Page 96 of The Billionaire's Fake Wife

30

Summer

Embarrass him, huh? If he hadn’t goaded me, I wouldn’t have fallen in with Karma's plan.

I survey myself in the mirror.

What had I been thinking when I'd agreed to wear the dress that she had created? I'd gone along with the idea, because... yeah, I did want to shock him. Show him that he shouldn't underestimate me. I toss my head.

This entire pretend wedding is a car crash waiting to happen. It's inevitable that everything is going to go wrong. I am nudging it along.

It is his fault, for treating me like… like worse than dirt. Like I don’t exist.

Hell, he treats that damn old school Casio watch of his with more affection. At least he massages it, touches it, tinkers with it. He gives it attention.

Me? He dismisses as if I am an errant child, or a dimwit who has no idea what I am doing. Which I don’t, I admit. Else why would I have landed in this situation? Faking a wedding that I very much want to be real.

I tighten my fingers around the bouquet of flowers.

There, I’ve acknowledged it to myself, huh? Although logic dictates that I abhor him, my body cannot deny the effect he has on me.

It isn’t that he’s good-looking. Not only.

It's that complete confidence that clings to his every move, the way he seems to walk into a space and own it, how everyone else in the vicinity acknowledges he is the most lethal of them, how he wears his arrogance with absolute single-mindedness. A cockiness that the world owes him—a mindset that is so alien, so different from everything that I am used to—a sureness I wish I possessed.

Is that what this is? Am I envious of everything he represents? What I lost out on, thanks to the error of my parents? Except, that isn’t me. I’ve always been proud of being my own person and making my way through this world on my own steam. I don’t need anyone to rescue me. I don’t.

So, what am I doing here? I glance down at my posy.

Wildflowers. White, pink, and violet blooms mixed with green. Thankfully, it isn’t the expensive bouquet that Amelie had wanted me to order.

It isn’t that I was averse to spending his money… More that every single option that Amelie had shown me in the catering, the decorations, the entire idea of how I’d wanted a wedding to be, well, it had all felt strange.

I’ll be honest. I’ve never spent time imagining my dream wedding.

When you grow up trying to figure out how to survive and where your next meal is going to come from—especially after you had all of it one day and it had been taken from you the next—well, you learn not to think too far out in the future. You really do try and focus on the now and what you have. Maybe it also had to do with my mother’s slight obsession with seizing the moment.

Perhaps she had an intuition for things to come, that her life would be brutally cut short one day when she’d contracted blood poisoning. I mean, for hell’s sake, what were the odds, huh? The dye from the hand painted fabrics she’d loved wearing had bled into her skin and prolonged exposure to it had killed her. Hell. The mind boggles.

It had wrecked my father enough for him to throw himself into his work.

He’d neglected me and Karma, progressively, and one day had not returned home. Apparently, he hadn’t been the above-board businessman he’d made himself out to be. He’d made a series of bad business decisions, then borrowed from the Mafia—bad idea, Dad—and when he hadn’t been able to pay them back, he’d abandoned us to the system and left the country. The coward.

We’d been lucky to be able to escape with our lives. At least our foster homes hadn’t been too bad—I’d heard some of the horror stories of the other kids. I’d thanked our stars that we’d ended up with people who, while they weren’t too loving, hadn’t been monsters either. And they hadn’t separated me and Karma. We'd stayed together until I'd turned sixteen and found myself at a homeless hostel. I had tried to protect her, but my sister’s illness had made her far older than her years, too soon.

I raise the blooms to my nose and inhale. The scent of the open countryside envelops me. Whoever had plucked this had known exactly which blooms to fold into the mix.

There’s a knock on the door.

"Come in." I face the mirror and survey myself.

Footsteps sound, then Karma’s face appears next to mine. "Wow," she breathes.

"Is that good or bad?"

"Umm." She tilts her head. "You look…"

"Go on." I grip my bouquet until my knuckles whiten.