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“Could you repeat the question, please?”
“Care to tell us how Senator Keaton popped the question? I have to say, he never struck me as the over-romantic type,” he chortled, stroking his beard like a Harry Potter character.
I didn’t even have it in me to taunt Wolfe. I was too caught up in the fact that my life was officially over, and Angelo was going to marry Emily, therefore fulfilling my worst nightmare.
“Yeah, of course. He…he…proposed to me on the…”
“Staircase to the museum,” Wolfe clipped, chucking my chin in faux affection that made my skin crawl. “I don’t know what I did to deserve her passionate kiss. You stole my breath.” He turned to me, his grays on my blues, two pools of beautiful lies. People gasped around us, enchanted by the magnetic power of his expression as he stared at me. “I stole your heart.”
You stole my first kiss.
Then my happiness.
And finally, my life.
“T-that’s right.” I dabbed my neck with a linen napkin, suddenly too nauseous and weak to fight back.
My body was finally crumpling under the strain of not eating for days.
“I will never forget that night,” I said.
“Me neither.”
“You make a beautiful couple,” someone remarked.
I was too dizzy to even tell if they were male or female.
Wolfe smirked, raising his tumbler of whiskey to his lips.
Defying him purposely—and undoubtedly stupidly—I allowed my eyes to drift back to the table where I longed to sit.
Emily was now grazing her French-manicured fingernails along Angelo’s blazered arm. Angelo looked down at her face, his mouth breaking into a grin.
I could see how she defrosted him to the idea of them.
How she lowered his guard, one touch at a time.
She leaned toward him, whispering something in his ear and giggling, and his eyes shot to me again.
Were they talking about me?
Was I making a complete fool of myself by staring at them so openly?
I grabbed a glass of champagne, about to knock it down in one go.
Wolfe wrapped his fingers around my wrist, stilling my hand before it reached my mouth. It was a gentle, firm touch. Callous and hairy. A man’s touch.
“Sweetheart, we’ve been through this. This is real champagne. The grownup kind,” he said with a hint of exasperated sympathy in his voice, causing the entire table to roar with wild laughter.
“The trouble of marrying a youngster,” the other senator snorted out.
Wolfe raised a thick, condescending eyebrow. “Marriage is a tricky business. Which reminds me…” He leaned forward, his blank expression turning into a sympathetic frown. “How are you handling the divorce from Edna?”
Now my furious blush became almost unbearable. I wanted to kill him. Kill him for this stupid stunt, for forcing me into marrying him, and for the fact that, by proxy, he just threw Angelo into Emily’s arms.
I put the champagne glass back on the table, biting my tongue from pointing out that I’d drank plenty at the gala where we’d met, and he didn’t seem to care much then.
Actually, he took advantage of my tipsiness when he tricked me into kissing him.
