I’d knocked again, thinking she hadn’t heard me the first time.
Nothing.
“I know you’re there,” I’d grumbled, loathing myself for pushing it.
I’d never sought out a woman before. All of my companions expressed prior attraction to me before I took them on. I could have gotten what they offered for free. I simply didn’t want to have them on their terms—only on mine.
“I’m not trying to pretend I’m not here,” Persephone had answered from behind the door.
Cracking my knuckles and reminding myself that she had every right to be angry after I declared I would replace her with someone else, I’d rested my forehead on her door.
“You have marital duties to perform.”
“If you think you’re walking through that door, you’re not just a cold fish, Cillian. You’re a dumb one, too.”
Cillian. Not Hubs or Kill.
She also called you a dumb, cold fish. Perhaps that’s the part you should focus on.
I felt my nostrils flaring and my lips thinning as I uttered, “I’ll be quick about it.”
“No.”
“Please.” The word tasted funky in my mouth. I couldn’t have said it more than a handful times in my lifetime.
“Go to Europe, Cillian. Have fun with your little girlfriends. Maybe they’ll give you the child you want so badly.”
My pulse was through the roof now.
I could feel the tension and pressure curling around my neck, and for the first time in years, I knew they were going to win.
Being turned down by my wife wasn’t even one of the worst things that happened to me this month, yet the idea she rejected me made me want to tear off my skin and cannonball it all over Sam Brennan’s house.
It was his idea I throw my weight around with her. Now not only did I have Arrowsmith as a problem but I also had a wife who refused to get knocked up.
I turned around, storming down the hallway, zipping past the master bedroom like a demon, continuing all the way down the hall, to the farthest room on the second floor. My fingertips itched. My eyelids ticked. I could no longer hold it inside.
Could no longer rein it in.
For the first time in years, I was going to let the beast come out.
I flung the door open.
It was an old study room I converted into a spa. Whatever BS excuse I could give the builders to soundproof the room and fill it with soft, unbreakable things.
I slammed the door behind me and let the monster in me take over.
Hoping the bruises and cuts it would surely leave would be gone by tomorrow.
On my seventh day of celibacy (but who the hell was counting?), we met for poker again.
Sam was watchful, Hunter was in his usual devil-may-care mood, and Devon looked like he was trying to work out what crawled up my ass.
Exactly one week from the moment I’d told Flower Girl she couldn’t tutor the Arrowsmith kids anymore, and she proceeded to piss all over my demands and continue about her life, banishing me from her bed in the process.
I’d been on edge all week, channeling my simmering anger toward Arrowsmith. Each day, I found a new way to poke him.
One time, I sent paparazzi cameramen to take pictures of Andrew picking his nose at a restaurant. The other, I had a PI sit in front of his house all night just to mess with his head, and on another occasion, I had an editor of one of the local newspapers run a story of that time Saint Andrew himself was caught in a three-way during his frat years at whatever community college he’d attended.
The issue with my secret was, revealing it would be damaging to Andrew, too. I wanted to push him to a point where he had nothing left to lose. To go to my father and tell him. Expose me. Turn me from the golden child to the fraud he thought I was.
Today, I was particularly sour. So much so I hadn’t even gone to the ranch to visit the horses. It started in the morning when it occurred to me that something was amiss. That something was the lack of cloud texts I’d been receiving (and ignoring) for months.
I couldn’t believe I missed Auntie Tilda.
The old hag never ceased to create problems for me.
Persephone was taking things too far.
I knew I had two choices—either I was going to back down and throw my wife a bone, tell her if she couldn’t get pregnant, or I was infertile, or both, that we could adopt—which I was genuinely open to.
Or I could flex my muscles and kick her out.
I had the decency to pretend to debate the two options for the sake of my ego as we played.
Hunter kept checking his phone. Sailor wasn’t anywhere near ready to pop—she wasn’t even half-close to delivery—but he acted like she was the first human to give birth to another one.