“I was over Effie Bagnold ages ago,” Mitchell Lloyd declared with a scoff, swirling his drink. “A woman should be delicate, like Suzan. Effie, on the other hand…”
Suddenly, a glass shattered in a man's grasp in the corner.
Holding a cake to celebrate their third anniversary, Effie Bagnold watched as blood trickled from the sharply defined hand of the man.
Lyman Etheridge, the power behind The Etheridge Group, calmly wiped his fingers, his dark eyes skimming her flushed cheeks. “Miss Bagnold, how about marrying me?”
The high society buzzed with shock.
Everyone thought the up-and-coming designer was out of options and seeking to secure her future by marrying up—but they were unaware that this marriage was the culmination of a trap Lyman had set five years earlier.
Lyman Etheridge’s private gallery was filled with thousands of her silhouettes: from her feeding cats in a rainy alley during her college days to her arranging jewelry backstage at a Paris fashion show…
Late at night, as Lyman Etheridge stubbed out his cigarette, he watched Mitchell kneel in a downpour on the surveillance feed. Suddenly, he pushed Effie Bagnold against the floor-to-ceiling window: “Did he touch you here... or here?”
Later, a financial journalist captured an image of the reputedly harsh and brutal Lyman Etheridge kneeling before Effie Bagnold, his hand trembling as he held a pregnancy test.
Effie Bagnold, twirling her wedding ring, let out a light chuckle: “Lyman, surprised?”
The typically stern Lyman Etheridge immediately had tears in his eyes, his voice quivering as he kissed the aged ring mark on her finger. “Effie, when you were twenty-two, all I wanted to say was…”
“Say… what?”
“The cake is sweet,” he murmured huskily right by her ear, "but not a fraction as sweet as you."
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