Page 7 of Sweet Wicked Vows
They always said it was a lonely place at the top. But what Frederic was offering meant that I wouldn’t have to do it alone.
Slowly, I dipped my chin once. “I’ll do it.”
An unnerving grin fell across Frederic’s face, making me realize in that moment that I just made a deal with the devil, and the devil never played fair.
Chapter Three
The instructions were simple.
Fly down to New York and meet at the courthouse at ten sharp.
Which meant only one thing: Frederic had done the impossible and somehow gotten the Reynolds girl to go along with his seemingly insane plan.
Whatever he did to make her agree, it must have been one hell of a sales pitch.
Then again, my brother had met Reynolds’ daughter on several occasions. Perhaps the two of them had more of a friendly relationship than I first thought. Frederic always handled the events, going in our place to sell himself to potential investors and consumers. Although he may come across as a cold bastard most of the time, he still knew how to handle people.
He talked the right lingo, knew exactly what people wanted to hear, and knew how to appease the vultures in the high society we now found ourselves in.
I hated all of that.
Crowds of people lit my skin on fire. There was always too much happening at once. Too much noise. Too much touching. Too much for my system to handle.
When we were clawing our way up in the world, I used to attend such shitty events. I forced a smile alongside my brother and pretended that I didn’t want to rip off the next person’s arm whoaccidentally bumped into me. I laughed at the shit jokes about golf, the country clubs lack of food varieties, and whatever other nonsense they spewed. Despite the looks and whispers, I acted like the businessman who had wonForbes Man of the Year.
As time passed and we no longer needed to prove ourselves, I struggled to maintain a pleasant exterior.
From then on, Frederic thought it best he attended such things alone.
Suited me perfectly.
“Another glass, Mr. Dade?” The flight stewardess smiled, hovering the bottle of wine near my empty glass. I nodded, watching the red liquid fill the emptiness before she stepped back. “Anything else I can get you?”
“Non, merci.”
Looking out the jet window, I rolled my thumb over my phone screen. I spent all night reading anything and everything that was out there about the woman I was being forced to marry.
Evelyn Reynolds.
She, surprisingly, looked nothing like her father. At first sight of her photographs on her social media accounts, that she stupidly didn’t set as private, I thought I’d stumbled across the wrong person until I remembered our one and only encounter at an event years prior.
Hair that reminded me of a dying sunset, sprinkles of freckles across her pale skin, and the facial structure of a Greek Goddess.
Not a hint of Reynolds until I spied the pair of earth-stopping green eyes staring back at me. The photo was of her and her younger brother at some charity function in Washington. The siblings were chalk and cheese, except for their eye color.
There was no realinformation out there about her. She was obviously the daughter of the largest diamond and fine jewelry tycoon in America and Europe. She had studied journalism, of all things, atNYU.
With her degree, she started working freelance before being hired as a reporting journalist for theLilypad Press,an upcoming online media platform.
It was surprising that her father didn’t push for her to study something beneficial to his company. Law or business, hell, even economics.
The rest of the information on her was pretty mundane. She hung around with the same two women—each of them tagged on her social media accounts, and all signs of her prior engagement to Laurence Larkin ceased to exist.
I mean, I scoured high and low and didn’t find as much as a whisper of him.
The jet landed in a miserable, wet New York, washing away Ontario’s crisp, dry August morning.
My brother arranged for a car to pick me up and drive me straight to the courthouse, likely not trusting me to actually go through with his plan.