“Please”—she waves me off—“call me Summer. I hope we can have a great working relationship,” she says. “I broke off my contract with Bauer because they didn’t appreciate my input. They wanted more makeup. I wanted less. They thought I needed to lose a few pounds. I thought I was fine the way I was.”
“What? That’s sick,” I say. “No wonder you quit. That’s ridiculous.”
“Especially these days.” She sighs. “It’s no matter. I just spoke to an attorney, and I plan to sue Bauer.”
“Good for you.”
She smiles. “I’ll be in touch.”
When the office is quiet, I sit in the dark, basking in the glow of potential success.
We might not have officially won them back, but it sounds promising. We’ve done all we can do, and now we wait for word from Sergio.
Everything is on the up and up, except nothing feels right.
As much as I want to celebrate, I can’t.
Charles and I are still at odds, and it’s killing me.
“Raven,” he calls from the door.
I look up, and my breath hitches at the sight. He looks worn but no less handsome. He’s my dream in reality. The one thing I’ll never be okay with losing.
He takes a seat next to me.
“Charles, I—”
“Please,” he says, “let me go first.”
I nod.
“I’m sorry about the Hamptons and what happened afterward. You did nothing wrong, Raven. It was my past sneaking up on me.”
“I know,” I say, and his eyes narrow.
“You do?”
“I did some digging and learned all about the time you spent with Tabitha. I know that she married your father.”
He blows out a breath. “Yeah, that was very difficult. But not in the way you think.”
“Tell me.”
“I never loved Tabitha. It was a relationship of convenience. One that kept going because I cared so little for her. I did whatever I wanted. There was no reason to break things off because we were hardly together.”
“You had to have loved her at some point. You asked her to marry you.”
“I didn’t. Marriage isn’t always about love, Raven. Sometimes, it’s a simple business transaction. Families marry their children off to other important families as power plays.”
“She was the daughter of farmers.”
Not that I don’t think farmers make a good living but compared to Cavendish? It seems unlikely.
“Her father owned half of London’s untouched land. The amount of pull he had was vital to the growth of Cavendish.”
“You would’ve married her just for that?”
He shrugs. “Like I said, love wasn’t a factor.”