waited for him to speak.

“I loved a woman once. Zara. She was everything I wanted, needed. If she had just given me time, I could have given her everything she’d ever hoped for.”

Shit. I was almost sure it was work stress. My father used to be this way when things at work became too heavy for him. So for Callum to speak about someone he loved once was a massive throat punch for me. I didn’t know the woman, and yet, I was already jealous. She’d had Callum in a way I never could, but sometimes I had let myself wander off towards that route and imagine what life would be like if he did love me. However, hearing how he was talking, this woman had been a significant part of him… and still was, presently.

In the calmest voice I could muster, I tried to speak without sounding like I was demanding more information because, let’s face it, I was dying to know what the hell was going on. For him to drown in two bottles of brandy, it must’ve been of epic proportion. “What happened to her?”

His throat bobbed a few times, as though it was difficult for him to speak. When he finally did, I was gob smacked. “She married my father.” His arm flung across to cover his eyes, conflicted. “She came to see me earlier.”

Damn.

Fucking damn. Was this the end of us? We’d barely just started and I really enjoyed being with him, but if he loved her still—which I was almost one hundred percent sure that he did—then I was just a tiny blip in his history of women.

“What did she want?”

“She came to tell me that she was going to be a free woman soon. That my father offered her family a way out of bankruptcy as long as she married him and never contacted me for three years and, after that time frame, they’d divorce.” He took a moment, thinking. “She heard about our engagement. Knowing that she’d be a free woman soon, she thought it was time to warn me off, so that I didn’t marry anyone because she wants me to wait for her.” He sounded quite torn, like he was having a hard time what to believe anymore… but there was a part of him that wanted to believe Zara.

Deep down, I knew what I had with Callum wasn’t cheap or sordid, but right this instant, it kind of felt like it was. I was here, sharing his bed, his home, all due to our sexual needs. That’s merely a minor problem because, somehow, I had only just realized that what I was feeling was way past jealousy. Through our odd back and forth banter, I was falling for him; my fake husband.

This unnecessary complication, I knew, would never be told to anyone else. Not even Mark or Lucia. This was information I would keep hidden because the second Callum found out about it, he’d be gone from my life in flash. Even if this wasn’t going to survive, I’d at least treasure his friendship and I wasn’t going to risk being a besotted fool over us being friends.

I’m not some girl who would fold when the going gets tough. I could very well do this. Who knew, maybe someday I’d date and fall in love again. Somehow, out of the blue, Clive’s face surfaced out of nowhere.

Really, who knew what the future held for me? It seemed that mine was full of surprises. I had to take everything in strides; the black, white and the gray.

I was, after all, the only von Berg left. I was a tough cookie. My mind was on a good roll of pep talk, but my heart was plummeting and, like any woman, we always had to know the answer to the most important question of all.

“Do you still love her?”

It was a nail to puncture my heart.

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