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“When do you expect it to arrive?”
He didn’t even hesitate. “We got an ETA of six weeks out.”
That’s when Lucas felt her presence before he saw her.
His Birdie-radar was forever finely tuned.
He felt his heart rate ratchet up as he watched her walk down the steps from the patio that ran the entire length of the house to the row of loungers.
Thankful for glasses that camouflaged his hungry eyes, he watched her spread her towel over the chair, remove her linen cover-up, and pull a book out of her tote.
“What the hell are you wearing?” Errol yelled across the pool.
She froze, still bending over the tote.
Lucas waited for her to rain fire all over his smug ass, but instead, she straightened with a smile that was as artificial as Errol’s pearly white veneers.
She looked down as if to remind herself of something and then lifted her head and said, “It’s a bathing suit?”
“Go back inside and put the other one on,” he barked. “The one mother picked out for you.”
Her smile faltered but, somehow, she managed to resuscitate it. “Of course.”
Lucas watched in utter fascination as Birdie turned toward the house and with the grace of a resigned starlet, ascended the steps and dipped back inside the folding glass doors of the mansion.
Errol’s attention returned to Lucas. “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?”
Lucas started, not expecting such an inappropriate question from the man who had just purposefully humiliated his wife. Not to mention the only woman Lucas had ever loved.
“She is,” he returned simply, glass shards cutting into his esophagus.
“Don’t be impressed. A few months ago, she was my stepmother.” He chuckled as if she were a joke. Below him.
“How does that happen?” Lucas asked, as if watching a train wreck, where Birdie was the victim and he a useless spectator unable to look away or refrain from learning the gruesome details of her demise.
“Bought her. With the very money that used to be the old man’s.” He leaned toward Lucas, unaware of the vein pulsating in his neck and his hands fisting. “She’s a tiger in bed. Likes it rough, if you know what I mean.”
He would kill him. As God was his witness, he would grab him by the head and wrench his neck until he could hear the bones pop and feel the cartilage bend to his will.
Unaware of how close he had come to being induced into his own dirt nap, Errol began his return to the mansion. “I have to get to the office. Tell Raul about the delay, and in the future, I expect you to come to me with updates rather than me having to ask for them.”
“Yes, sir,” Lucas said, the rage pounding through his body like a jackhammer, his anger clouding around him like the dust such an activity would render.
