The Wrong Fiancée: A Billionaire Second Chance Romance (Marriage by Contract Book 3)
The Wrong Fiancée: Chapter 9

‘You were sleeping with her, you son of a bitch?’ Ginny screamed at her husband.

‘Ginny, I need you to calm down.’ Sam looked at me uneasily.

‘I won’t calm down,’ she screeched. ‘You’re such an asshole, Sam.’

Holy fuck! I didn’t want to be part of the Thatcher family soap opera, I thought as I tried to get the hell out of Ginny and Sam’s bungalow. I’d been summoned by them because they were very disappointed with my behavior at dinner. I was a grown-ass man, and I had no idea why they thought they could treat me like an errant teenager—but Ginny was, as I had been noticing, completely batshit crazy.

‘Mama, stop it,’ Felicity pleaded and glared at me. ‘This is all your fault.’

‘Mine?’ I shook my head. Nope, the Thatchers were nothing like my family. This kind of drama was not who we were. The screaming and yelling and fighting. The humiliating of staff. Nope! If my mother was around, she’d bitch slap Ginny until she got a concussion, and that wasn’t hyperbole.

I walked out of their bungalow, wanting to reach ours but unsure of what to do next. I’d had it up to here with Felicity and her family.

‘Dean, please,’ Felicity called out. I didn’t stop until we were at our doorstep. I held the door open and waited until she was inside.

I turned on the lights and felt a pang of hurt go through me. Felicity was crying. I didn’t want to hurt this woman. She was going to be my wife. Right?

‘Fee,’ I began.

She nodded. ‘I know. I know. You’re thinking I’m being a bitch. But…Daddy had an affair with Iolana.’

‘Elika’s mother?’

Felicity sniffled and sat down on a couch. ‘For a while, we wondered if Elika was Daddy’s.’

‘Is she?’ Sam didn’t seem like type to cheat on his wife, but then again he was married to Ginny so….

‘No. No, she’s not.’

‘How do you know?’ I asked.

She looked away.

‘You did a DNA test?’ I couldn’t believe it. ‘Does Elika know you did that?’

When Felicity continued to keep her face turned from me, I had my answer.

‘Fee, whatever happened between your father and her mother has nothing to do with Elika.’ I sat next to her and took her hands in mine. ‘I don’t understand why you’re cruel to her. I don’t like seeing it. I really don’t like it.’

And if this is who you are, I can’t marry you.

Fuck! Where had that come from?

‘I’m so sorry,’ Felicity whimpered. ‘I’m so ashamed of myself. Mama gets so upset, and she cries all the time and….’ She pulled her hands away from mine and wiped her tears. ‘You’re right. You’re so right. I’ve been behaving very poorly when it comes to Elika.’

I felt like I was in some chick flick having a conversation about mean girls. I fucking hated it.

‘You’re not your mother.’

She smiled at me. ‘Thank God, right?’

I laughed. ‘Yeah.’

‘You still love me?’

‘Yeah, I do.’ For the first time since I’d said those consequential words to her, which I hadn’t said to any other woman, I wondered about their veracity.

Seeing Elika again was playing havoc with my head, I admitted. I felt something for her.

Not something, asshole, you feel lust. Good, old-fashioned, garden variety lust.

‘I love you too, Dean. So much.’ She hugged me tight, and I inhaled her perfume and held her. I’d made a choice, and I had to have the moral courage to stand by it. We’d been engaged for just a few weeks; I should give it time to settle. Cold feet. That’s all this was. Or was it?

‘You sure about this? You don’t even live together,‘ Damian said when I told him about my plans to propose to Felicity.

‘We almost do. I mean, we travel a lot. I stay at her place in New York, and she stays at mine in Hong Kong.’

‘That’s visiting one another’s home, not living together,’ Damian pointed out. ‘Trust me, living with someone and loving someone are two different things.’

‘You like living with Emilia,’ I remarked.

‘Fucking love it.’ I could hear the satisfaction in his voice. My cold and calculated brother had changed since he married Emilia. She’d made him a better person, we all agreed, just as Elsa had made my brother Duncan semi-human.

‘I may want to live in the US full-time after we get married. Would that be okay?’

Damian was, after all, the CEO of the company and my boss.

‘We can promote someone in Asia, and you can manage US operations, if that’s what you want. I can then just keep the CEO job. Emilia would like that—would mean less work.’

‘It’s going to take a minute,’ I warned him, ‘so don’t get your hopes up that I’ll carry your workload. Already spent months doing Duncan’s job while he was sorting his shit out with Elsa.’

Damian laughed. ‘And you did a stellar job. Dean, you can work from anywhere or not work, if that’s what you want.’

‘I love the company,’ I simply said.

‘Yeah, I know. Me too. But I love my wife and my kid so much fucking more.’

As I held Felicity, I wasn’t sure if I felt about her the way Damian did about Emilia. He’d give up his job, his life, anything for her. I wouldn’t even give up defending Elika, who, in the large scheme of things, wasn’t relevant.

We didn’t make love that night.

I didn’t feel like it, and thankfully, neither did Felicity. I was conflicted as fuck. I loved Fee. I did, didn’t I? But if I loved her, why did seeing Elika make me so damn happy and excited—and why was I so concerned about who and what took the light and joy away from her eyes?

I watched Felicity as she slept. She was beautiful. Classically stunning. Had that blinded me? No. She was more than her face. It was her intelligence, which seemed to have shrunk in the company of her parents. When we’d spent time with them before it had been an evening here and a day there—this was the longest time we were together.

At least in a couple of days, I could avoid Sam and Ginny because I was going to be gone for a week. I had warned Felicity that I’d be working and traveling through the summer. Since she was doing the same thing, we’d asked the resort to set up one of the bedrooms in our bungalow as an office for me. Felicity was working with her father in his office in his bungalow.

Unable to sleep, I went into the second bedroom to work. I lost myself in sorting through the inventory for an upcoming auction, carefully grouping the objets d’art.

However, thoughts of my time with Elika kept nagging at my conscience. I decided I had to tell Felicity. It wasn’t cheating to withhold something from four years ago, but the fact that it was Elika—the very person I was defending against Felicity and Ginny—made it feel dodgy.

The universe sure loved a good fucking joke at my expense. How the hell was the best sex of my life related to my fiancée in the most convoluted way?