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Olivia couldn’t help but do a calculation in her head, wondering how much he had paid to have the entire restaurant for the evening.
She’d need to eat an entire week’s worth of food to justify this.
Fletcher could buy the business ten times over, but that wasn’t the point.
“Are you uncomfortable?” Fletcher asked, narrowing his eyes. “Because that’s not what I was aiming for.”
Damn.
She hadn’t realized she was so transparent.
“No. Maybe. It’s just, no one has ever done anything like this for me before. I don’t mean rent an entire restaurant, but that, too.”
“Then what do you mean?”
She played with the wooden chopsticks, which were intricately engraved, trying to find the words to explain her life.
Her parents had loved her, so it wasn’t like she had gone without. But looking back, she wasn’t sure they’d had a loving marriage. They’d moved around a lot in the early part of her life because she was an army brat, so she’d never formed best friends like some kids did.
Her father hadn’t doted on her or returned home from his missions running across the tarmac with open arms like she’d seen with other families. It was as if he’d kept a part of himself shut down.
Then he died and a part of her mother had died, too.
She never felt neglected, but she most certainly wasn’t treated like a princess.
Then, when Olivia had started dating, she’d been attracted to confident men who showed her a lot of attention. What she hadn’t realized immediately was the extroverted confidence was hiding a need to control.
She’d left those men without looking back, but it was Simon who had slipped through the cracks.
Gaslighting was slow and extremely harmful. She hadn’t seen the signs until they were married a few years. He’d never done anything to make her feel special. Quite the opposite.
He’d made her question her sanity.
It started with little things, like asking if the diet she had started was in fact adding pounds. When she challenged him, saying she hadn’t changed anything in her diet, he'd laughed at her and reminded her that she had talked to him about it the month before. He even produced a brochure about Keto.
She’d never seen it in her life.
After a while she had begun questioning herself. Had she changed her eating habits and not realized?
He did the same with their sex life, claiming she didn’t find him attractive anymore. She had been exhausted and stressed from the psychological abuse, now she looked back.
She’d told him she was doing the same thing, but he claimed she was going to bed later and wearing different clothing to turn him off.
She’d bought some lacy nighties, and he’d told her she was overreacting to his comment.
Olivia didn’t know which way was up from one day to the next.
The subtle abuse was constant.
Fletcher doing this for her, wanting to spoil her, was new. A new experience she didn’t know how to accept.
“This is just so kind. So, well,you, I guess.”
Fletcher reached out and took her hand. “I do have an ulterior motive. Don’t make me out to be a saint.”
“You know I’m a sure thing.”
She laughed and his fingers pressed firmly against hers, their eyes locking. Her smile faded as a million unsaid things passed between them.
