AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“You were bare-ass naked,” I reminded him. “For God’s sake, you’re one of the richest men in the world, and co-CEO of one of the largest corporations on the planet. Don’t you people learn to lock your damn doors, so you don’t have to deal with the press? Or were you just okay with letting your kinder, nicer brother take the fall for every stupid thing you did?” I took a deep breath as I turned my back on him to continue unpacking. “It hurt Damian, you know. He pretended every ridiculous thing you did was his mistake. He was loyal to you to the very end, and that nearly killed his relationship with the woman he loves.”
Luckily, when Damian had needed to make a choice between the brother he’d protected for two years and the love of his life, he’d made the right decision.
“Damian should have told her that he had an identical twin,” Dylan scoffed. “If he had, there wouldn’t have been any misunderstanding in the first place. I never asked him to pretend he was me or take any of the blame for my actions.”
My blood started to boil. “He did it for you, to protect you, although I have absolutely no idea why. You obviously don’t have the same loyalty to him. God, do you really not give a damn about your own twin?”
Yeah, Dylan had suffered a loss, which had obviously caused him to become a different man than he’d been before. But that was no excuse for the way he’d shunned his entire family after it had happened.
I caught his furious expression out of the corner of my eye. Good! Let him be pissed off. It was better than the dead expression I’d seen in his eyes when he’d first come to the door.
Something or someone needed to penetrate this man’s armor, and I didn’t care if I had to irritate the hell out of him until he finally broke. There had to be some of the old Dylan still left inside of him, and I was determined to find it.
“He never told me that he was masquerading as me every time I made…an error in judgment,” he snarled.
I dropped a pair of jeans onto the bed and swung around to face him again. “Please! Damian was covering for you for over two years. You didn’t know because you were just too self-absorbed to notice. Meanwhile, he was screwing up a relationship to keep his promises to you about letting you disappear from the public eye for a while. Well, if that was what you wanted, why in the hell did you keep showing up in the dumbest of ways?”
“I admit, I did some nonsensical things—”
“Foolish,” I corrected, unwilling to let him squirm out of his outrageous actions over the last two years. “Behavior that was more than newsworthy to the gossip columns, which makes no sense when all you wanted was your damn privacy, according to Damian.”
He folded his arms across his broad, muscular chest and sent me a glare that probably should have had me running for the hills, but didn’t.
I didn’t back down to idiots.
“Those events only happened when I drank too much,” he grumbled.
“Which was apparently way too often,” I commented drily.
Dylan released what sounded like an exasperated breath as he walked into the room and sat down on the end of the bed. He eyed Jake’s snoring body sprawled out on the comforter before he said, “That really is a sorry excuse for a hound.”
I grabbed the jeans and folded them before I shoved them into a drawer. “Jake is an amazing dog. I’m so sorry he offends you because he isn’t a purebred, perfect specimen,” I said in a snarky tone.
Dylan ignored the comment. “I do care about Damian, which is why I’m not planning on getting into trouble or attending his wedding,” he informed me grimly.
“And you think that’s going to make him happy?” I snapped out the question. “Even though you don’t deserve it, he still loves you. Do you really believe that he wants to experience one of the happiest days of his life without his twin brother there?”
“He made it perfectly clear how he felt about me after that little incident at the gala in England,” he answered harshly. “I haven’t heard from him, my mother, or my younger brother, Leo, since that night.”
“Do you really blame them?” I asked. “You propositioned the woman he loved. You asked Nicole to join your orgy while you were staying at your mother’s country home. During a formal gala. And she had no idea you existed. Nicole thought you were Damian.”
“Technically, it would have been a ménage, not an orgy,” he answered coolly. “There was only one woman in the bed at the time, and it wasn’t like we were in the process of intercourse. The liaison was still in the early stages of foreplay when Nicole walked into the bedroom.”
“Whatever,” I replied sharply. “What in the hell possessed you to hit on Nicole to join your little twosome?”
“Shock value, I suppose,” he answered nonchalantly. “One look at her had already told me she wasn’t the type.”
“Of course she’s not,” I huffed. “Nicole has more class in her little finger than you possess in your entire body. Not to mention the fact that she’s madly in love with your brother. It destroyed her when she thought you were Damian, and that he was already cheating on her.”
“Obviously, she doesn’t know my twin all that well,” he drawled. “I knew when he finally fell for a woman someday, he’d fall hard. Apparently, I was right, and he isn’t the cheating type. He’s absolutely obsessed with Nicole. I doubt he even sees another woman.”
I slammed the empty suitcase closed. “How was she supposed to know that? She didn’t even know he had a twin brother.”
He shrugged, which made me want to slap him. “If it makes any difference, I hated myself after I understood what had happened.”
“It doesn’t,” I informed him as I shoved the empty suitcase in the closet. “Has it ever occurred to you that you’d be far better off cleaning up your act than burying yourself in self-loathing? It’s a hell of a lot more productive.”
“That idea did occur to me just recently,” he answered in a bitter tone. “You can go home, Kylie. I don’t drink myself senseless anymore, and I don’t want you here.”
