Page 154 of Handsome Devil

“And you’re my Alice.” A rueful smirk tilted his lips. “Brave, adaptable, curious, confident. I knew it from the beginning, but hating you was so much easier than loving you. Because loving you meant admitting I might not get the one thing I ever truly wanted.”

He pressed his lips to my forehead, and I closed my eyes, relishing the moment.

“No more pretending.” Tate clasped my chin. “This twisted game of cat and mouse stops here. You’re my wife. You understand?”

I did. LikeThrough the Looking-Glass, the tide had turned. The shift had completed. Fates had been made.

Ispent the next week and a half crying and making love to my husband. Often times simultaneously. Dazzling bouquets of flowers arrived at our doorstep, dozens or so every hour. I wasn’t ready for company yet. Luckily, Tate had a talent for kicking people out.

“She’s not accepting visitors,” I heard him drawl at Cal and Dylan one day while I was buried under my blankets, crying my eyes out.

“Listen, honey, the only time I care about a man’s opinion is when he praises me in bed.” Dylan tried to push through him. “She’s our best friend. We want to see her.”

“She’s mywife,” he deadpanned. “And she’ll be ready to see people at the funeral. You wanna see her? Go look at a fucking picture.”

“We can’t even do that. You crashed all the servers that hosted pictures of her from events and social media!” Cal whined.

“She said she needed a social media break,” Tate said dryly. “And I am nothing if not thorough.”

“That’s such a weird way to pronounce obsessive. Anyway, since when did you take the role of the doting, caring husband?” Dylan lamented.

“We’re a real couple now. Guess you’re not as close as you thought if you’re this far out of the loop.”

Dylan huffed and puffed, but eventually they left. I clutched my stomach, curled in a fetal position. I’d see all of them at the funeral. I needed a few more hours to lick my wounds alone.

Tate returned after a few moments, arms laden with treats and flowers.

“You want me to send the flowers to the nearest hospital and the food to the soup kitchen like last time?”

“If you can.” I sat up in our bed, smoothing over my dressing gown. We were both ignoring the other glaring reason neither of us wanted visitors. Which had to do with the equations covering nearly every surface.

“Tate?” I asked.

“Apricity?” He stopped on his way out of the room.

“Does it ever get better?”

He kissed my forehead. “No. But you learn to live with the pain.”

Ten days after my mother’s passing, she was put to rest in Wimbledon Cemetery, next to Dad and Elliott.

Tate purchased an elegant coffin and potted plants. He’d been on edge the entire week, barking orders at Edith to get everything right. At some point, I had to remind him that my mother wasn’t here to appreciate the gesture.

To which he answered, “So? She communicated with that Lina woman and said I was doing a good job. You think I don’t know I’m on probation?”

Now, we were walking toward her grave, arms linked. Medieval angels, crosses, and saintly maidens spotted the lush, green grounds around us. Stony and assessing pebbled eyes of statues followed us. I had the acute, unrelenting feeling I was being watched by otheralivebeings, but I chalked it up to stress.

My husband promised me he’d take care of the Tiernan issue, and I believed him.

I stopped when I spotted the thick crowd of mourners gathered around the empty grave where Mum’s casket would be tucked. They swarmed like bees, all sheathed in black, not in the dozens but the hundreds. Not just Mum’s friends and former colleagues but also my friends from home and a staggering number of my colleagues. Anywhere between one hundred and one hundred and fifty GS Properties workers arrived from London and New York combined.

“I hadn’t realized you chartered flights for the New York branch of GS Properties.” I cleared my throat.

“I didn’t.” Tate plucked his leather gloves off. “They purchased their own tickets, using their personal time off.”

My heart dipped, and I did a double take at the rows of seats in front of the open grave as they filled with people. Everyone was here. Kevin and Mariam and Trisha. The entire HR department. Cal, Dylan, their spouses, and Kieran. Alix and Sadie too.

Among the familiar faces I also detected the Ferrante brothers. A chill rolled down my spine when my eyes landed on Achilles’s bored, soulless gaze. He surveyed the crowd like a predator picking his next meal.