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He raced down the hallway, deciding against the elevator and taking the stairs.
Still so many questions that needed to be answered and feelings to be dealt with.
Birdie had just said that morning, when she had woken up in a daze and desperate to see Mia, she was ready to share everything.
Instead, Mia had dropped a bomb, and before he could get his shit together, she had banished Birdie from her room and their lives.
Somehow, the details surrounding that powder keg of information were vitally important. And once again, she left before providing any context or insights.
The automatic entrance doors couldn’t open quick enough as he spotted her with a man, standing in front of a car valued at over two hundred grand.
“Birdie,” he called out.
Her back stiffened in response as the man in front of her, wearing a suit that cost more than his vintage truck, peered over her shoulder.
Lucas reached her but stopped short. “Bird, look at me.”
She turned to him, and the first thing that came to mind? Another person had inhabited her body. This wasn’t his Birdie, but a plastic and veneered version of the original.
She had pasted a smile he had never seen before on her face. Fake and failing to reach her bottle-green eyes.
“Lucas, perfect timing. I’d like to introduce you to Errol Shepherd.”
The man extended a hand sporting a gold watch Lucas had only seen on the wrist of crooked politicians.
His eyes remained on Birdie, ignoring the gesture. “Can we talk? In private?”
She turned toward the suit, and Lucas’s eyes stayed on her small hand resting on the man’s chest.
“Give us a minute, please.”
“Aren’t you going to tell him the good news?” The man’s expression proved hard to decipher since he was wearing sunglasses, the only telltale sign a pair of condescending lips drawn in a smug smile.
Standing between them, Birdie glanced down and then with that phony as fuck smile on her face, looked Lucas in the eye. “Errol is my fiancé.”
Once again, he was shell-shocked. “Since fucking when?”
The man responded for her. “Since the day of my father’s funeral.”
Birdie winced, bringing a protective arm across her stomach, holding on to her elbow.
The name Shepherd was a hard one to forget, not to mention his first, especially since his brother’s was Flynn. Having read the names in a particularly salacious article online, at the time, Lucas had thought it ironic how Birdie had managed to marry into yet another jacked-up family.
He scoffed, shaking his head. “This can’t be happening. You’re marrying your stepson?”
She blinked as if something bothered both of her eyes and said blandly. “Wow, it sounds so much worse when you put it that way.”
His heart sank as his temper rose, especially at her deadpan delivery.
But he caught himself, and yanked up as many of his walls as possible to shield him from the only woman who could wreck them one by one with a single honest smile.
It took every ounce of strength to not care. To refrain from wallowing in disbelief or to become overwhelmed with grief, refusing to allow himself a moment of loss.
How apropos that when he’d finally succumbed to her, had drowned in her body and melted into her soul, she once again turned his world upside down and inside out and stomped on it.
* * *
Birdie pinchedthe inside of her elbow to keep from crying while Lucas stood before her in disbelief.
