Page 2 of Velvet Sin (Elite Men of Los Angeles #5)

ELEANOR

“I feel like this might’ve been a mistake!” I shouted over the pulsing music, but my voice barely carried. Around me, Megan and the rest of our crew were laughing, already swept up in the club’s atmosphere.

Megan caught my eye and shook her head, pointing to her ears to signal she couldn’t hear me. Then she laughed, clearly unconcerned.

Of course, she didn’t know what was rattling around inside my brain. None of them did. They were here for a good time. Meanwhile, I was drowning in second thoughts and wishing I’d stayed home.

I’m not afraid. I belong here. Right. I didn’t even believe myself.

I had never felt so out of place in all my life, which was saying something after spending ten years with a man whose world I had never quite felt a part of.

Always on the outside, looking in, even when I was the one planning the dinners and the parties, hosting them in the house I had so painstakingly and lovingly put together.

The house that was supposed to be our future.

I’d worked my ass off, but I never felt like I was a part of things. Never part of him.

It was way past time for me to let loose and shed all that shit, yet I still wanted to run like a scared rabbit from the dark, intimidating club.

I had never been anywhere like this, a place people went to hook up, wear kinky clothes, and fuck or watch others fuck, depending on their personal preferences.

This was me, timid little Eleanor Nichols.

The girl who would happily blend in with the wallpaper if it meant not being perceived by the people around her because people judged as soon as they saw something.

At least, that had always been my experience.

But my friends didn’t know that about me.

They knew Eleanor, who, until just recently, had been an energetic, devoted, loving stay-at-home wife with my Pilates, Target runs, and mornings with the girls over coffee while my husband went out and provided.

Happy to stand at his side and ever so slightly behind him.

Maybe not enough for the rest of the world to notice, but enough that I always felt it.

Even in the beginning, when we were first together, I saw my entire future in his eyes.

I was always half a step behind. It always nagged at me, like a piece of popcorn stuck between my teeth.

“Come on! Have a drink. It will loosen you up.” Izzy frowned at me even though I accepted the martini with a smile. “This is your weekend, remember? We came out here for you. It’s a new beginning,” she declared.

A new beginning. The martini didn’t taste like a new beginning.

If anything, it reminded me of the drinks Cameron would mix up when he’d get home from work at night.

We would enjoy a martini together before dinner, like some couple from Mad Men .

Just the two of us in our big house full of furniture and not much else.

The house I worked like hell to make comfortable, warm, inviting.

And it still never quite felt like mine.

Now, it wasn’t mine, officially, with the ink barely dry on the divorce papers.

I was glad to let him have it after what I’d walked in on that terrible afternoon six months ago.

There wasn’t a chance in hell I could ever live there and be happy after witnessing my husband slamming his dick into his assistant in our marital bed.

He didn’t have the decency to limit them to the office, like any normal cheating husband.

"What the hell are you doing?" My voice cut through the room like a blade, sharp and trembling.

There he was—Cameron—in our bed. Our bed. And her. Tangled sheets, bare skin, and the stench of betrayal hanging heavy in the air. It hit me in full, glaring color, every ugly detail searing itself into my brain.

For a moment, I froze in the doorway, staring. My mind refused to catch up. How could he do this? How could he lie there with someone else while I stood here, feet on the same floor, still believing this was us?

But then disbelief snapped. Shattered. Anger surged hot and blinding, leaving no room for hesitation.

There was no coming back from this. Not from the ultimate betrayal.

Not after I’d spent years trying to patch together the fraying threads of us—overlooking how he’d wince when my jokes missed their mark, brushing off his pointed jabs when I mixed up the name of his business partner’s latest flavor of the month.

Never mind that he treated women like disposable props in his orbit.

I had fought for us. Swallowed hurt after hurt and convinced myself that love was reason enough to forgive. But this?

This was clarity. The kind that burns away every excuse.

I turned on my heel without waiting for his excuses—or hers. My chest heaved, my heart cracking wide open, but the path forward was suddenly crystal clear. By the time I reached the door, the decision was made.

Call a lawyer.

Pack my bags.

Walk away.

And for the first time in years, I knew I wouldn’t look back. Maybe a part of me had been waiting for this moment all along.

The thought of it made me gulp down the ice-cold vodka in one go. “Take it easy,” Casey warned, giggling as she sipped more of her drink. “The night is young.”

How did the three of them seem so damn comfortable, wearing the outfits they’d brought along with them, which they had changed into in the locker room when we arrived?

Short dresses, tight, showing all kinds of boob, barely long enough to cover their asses.

My cheeks went hot when I noticed a man checking them out as he walked past, and I wasn’t even the one he was looking at.

I tugged my dress up a little over my chest, feeling exposed.

Vulnerable. And this was supposed to be fun?

It was Casey’s idea to come here after dragging me from Las Vegas to Los Angeles for a celebratory girls’ weekend.

“ Everybody wears masks, ” she’d explained back at the hotel after surprising me with this excursion.

“ So it’s like you can be whoever you want to be, and it doesn’t matter.

It’s all safe, you know? Like a Halloween costume. ”

She swore this wasn’t something she and Andrew had ever done together, and the rest of the girls agreed they had never been to a sex club, either—alone or with their husbands.

So why was I the only one nervous and blushing at the sight of a man with a ball gag in his mouth being led around by a woman in thigh-high vinyl boots?

I didn’t know where to look. It felt wrong, but then again, they were walking around dressed as they were because they wanted to be seen, right?

Still, I knew better than to stare, holding up my glass to the bartender instead. I desperately needed another drink.

“You should mingle!” Izzy insisted, tossing her red hair over one bare shoulder. “You look fucking amazing. And you told me yourself things were shit in the bedroom the last year or so. You need to get laid.”

I was starting to wish I had never gone to my friends for advice when things with Cameron took the turn they had. “For God’s sake!” I shouted over the deafening music, forcing a laugh. “You care way too much about my sex life!”

“Maybe I want to live vicariously,” she admitted, sipping her drink while she looked around the room. “There’s nothing wrong with wondering what could be, you know?”

So I was going to be everybody’s guinea pig as the only divorcee in the group? No, thank you. “I’m not going to sleep with some random stranger just so you can get a kick out of it,” I said, shaking my head.

“Calm down,” she urged, laughing. “It’s not that deep. You deserve some fun. You spent years sitting around at home waiting for Cameron to show up.”

Was that what I had done? It seemed like a throwaway comment, something she hadn’t thought about, but her words echoed in my head as the bare-chested bartender slid another martini my way.

Was that what they saw when they looked at me?

Just some pathetic woman who waited at home for her husband to decide to show up after he fucked his assistant?

Just when I thought I had myself under control, a thought like that would come up out of nowhere and hit me in the stomach hard enough that I almost doubled over.

I was the only one who didn’t see it. The late nights, the excuses.

By the time I clued in and stopped taking his words at face value, he had already made a joke out of me, out of our marriage.

He’d turned me into exactly the kind of woman I always swore I would never be.

I had to let him do it, acquiescing a little at a time, which was even worse.

Agreeing to stay home when my dream had always been to earn my MBA and sit at the head of a company one day.

Shaping myself into the ideal, supportive wife.

Watching my weight obsessively to keep him happy.

Even agreeing to wait for kids until we’d “had our fun.”

In the end, he was the one who’d had fun while I swallowed lump after lump of disappointment, which had slowly turned to resentment. Still, I’d held on since he was a good, steady man with a bright future.

It was one thing for him to betray me, but I had betrayed myself too.

The second martini went down very smoothly.

Slowly, my muscles loosened, and a familiar sense of warmth and happiness washed over me.

All of a sudden, I wasn’t quite so nervous anymore.

No, I wasn’t about to walk around with my body hanging out like some of the women did, but now, when I looked at them, there was no shock or sense of embarrassment, like I needed to look away.

Maybe I envied them a little. They didn’t care what anybody thought. I had spent ten years in a relationship in which public perception was all that mattered.