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ChapterThirty-One
Sadie
Patricia gives me her full attention, her cat like green eyes slicing into me like daggers.
I'm suddenly breathless.
This woman looked super sweet and super nice two seconds ago. Now she looks like she's ready to harm me. The couple at the table over both have big juicy steaks, half eaten. They don’t seem to sense the animosity pulsing from our table right now, because the man isn’t guarding his steak knife where it rests against the rim of his plate. The way she is looking at me right now, I’m seriously worried she might make a grab for that knife and plunge it into my hopeful heart.
The knife doesn’t plunge into my heart, thankfully. But her words do. “You'restaying with Nick?”
Why does she make that sound so unbelievable? I swear, beneath the sugary sweet of her voice there’s a scorn.
“Um, yes. That's what he said,” I answer, feeling my belly flip and flop with nerves.
I am so uncomfortable right now. I want to run away.
I don't do confrontation. I don't like to fight, and right now I feel like she's getting herself ready to scratch me. Her Holiday red talons are nothing to sneeze at. I would not win in a fight against those.
Instead of scratching me to shreds like I expect, or pulling every strand of hair from my head, she shocks me speechless as her face splits into a blinding smile. When she shoves her hand toward me, I flinch. I don’t take her hand, and that doesn’t seem to bother her as she announces, “I’m Nick’s ex-fiancée.”
My body tenses, and I was already tense, so now I feel like I’ve been carved from granite and dropped here in this stunning mountain steakhouse with its timber beams and scuffed wood floors and low amber light to endure this twisted hell.
This woman is Nick’s ex-fiancée?
What. The. Fuck?
My gaze stutters as it moves from her to Nick. He doesn’t look happy. In fact, he looks the opposite of happy. But he's not denying her claim.
Hewasengaged to her. To this beautiful mountain Barbie with her Holiday done nails, brightly painted red lips that are way too pouty to be real and hair a man could literally get lost in.
What the fuck?
I push out words from my throat that feels as though it’s been rubbed raw with sandpaper. “It's nice to meet you.”
An uncomfortable heat is beginning to bloom from the core of me, radiating outward. My flesh—every inch of it—is prickling uncomfortably. My senses, my freaking intuition is telling me to run. To escape. To flee this terrible misery.
I’m embarrassed. No, no. Embarrassed is too light a word for the way I feel.
I’m humiliated.
I’m stung to the core of me, and I can feel the telltale tickle in my nose that means I might just cry.
I get the man having had a life before me. Normal people have baggage—they have exes. I’m excused from that class of normal, but we’ve already established I’m crazy.
So, I expect Nick to have had a life before me. But a fiancée? And one as beautiful as this woman? I mean, the man has to have expectations, and I’m clearly not the woman to meet them.
What the hell is he even playing at with me?
I can’t give him what he clearly wants. I bet this bitch can bend like a freaking rubber band in bed too.
Shoot, shoot, shoot. What am I still doing here?
Chancing another glance atBarbie, I find she’s studying me. Not only is she beautiful, she’s mean girl beautiful. The kind of woman who knows without a shadow of a doubt that she’s beautiful and she uses it like a blade to cut other women down. Right now, as her green eyes pin me to the chair across from Nick, she looks like the cat that caught the canary—accept I’m the canary and she’s going to shred me between her claws.
She knows exactly how I feel right now. I’m an open book, and I’m beginning to think she’s been watching our table for a while, because she knows just how much hope I had for myself and the man on the other side of the table.
“Leave, Patricia.” Nick sighs as though bored, but I can feel his dark eyes on me now. Studying me.
