Total pages in book: 147
Estimated words: 142801 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 714(@200wpm)___ 571(@250wpm)___ 476(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 142801 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 714(@200wpm)___ 571(@250wpm)___ 476(@300wpm)
As I pick up my phone, Lucy’s words echo in my head. But I love him.
I’m not sure if love turns people blind to reality or just temporarily stupid. Probably the latter.
Flicking to my voicemails, I recall the desperation in his tone.
“Please, Deubel. Let me speak to her. If you’ve touched her, I’ll—”
“I fucking love her!”
Had he professed to love Lucy with the same intensity? I put my phone away, disgusted with myself. With him. My own love for Lucy turned me blind for a while. I’ve since had my eyes opened. Very wide.
Reaching for my drink, I throw the rest of it back.
Now, Eve is an interesting proposition. A different kettle of fish. She’s strong, feisty, and lovely. She can be quite determined, with the right incentive, I know.
She will bend for me. I’ll make sure of it.
It will be such a delicious justice, turning Atherton’s plan back on himself.
Chapter 12
EVIE
Wednesday morning, I decide to go to work. I’m not rostered on shift for almost three more weeks, thanks to my supposed honeymoon, but Lori’s put-upon sighs and sulky glances are driving me crazy. I’m so tired of tiptoeing around her.
Besides, idle hands are the devil’s playground. Not that I’m giving into any kind of manual dalliances when it comes to thinking about Oliver Deubel and his pretty face. I’m also not giving his lazy threats headspace or remembering how I allowed him to feel me up in a public restaurant. Or at least I wouldn’t be thinking about it if I hadn’t been forced to spend the afternoon hiding out in the break room.
“I’ll cancel your visa,” I mutter darkly to myself. All he was missing was a mustache to twirl. Maybe a bout of maniacal laughter. And this is the man who saved me from the street—the one I practically had to trick into bed! That sounds worse than it should. I mean, I understood his reluctance, but this I do not understand!
“I should probably warn you, I make a terrible friend.”
I feel myself frown at the remembrance. It’s such a crappy defense.
“You seem to be laboring under the misapprehension that I won’t.”
The man I spent the night with, the only person who helped me that day—he didn’t seem the type to hold my visa over my head. But I know men like him, rich men. The kind my mother has a taste for. Men like my stepfather who will leverage just about anything to get what they want.
Which is probably why this all feels like such a head fuck.
Work hasn’t been the distraction I needed—my colleagues can barely look at me! At first, I took it for concern. Maybe they thought I would be too upset to hold a conversation. That maybe I wasn’t allocated a treatment room for fear I wasn’t in the right mindset to make sound clinical decisions. But it feels more like the issue is theirs, like they’re embarrassed for me. Like they don’t know what to say or how to act in front of me.
It’s like a bad farce out there—lots of forced laughter and scary smiles when I walk by. I mean, people, come on! Infidelity isn’t catching—you can’t contract it through a third-party host.
Even if some of them were guests on the day.
So here I sit, hiding out in the break room, eating my body weight in cookies. Weirdly, there is comfort to be found in these familiar surroundings. In the ever-present whiff of disinfectant and in the low hum of voices and animal sounds. It’s better than the loneliness that lurks outside these walls.
“What are you doing here?”
I glance up, my heart suddenly glad as Yara’s head appears around the door. “Helping myself to Rachel’s cookies.” I pull another chocolate Hobnob out of the packet—one of the UK’s best inventions, for sure. “Snitches get stitches.”
“I don’t want you coming anywhere near me with a needle,” she says, closing the door behind her. “You left that Labrador’s paw looking like Frankenstein’s monster last week.” She makes a sad face, imitating a feeble paw wave.
“My sutures aren’t that bad.”
“Not when you remember where you’ve put your glasses, at least.”
“Ha ha.” My hand lifts until I recall my glasses are on the top of my head. The one good thing to come out of today was finding them. Well, that and seeing Yara. “I thought they were gone for good this time,” I say as I dunk the Hobnob into a mug of tea the color of red bricks. I heap the soggy deliciousness into my mouth.
“You didn’t come back for your glasses.” Leaning her slender frame against the door, she folds her arms.
Yara is gorgeous, all high cheekbones and amber, feline eyes. “Bollywood eyes,” I once heard someone in the clinic say, to which she’d laughed and said she wished she had the brows to match instead of inheriting Bollywood villain brows from her dad.