Page 1 of A Vicious Love

CHAPTER ONE

SIENNA

My fiancé had stood me up.

Again.

I stood in the foyer of the Harlan Conservatory while the charity gala carried on behind closed ballroom doors. The string music had become a muffled hum through the walls, mixed with the low, expensive murmur of people who knew how to whisper without ever looking as though they were whispering.

I glanced toward the main entrance again.

The staff had stopped checking on me ten minutes ago because I kept smiling at them as though I wasn’t humiliated, and they were too well trained to make me feel worse. One of the girls near the check-in table caught my eye and offered me another tiny, sympathetic nod. I gave her one back.

My cheeks hurt.

Jamison Crow was twenty minutes late to a seated charity dinner where half of Harlan had already noticed I was alone in the foyer, waiting for him like a little fool in satin.

I shifted my weight in my heels and pretended to admire the floral installation climbing the staircase. The Harlan families loved flowers. Thousands of dollars of them, arranged into enormous displays so everyone could admire them for a few hours before they started dying.

My dress was pale blue tonight. A little too hopeful, maybe. I had picked it because I wanted something that wouldn’t make Jamison look annoyed when he saw me.

I’d originally put on sheer gloves, but Jamison didn’t like anything fussy. I’d spent twenty minutes in front of the mirror wondering if sheer counted as fussy before taking them off at the last minute.

The ridiculous part was that he probably wouldn’t notice my hands.

Finally, the front doors opened.

The atmosphere in the foyer changed before I even saw him.

That was the thing about Crows.

Jamison walked in surrounded by a wall of men in black suits. They tried to become furniture and failed because no one built furniture that looked capable of breaking a man’s arm in three calm movements.

And in the middle of them was my fiancé.

His black suit had been tailored over heavy muscle, and black ink covered his hands before disappearing beneath his cuffs. More climbed his throat above his collar. One hand held his phone to his ear as he walked, his expression dark enough to make everyone within ten feet suddenly remember somewhere else they needed to look.

“Then fix it before I get there,” he snapped. “I don’t care what he signed. I care what he can prove. Get the file off their server and put Reed on the south account.”

The girl at check-in lowered her eyes. Two men near the staircase stopped talking.

One of Jamison’s security detail leaned toward him, but Jamison lifted a hand without looking and silenced him.

I swallowed. My terrifying, tattooed, always-angry fiancé looked as though he’d been dragged straight out of a war room and forced into a charity gala. I smoothed my dress once and walked toward him.

Because that was what I did. I always went to Jamison, even when he was late, mean and looked straight through me.

His men noticed me first. Two shifted apart just enough to let me through, and I gave them a small smile as I stepped between them.

“Hi,” I said softly.

Jamison kept talking.

I stopped beside him and waited while he finished whatever was more important than the woman he’d left standing alone for twenty minutes. He could have looked at me. He could have acknowledged that half the ballroom had watched me wait for him.

Instead, he dragged the call out.

“Tell him I’m not repeating myself. If Harrington wants a meeting, he can wait until I decide he deserves one.”