Page 28 of Wicked Games

“Yeah. I know. Come on.” He opens the door and I step into his living room. There’s a laptop on the coffee table, and the flowers on his island are dying like mine are. I should throw them out. His still have a little life in them yet. “Do you want some wine? I have a few bottles in the cabinet. Wine glasses above the toaster.”

“Red? Are you still grilling steaks?”

“Might as well. We can nuke some potatoes though. They’d take too long out there.”

“Sounds good. I’ll pour the wine and you get the steaks started.”

“How do you like yours?” he asks, taking two plastic-wrapped steaks out of the fridge.

“Medium rare is fine. Medium. Just don’t turn it into a bloody charred brick.”

“You don’t think I can grill a steak?”

I open the cabinet door. Several bottles of wine are lying on their sides. I’m going to have to turn a light on to read their labels. “Do you cook for yourself?”

“Yeah, I can cook. Money’s only a side bonus of what I like doing.”

“I wish I had that problem.”

“No, you don’t.” His voice is low.

“I’m sorry.”

He brushes his thumb over my cheek. “It’s okay. Put a couple potatoes in the microwave, will you? We can eat outside.”

“Sure.”

The potatoes are in the cabinet next to the wine, and I rinse two and shove a fork into them, and put them in the microwave. While they cook, I look around in his kitchen for a corkscrew and find one in a drawer full of spoons, spatulas, and whisks. I choose a Moscato that might be too light to go with our steaks, but even if Seth knows his wine, he wasn’t going to find the caliber he drinks in Ashfield in this little town.

“These won’t take long,” he says as I step onto the patio.

“Good. I’m starving. Here, I poured you a glass.”

“Thanks.”

He takes the wineglass and sinks onto a wicker loveseat, and I sit next to him and sip. He lit the candles that were on the table, citronella to keep the bugs away, and the flames flicker in his eyes. We sit like that, not speaking, our fingers tangled together, and I try to describe what I’m feeling. There’s peace, but it’s unsettling too, because it’s something I wouldn’t have found if I hadn’t met Seth and I don’t trust it. I was happy in my marriage, but not because of Darren, if that makes sense. I had my writing, my own friends. He didn’t make me happy, or, I should say, my happiness didn’t depend on him. Meeting Seth freshly divorced, I think my happiness could grow to depend on him because I don’t know who I am alone. If I let myself be in a relationship with him, I’d have to learn how to be my own person in addition to being his wife. If he let me be my own person. Can you be anyone but a billionaire’s wife if you’re married to a billionaire?

Seth turns the steaks and I go back inside to find plates and silverware to set the table. The potatoes are done, and I bring them out with the butter and sour cream he had in the fridge. It will be a simple meal, but all the sex we had didn’t fill me up, not that way, and I’m starving.

He cooked the steaks perfectly, thick sirloins, and I eat half of mine before I can even tell him so. “You are a good cook.”

He sips his wine. “Maybe I lied and this is all I can make.”

Tilting my head, I say, “I would be strangely okay with that.” I pause. “Did Brooke like to cook?”

“She did, but we had a housekeeper who did most of it. We weren’t married long before she got pregnant, and she was pretty sick through the whole thing.”

“Did she want kids?” I ask tentatively, wondering how long he’ll let us talk about this.

He shrugs. “She said she did, and she wasn’t on anything. We both knew how sex works, and it wasn’t a surprise when she got pregnant. I don’t know. I don’t know what happened. It was like, one day we were happy, and the next I was at work, Theo was with his nanny more than he was with her, and she was gone doing whatever it was she was doing.” He scoffs. “I guess that’s Vale. Sometimes I wonder why she even married me.”

“And it wasn’t Violet?” I risk him getting mad at me. We’ve already gone through this once, but a woman isn’t suddenly unhappy to the point she’s sleeping around behind her husband’s back. If what he says is true, they were married for maybe a year before she got pregnant. That’s hardly a marriage.

He blows out a sigh and rubs his face. “I don’t know, Avery. I talked to her about it after I snapped at you and she said Brooke hated her. I had no idea. Women choose their own friends so I didn’t expect them to be close, but for Brooke to hate me because of my friendship with Violet, that just seems so extreme. She knew we were friends and business partners when I asked her to marry me. She said yes. Why would a woman say yes to a man she didn’t love?”

“I doubt she would, but maybe she didn’t like being a billionaire’s wife and she didn’t know she wouldn’t until she was living it.”

“I really hope that’s not true.”