Chapter 45
[ 955 words ]
Delia’s POV
“The door, Delia,” he commanded. “You knew exactly what you were signing up for when you agreed to this arrangement. I am a businessman, and I have fulfilled my contractual obligations for the evening. I do not have the time or the inclination to keep trying to make it sink into your head that I do not fancy you. You are a name on a document. Nothing more p>
“But you fucked that Chloe girl!” I screamed; the words tore from my throat, raw and ugly. “You brought her into this house! You slept with her in the guest suite while I was right down the hall! If you can touch her, why can’t you touch your own wife p>
Julian’s lip curled into a thin, cruel sneer. “Chloe knows her place. She is a professional who understands that she is a temporary convenience. I am a married man, and if my real wife ever walks through those doors, I don’t want to have to explain why I was wasting my time with a woman who was just a placeholder p>
My heart stopped. If my real wife ever walks through those doors. He wasn’t talking about me. He was talking about someone else. The woman in France. The woman whose nails I was currently wearing like a costume.
“I played my part today,” Julian continued, his voice dropping to a dangerous, low vibration. “I gave your mother the show she wanted. Now, use the door before I lose my patience p>
“No,” I whispered. I was losing him. If I let him push me out now, I would never get back in. I reached for the zipper of my dress, my movements frantic. “Look at me, Julian. Really look at me p>
In a final, desperate bid for his attention, I let the gown fall to the floor. I stood before him completely naked, trembling in the cool air of his bedroom, offering him everything I had. I waited for his pupils to dilate. I waited for him to reach for me, to finally realize that I was standing right here, while the wife whom I’ve never met was miles away.
Julian didn’t move. He didn’t even blink. He looked at my naked body with the same detachment he would use to study a budget report. After a long, agonizing silence, he reached for the robe I had discarded on a nearby chair.
He didn’t wrap it around me gently. He threw it at my face.
“Put it on,” he said, his voice dripping with disgust. “It would be a pity to embarrass you further, Delia, but let’s be clear: my dick doesn’t even perk by looking at your body. You are unremarkable. You are a chore. Now, leave, woman p>
The rejection was so total, so visceral, that I felt my knees go weak. Before I could even wrap the robe around myself properly, Julian gripped my arm, not with heat, but with a terrifying, iron-like strength. He shoved me toward the service door, propelling me into the dark hallway that led back to my lonely wing.
“Julian, please p>
“Goodnight, Mrs. Windsor,” he snapped, and the door slid shut with a final, echoing click, locking me out.
I stood in the dim light of the back hallway, clutching my robe to my chest, shivering. On the other side of that wall, Julian was probably already washing the scent of me off his hands. I had entered his room a queen in my mother’s eyes, but I was leaving it as something far less than a placeholder.
I was a ghost in my own marriage, and the man I loved had just told me that he was waiting for a wife.
Julian’s POV
I checked the time the moment the service door sealed Delia back into her wing, and I did it not because I cared where she went after humiliating herself in my suite, but because I needed to confirm that Martha Kensington had finally left my house and taken her perfume, her entitlement, and her constant hunger for leverage with her, because there are only so many hours in a day and I refuse to waste any more of them playing husband for a woman I never wanted while her mother watches like she’s supervising livestock.
The estate had gone quiet in that way only old money houses know how to go quiet, where silence is not peace but a controlled environment, curated by staff who understand which doors to close and which corridors to clear when the head of the family is done performing, and I stood for a moment in my study, the same study with the mahogany shelves and the weight of Windsor history pressing in from every angle, and I let the stillness settle into my bones long enough to hear the thing I didn’t want to admit out loud, which was that I didn’t feel relieved after pushing Delia out of my suite; I felt irritated, as though the entire evening had been a distraction from something else that kept pulling at the corner of my attention like a hand I couldn’t shake off.
The whiskey in my glass tasted like nothing, the kind of nothing that happens when your mind has already moved on, so I set it aside and reached for my phone, and I stared at Zane’s name for half a second because I knew exactly what he was going to say before he said it, and I called anyway because the one thing Zane has always been good for is showing up when my restlessness turns sharp enough to become dangerous.
He answered with a lazy voice that suggested he was already smiling. “You survived another performance p>
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