Page 25 of Bride on the Dotted Line (Blackstone Center #1)

Nick

It’s a full-fledged spring day by the time John pulls the car up to my family home the next morning. Snow dots Victor’s lawn in tiny, shrinking islands, green creeping into the hedges and flower beds.

A new season. A new start.

For the first time in a long time, I don’t feel like I’m walking into a snake pit unprepared as I cross the threshold of my childhood home.

I spent the night in bed, awake, staring at the glittering cityscape and figuring out what I want to say.

To Victor, who won’t be happy to hear how colossally I fucked up my fake marriage.

To Sienna, who was breathing softly on the other end of the phone until sunrise.

I don’t deserve her. I know I don’t—but she handed me her heart last night even so. She said my name like it belonged to her, whispering it into my ear. The tremble in her voice was thick with need and a kind of trust no one had ever afforded me before.

This determined, formidable, successful woman chose me. A man who was born into gold and diamonds and was required to be none of those things.

Under my covers with my hand wrapped where I’d imagined hers for weeks, something solidified inside me. A truth finally took form: it doesn’t matter if I’m Nick Harwood. It doesn’t matter if Sienna Hayes can’t love me.

She does anyway.

And I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure she gets what she needs.

Dad, I rehearse in my head as I walk through the door of my family home, there is no accepting the life we pictured after this, a life where Sienna and I never see each other again once we get divorced. I’m going to find another way.

I pull out my phone, nervously scrolling through news headlines while I walk up the stairs to Victor’s study.

Still nothing about Sienna’s dad—whoever hired the PI seems to have given up, thank God.

I flick through articles upon articles on how I seem completely changed.

Photos of Sienna and I plastered across websites, smiling, laughing, caught in those unguarded moments that make us look real.

We are real.

For once, the tabloids are right. I am completely changed. She’s done that to me, and the best part is, none of it is an act.

When I push through the door to the study, my father is behind his desk, writing something on a sheet of paper.

His dark eyes glance up as I walk in, the glint in them as stern and unreadable as ever.

He gestures for me to sit in the chair across from his desk, and I oblige, running a hand through my hair.

It’s silent in here. I catch the faintest scent of cigar smoke in the air, and my chest tightens. My father only smokes when he’s angry. Maybe he’s still pissed that I pushed back about Roderick and Lionel over the phone in Fiji.

I clear my throat. “Having a good morning so far?”

He tosses his paper and pen to his desk. “You’re late.”

“I am?” I check my watch, confused. “It’s eight in the morning. You said to meet you here when I got your text.”

“Two hours ago.”

My phone is heavy in my pocket. “I can’t just drop everything and come here at six in the morning with no notice.”

His expression darkens, eyes wandering out the window. For the first time, I notice his hair is uncombed, sticking up all over his head. He looks like he didn’t get a wink of sleep.

“Dad, are you?—”

“Is it true?” he asks abruptly.

I blink, caught off guard. “Is what true?”

He glares at me, and all at once I realize what the look in his eyes is—it’s rage. I sit up straighter. I’ve seen my father angry and disappointed plenty of times, but rage ?

“Sienna Hayes,” he says, voice low. “The last name is common enough around here, so I didn’t pay much mind to it.”

The massive room suddenly seems tiny, suffocating. I don’t like the way he’s saying her name. “What are you talking about?”

Victor stares at me, laces his fingers, and ignores my question. His quill and ink are pushed to the side of his desk, along with two stacks of papers that look like legal documents. Outside the study, two workers are skimming the surface of the pool, catching fallen leaves in long-handled nets.

“Did you think I wouldn’t find out, Nicholas?” my father says.

“I …” This isn’t good. “Find out what?”

“Is your wife the daughter of Frank Hayes? The same Frank Hayes that lost his mind and drove his company into the ground eleven months ago?”

Ah.

He’s finally figured it out.

Victor rolls his eyes. “Don’t just gape like a fish, Son. Speak. ”

I flinch. His tone is acerbic. Victor Harwood doesn’t talk like that unless he wants to cut someone through to the bone. I’ve seen him do it in boardrooms and investor meetings all my life, and a month ago I would have just sat down, shut up, and took it.

I can’t let him talk about Sienna’s family that way.

“Frank Hayes didn’t lose his mind,” I say tersely. “That’s just a rumor. And even if he did, he shouldn’t be shamed for it.”

Victor scoffs. “He was a fool. A liability. I saw those photos of him sweating buckets in meetings. I saw him sneaking drinks at grimy pubs.”

“The tabloids?—”

“Please, Nicholas. Harwood Restaurant Group cannot be attached to such a person. A man who can’t stand up to the pressure of running a company is hardly a man.”

Hardly a man.

To think I walked in here feeling prepared to tell him my feelings. At moments like these, I miss Mom so much I feel like punching a hole through the wall. I grip the arms of my chair until my knuckles ache.

“How could you say something like that?” I ask him. “Mom would have—” My father’s eyes flash, and I stop, biting my tongue before I can make everything worse by talking about her. “Frank Hayes won a defamation suit. Do you believe every single thing you read?”

“I don’t read, Nicholas,” Victor tells me, mouth thinning. “I have people to read for me. And soon, so will you.”

There’s a viscous, bubbling feeling climbing through me. I lean forward, bringing us closer across his desk. “How did you find out? Did you Google Sienna’s name?”

“Do you really think I have time for something like that?”

I stare at him—the judgmental curve of his eyebrow, the white strands in his hair, his laser eyes—and the truth hits me like a truck.

Why didn’t I see it before? The tabloids are always nosy, picking through people’s lives online and paying paparazzi for photos, but they rarely have the resources for an outside hire.

“It was you,” I say. “You hired the private investigator.”

My father examines me for a second more, then shrugs, casting his gaze through the window, over the pool, across the minigolf course. Sky reflects in his eyes. He says nothing.

I stand, the wooden legs of my chair screeching across the floor behind me. “I e-mailed Alvin. He said he didn’t know anything about the PI. He said he’d try to get whoever it was to stop.”

Victor glances at the stack of documents at the corner of his desk, then back at me. His lip curls. There’s pity on his face, like he’s looking at an animal that was stupid enough to walk into a trap—and he’s right. He might as well be looking at a worm wriggling on a hook.

Alvin lied to me. Of course he did. If he hadn’t, I’d have walked into this meeting today with more cards than Victor wanted me to hold.

Fuck.

My whole life, my father has been over my shoulder, looking at my hand.

I stand at the edge of his desk and look him in the eye. “Do you have any idea how difficult it is for Sienna to have a PI following her around? Do you know what she went through with her dad? My father-in-law?”

Victor cocks his head to the side. Searches me. Sighs. “Nicholas.”

“No. You?—”

“Divorce her.”

The words are tired, resigned. He leans back in his chair, folding his arms across his chest. He’s giving me an order he expects me to follow without question.

“Get it done,” he says. “Quietly, quickly, whatever it takes. I’ll have Alvin dissolve the contract with her lawyer. I don’t want any more scandals, and I certainly don’t want our family name mixed with theirs.”

For a second, I can’t see, I’m so furious. My fingers find the top of my thigh, pushing into the hard muscle there. “We’ll divorce when the contract expires. That was—that was the agreement.”

He gives me a haughty huff. “Plans change.”

“You can’t be serious. Our PR stunt is working. The public loves us, and?—”

“Oh, I’m very serious,” Victor spits. “The public might eat up this little romance now, but they’ll turn on you the second they find out her full name. Besides, it’s done. We spoke with your wife on the phone this morning, before you bothered to wake up. She’s briefed on what she needs to do.”

My heart thuds. I texted Sienna good morning before coming here today, but—I pull my phone out of my pocket to check—I haven’t gotten anything back. I’d assumed she was asleep.

“You spoke to Sienna?”

“Alvin did.”

“What—what did he tell her?”

“That she was to leave your penthouse at once. To cut all contact with you, and to consider her marriage over.”

I can’t breathe. Fuck. Fuck. Sienna. To hear that first thing in the morning, especially after what happened last night …

Dread fills me. It’s all I can do to keep from sprinting back to the penthouse to make sure she’s still there. “Is she okay? I need to make sure she’s okay.”

“She’s fine, Nicholas. Relax. She’s a grown woman. It’s done.”

I stare at him, chest heaving. Outside the window, freshly skimmed water gleams in the pale light. Pure and clean.

And suddenly, I’m twenty-two years old again, sitting in the hospital, eating lunch with Laurie Harwood.

“Your father will protect our family at all costs,” my mother says to me, picking at her mashed potatoes.

“That’s why I chose him. He’ll keep the company strong until you’re ready.

But Nick …” She reaches up and ruffles my hair, a gesture from my childhood she never lost the habit of, even near the end.

“Don’t forget you have a choice. You always have a choice. ”

I hadn’t known what she’d meant at the time, but she was right.