Page 4 of Bad Boy Husband

SADIE

T here was nothing quite like spending six hours straight standing on brittle, sun-dried grass for nothing to remind a person of how hopeless hope could feel sometimes. Cages of nervous, big-eyed dogs stood around me, but not one of them had found a forever home in our adoption drive.

Strands of my hair stuck to my neck in the afternoon heat. My cheeks were warm and my usual optimism was nowhere to be found. The downtown park had looked promising this morning. The tents had been newly erected and crisp, the volunteers fresh-faced and eager.

Now, however, it was late afternoon and the breeze had died down. The sun had turned merciless. The only thing still moving out here was Hooch’s tail as it thumped lazily under my folding chair.

Lisa, who’d been working at the shelter since I’d been in diapers, leaned her hip against a portable crate and gathered her graying hair to remake her ponytail. “Rough day, huh?”

“That’s an understatement,” I said, wiping sweat off my forehead with the back of my arm. My shirt clung to my skin and even my sneakers felt tired. “I don’t understand how this is possible. There were so many people here earlier. Did anyone even take an application form?”

“Don’t beat yourself up, kiddo,” she said as she shook her head.

“This happens every year. It’s the end of summer, people get busy, and kids go back to school.

Suddenly, the dog’s too much work on top of everything else.

Shelter numbers go up, adoptions drop off.

It’s like clockwork, but it’ll pick up again eventually. ”

I looked at the dogs lying flat from the heat, their water bowls full.

There was something like dejection in their eyes, all their energy sapped like they fully understood what had happened here today, and something sharp twisted behind my ribs.

“That doesn’t make it suck any less. People are the worst.”

Lisa nodded but shrugged with the kind of resignation that came from too many seasons of experiencing the same heartbreak over and over again.

It was awful, but it was also getting late.

I’d been hoping for a resurgence of families in the park once the worst heat of the day broke, but so far, there were only a few couples in the distance, staying far away from us.

Like maybe compassion is freaking contagious.

I sighed. The others had quietly started packing up and I joined them without saying a word, folding tents, loading crates, and collecting flyers from the ground and the benches.

It wasn’t just the poor turnout that weighed on me.

It was the steady, relentless truth of the fact that adoptions were slowing and donations were drying up.

The foundation I’d built with money I didn’t have anymore now barely had enough in its account to print new flyers, let alone pay off a vet bill or supply enough food to the shelters I tried to support.

Without meaning for it to happen, my mind drifted back to the Westwood party last weekend.

There had been enough money gathered in just CC’s closest group of friends to keep every shelter in the city fully stocked for at least the next fifty years—without even making a dent in their bank accounts or having to buy one less pair of shoes.

It irked me, but unfortunately, that wasn’t the only reason I was thinking about that party. Whenever I wasn’t actively focused on not thinking about him, it happened. Jameson wandered into my mind like he owned the right to be the only man on it.

I thought back to that moment when I’d looked over and realized he was standing just a few feet away, actually coming over to talk to me. Despite my personal feelings about him, Jamie was a real stunner.

Light brown hair that always fell a little messier than the Westwood standard. Hazel eyes, not the same, glacial blue of his brothers, that were warm and restless. He’d always had the kind of eyes that could make me forget the sharp edges of who he was supposed to be.

No matter how expensive or tailored the suit, he always wore it like it should consider itself lucky to be touching him.

He had that aloof charm that drew people in like bees to honey—if honey wore watches expensive enough to supply every last one of these dogs with a mansion and a staff of its very own.

I shook my head at myself. There was a lot more to Jameson Westwood than met the eye. A whole heck of a lot more than he ever let people see. But he wasn’t going to let me sell even one of his watches for the cause, which meant it was time to get my head back in the game.

The shelter was going through it right now and Trent had been annoyingly right. There was absolutely nothing I could do to help—and I hated it.

“It’ll go better next time, kiddo,” Lisa said when we both reached our cars. “Thanks for all your help today. I’ll see you soon, okay?”

“You bet.” I opened the back door for Hooch and watched Lisa climbing into her beat-up old Jeep.

Once upon a time, I’d planned on buying the shelter a brand-new, reliable vehicle of its own, but that was just another of the plans that had never come to fruition. I groaned and dragged both hands through my hair, reassembling my own damp ponytail before dropping into the driver’s seat of my car.

My phone buzzed. I pulled it out of my pocket, smiling when I saw a text from Laney light up my screen.

Laney Westwood: Swing by Baby Blossom before you go home?

Me: Have you got cold water and a couch available right underneath the air-conditioning unit?

Laney Westwood: No, but we can make a plan.

I chuckled but decided to stop there anyway. I didn’t have working air-conditioning in my apartment either. Whether or not Laney had a couch available for me underneath one, the store was still cooler than my place.

Plus, I hadn’t gotten to spend much time with her at the party. There had been too much going on and too many people wanting her and Sterling’s attention.

On the drive over, I wondered if maybe Sterling would be at Baby Blossom too. It wasn’t impossible. That dude was so in love with his wife, he could barely stand to be away from her for an hour. I smiled as I thought about it.

Sterling “The Ice King” Westwood in love. I never thought I’d see the day . That was part of the reason why I wanted to get his take on marriages of convenience, though. Jameson had offered to talk me through it, but what did he really know?

When I walked into the store a few minutes later, I looked around, but he was nowhere to be found. Disappointment raced through me until I saw Laney coming out of her office. She was gorgeously pregnant, glowing with just a little baby bump visible under her loose-fitting T-shirt.

“Hey, you made it,” she said happily, though her voice was gentle, like she could read the answer on my face before she’d even asked the question. “How’d it go today?”

I sighed and dropped into a velvet armchair near the back of the shop. “About as well as you’d expect when the highlight of the event was a six-year-old sticking gum in the donation jar.”

Her soft gray eyes met mine, her voice quiet but understanding. “You can’t save them all, Sadie.”

“I know,” I lied. “It was just rough to sit there feeling like my hands have been tied behind my back.”

She grimaced, offering me a bottle of icy water. I drained it in seconds while she tried to sound upbeat. “Maybe you need to rethink your marketing strategy. Hire someone to run ads for you, or maybe get a feature in the paper. Even just better Instagram reels could work. People love those.”

“With what money?” I asked, my voice sharper than I’d intended. “I don’t even know if I can keep the foundation paperwork current next quarter, let alone pay some marketing guru to help us gain traction. Those people charge like wounded buffalo.”

“We could ask Luella to help?” she suggested, referring to her youngest employee, a Gen-Z stereotype who’d been born with her phone glued to her hand and had a knack for Tik-Tok trends. “I’m sure she wouldn’t mind and?—”

“Yeah, maybe,” I cut across her. It wasn’t a bad idea, but I’d feel terrible asking her to invest her time without being able to pay for it. “I’ll think about it.”

Laney didn’t push but she never did. She was just there for me, silent, strong, and steadfast, letting me know I had a shoulder to cry on if I needed it.

“Distract me,” I said as she handed over another bottle of water. “I need a positivity injection. Let’s talk babies.”

She smiled and indulged me, even handing over an impossibly soft stuffed elephant for me to cuddle while we talked. Hooch lay by my feet after she’d given him a bowl of water too, and for just a little while, it felt like my world wasn’t ending.

People came and went. Customers stopped to chat with us before they went into the prenatal breathing class Anna, Laney’s other employee, was presenting. Hooch got plenty of love, too, and by the time we got home, I was feeling marginally better, but only temporarily before reality sank back in.

Laney’s booming business and awesome customers weren’t mine. I was still way up the creek without a paddle in sight. I fell backward on my bed, still in my rescue shirt and dusty jeans, and stared up at the water stain on the ceiling.

Maybe Trent was right and going back to Dallas to get married was the only play left. Hopefully, I could find someone rich and stupid enough, or maybe just lonely enough, to bankroll the only thing I’d ever really cared about.

Once again, my mind drifted to Jameson though, because of course it did. For so long, I’d avoided the Westwoods so that I wouldn’t have to see him. All because I’d known that if I did, all sorts of things would be stirred up inside me. And that was exactly what had happened.

After I’d heard about Laney though, curiosity had cracked the door wide open.

I’d gone to CC’s garden party to find out what all the buzz and the fuss was about, and I’d instantly liked her, but since Jamie was her brother-in-law, that meant my friendship with her had put him squarely back in my life.

Well, on the outskirts of it, but close enough that I could never forget he was there.

Most people saw him as the rakish heir, the second-born son the press had labeled as the bad boy when he’d been just a teen.

A guy with a permanent smirk on his perfectly oval-shaped lips who didn’t have two craps to give.

I knew the truth, though. Or at least, I knew enough of it to know that smirk hid something much quieter and sharper. Something that couldn’t sit still if it tried and had interests way beyond what anyone would believe.

My phone dinged, snapping me out of the spiral I’d been sinking into. I lifted it off my chest, expecting another low-balance notification from the bank, but it wasn’t. It was from Instagram. Surprise trickled through me at what the app had to say: therealjamesonwestwood started following you.

I blinked at the screen, my heartbeat doing a slow, traitorous tumble. After years of sloppy profile stalking in the midnight hours— and yeah, Jamie, I noticed —he’d finally hit the damn button and I had absolutely no idea what to make of it.