Page 166 of Theirs to Tempt: The Marriage Claim

Lucian doesn’t look at him.

Neither do I.

The ring slips free.

I place it on the pale stone counter, and the tiny sound it makes seems impossibly loud in the enormous room. Then I remove one wedding band, followed by the other.

Without the familiar weight of them, my hand feels strangely naked.

For a moment, all three of us stare at the small cluster of jewelry between us.

“We are still married,” Lucian says.

A broken, almost hysterical laugh escapes me before I can stop it. “Of course that’s what you’d say.”

The pain that crosses his face is immediate.

I close my eyes.

Hurting him doesn’t make me feel better.

When I look at him again, he has regained some of his composure, but not all of it. I know Lucian too well now. I see the tension in his shoulders, the way his fingers curl and release at his sides because he has decided not to reach for me.

“I am not saying my father is innocent,” I tell them. “I’m not pretending you turned some wonderful, honorable man into someone who gambled away his daughter. He made his choices. He lied. He took money that wasn’t his to take. He used my work and my name. Then when he was desperate enough, he put me on a table as if I were another asset he could leverage.”

Caleb’s expression tightens.

“My mother made choices too. She told herself that taking escrow money for my tuition was acceptable because she was helping me. Later, when things stopped making sense, she asked fewer questions because she was sick and frightened and dependent on my dad.”

I look from one man to the other.

“And you knew exactly what and who you were dealing with. And you created a trap that drew him in deeper and deeper.”

He says nothing.

I wrap my arms around myself, suddenly cold despite the controlled temperature of the penthouse. “What I don’t understand is why.”

The memory of that courtyard with Adrian eight years ago rises with startling clarity. The scent of jasmine on the night air, candlelight flickering, the man I loved kneeling in front of me.

Then slow applause from the shadows.

Lucian and Caleb.

I had thought that was the moment they entered my life. But the financial trail tells another story.

They had been in my father’s world months before they stepped from the shadows of that courtyard.

A question I have carried for eight years rises so abruptly that I wonder how I managed not to ask it before now.

I look at Caleb. “What did you say to Adrian?”

His expression changes.

It is subtle, no more than a tightening around his eyes, but after living with these men, sleeping between them, learning the thousand small ways they communicate without words, I see it.

Lucian does too.

For once, he says nothing.