Page 1 of Reckless Seduction
ONE
The parking lotis dark and wet.
Streetlights shimmer off the side of the brick buildings, casting an eerie glow into the interior of my broken-down Jetta. Tears stream down my face in torrents as I gulp and sob into the steering wheel, an empty bottle of Jameson loosely in my hand.
What the fuck have I done to deserve this?
I thought we saw eye to eye. Our arrangement isn’t one built on love, but I thought we had an understanding. That maybe, despite our circumstances, we might grow to love one another. Then again, how can a snake love the mouse it strikes at?
Work has been hectic recently, and I know it has caused a rift between us. Things have been heating up on the Ward front, and I am inching closer and closer every day to finding out where my friend has disappeared to. Still, with my busy schedule, I’ve been sure to make time for him when he asks.
Ifhe asks.
Not that he ever does. Now I know why.
If anything, he should be grateful for my job and hours. My career as an investigative journalist kept us afloat when he first started his security company. Everything he has is because I’ve spent years working my ass off so that I had the capital to investin his company without taking on too many business loans. It wouldn’t exist without me. All because he didn’t want to ask his father for help.
He wanted to do something on his own.
I snort at that. Drew hasn’t done shit on his own. It has all been done for him—by me. He spent five years building up the company with the moneyIgave him. He even hired my best friend, Brittany, when she needed a job.
The same best friend I found in his bed, sucking his cock, and apparently not for the first time.
Treacherous bitch.
Three years.
Three years of late nights in the office and weekend consultations. That is how long he’s been sleeping with her behind my back. And who knows how many other women came before her. I’ve been nothing but a fool. A completely oblivious fool, because everyone knew but me. My friends’ tones when I called to ask for a place to stay for the night said it all.
They knew and never told me.
At least I know where I stand.
No wonder he didn’t want me to move in with him full-time. How many other women have there been over the years? We’ve been engaged since I was sixteen. I know he had women before we made the engagement official. My father told me it was his right as a man, but I never got that same courtesy. My father made damn sure that I remained virginal until I was eighteen and Drew could claim it for himself.
I was naïve then.
Wanting so much to prove to my father that I was more than just his bastard daughter. I looked away when I saw Drew with other woman, but the moment we became official, it all stopped, and I thought he had changed.
Fucker was just getting it closer to home.
We made our engagement official five years ago, on my twenty-first birthday. A long engagement, he said—so he could get his company off the ground. Once everything was stable, we’d get married.
So why wait all that time if he was just going to cheat on me?
There’s only one answer that makes sense.
He didn’t want to lose access to my bank account—or the financial backing my father provided.
The arrangement started when I was sixteen, wrapped in expectations and obligations, strings attached so tightly I barely noticed I was a puppet. A pretty one. A useful one. But when I saw Drew and Brittany together today, I took fucking shears to every last string.
No one gets to use me anymore.
I’m done.
He can marry her, for all I care.
I stuffed everything I owned from his apartment into a bag, ignoring his pleas and protests as I stormed out. Brittany sat on his bed, smug and naked, her body on full display like she’d won some sort of prize. She’d wanted him once, long before me, but our families had already decided.
