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Chapter Eighteen
Iwas overwhelmed. I thought that I had been holding it together well recently. I’d accepted that marriage to Marco would be my lot in life. Like Dom said, Marco had sweetened the offer of this marriage. It stung that he accused me of being a gold digger because he was right. I didn’t love Marco, and he didn’t love me. This was a marriage of convenience.
Sitting on Marco’s bed, I did my best to try and control the anger that was bubbling against the surface. I was minutes away from screaming my fucking head off.
In. Out. In. Out. I tried my best to breath slowly, so that I could calm down. I closed my eyes when I heard the sound of dress shoes outside of the door. “Ivy?” Marco’s deep voice called out from the other side of the door. The door shook as he tried to open tit I’d locked it the moment that I rushed inside.
“Open the door,” he ordered.
I wanted to tell him to fuck off and go back to his brother, but I couldn’t. I wasn’t naïve. I knew that I wasn’t getting out of this marriage unless I was in a coffin.
“Ivy?” Marco called out.
Sighing, I jumped up from the bed and rushed towards the door. Grabbing the handle, I pulled it open with a flourish. “What?” I bit out. I was being unfair. Marco hadn’t called me a whore. At least, not in the last thirty minutes. But I knew what he thought of me. He’d told me as much when he showed me to our new room.
“Come to drag me back to dinner? Because that’s the only way you’ll get me to that table.” Sasha was nice enough, and Alex had been kind to me, but I would sooner starve to death than sit at that table with Dom Blanchi.
Marco leaned against the doorway. He was dressed in a black suit, and he looked effortlessly sexy. It pissed me off more. “I came to see if you were okay?”
I snorted and backed away from the door. “Like you care.” Just two weeks ago, Marco had tried to squeeze the life out of me, but now, he was acting like a genuinely concerned fiancé.
“Dom was out of line.”
I put my hands on my hips and leveled him with what I hoped was my menacing stare. “Was he?” I asked. “Because just thirty minutes before you were reminding me that you’ve seen me naked.”
Marco shrugged. “So?”
My mouth dropped open in surprise. “So, you are just as bad!”
“Am I?” Marco asked.
I threw my hands up in the air in frustration. Marco leaned into being the bad guy so well that he didn’t even care that he did something wrong. “I’m not a whore,” I spit out, “and I’m not a golddigger.”
“I’m aware of all this.”
“Then why would you let your brother say those things about me?” I didn’t understand why Dom’s words were bothering me so much. Though I found less information about Dom on the internet than Marco, I knew enough to piece together the fact that he wasn’t just a wealthy New York businessman.
Marco walked into the room. “Can I come in?” he asked.
“It’s your room,” I reminded him. I didn’t think that I was ever going to think of this space as ours. It was dark and masculine and looked like the room of a bachelor.
Marco sat on the edge of the bed. His eyes watched me as I busied myself putting away the few pieces of clothing that I had. It was embarrassing that I had so little when he was disgustingly rich. I didn’t even have anything to wear to this fancy dinner, which was another thing that rubbed me the wrong way.
“Dom’s the leader of the family,” he explained to me.
I said nothing. I just continued folding my clothes over and over again.
“He’s just trying to…”
I dropped my clothing and turned my attention to Marco. “Put me in my place?”
Marco cringed, but I knew that was what he was saying. Sasha was young. I wasn’t sure how old she was, but she had the face of a cherub. I’m sure that some of that was her pregnancy, but I suspected that she was at least a few years younger than me. “I’m not your sister-in-law,” I told Marco. He raised a brow and opened his mouth to speak, but I cut him off before he could get a word in. “I know this isn’t a real marriage, but I’m not going to be some submissive waif following you around”
Marco said nothing, and for a moment, I worried that I’d gone too far. No matter what Marco said or did, I couldn’t forget the moment he had killed someone. That was what started all of this.
“I can assure you that fake wife or not, I don’t expect you to be anything like my sister-in-law.”
“Are you sure?” I asked. I didn’t know why it mattered to me so much.
