Just Before My Wedding: Trapped By My Ruthless Boss novel Chapter 26

Chapter 26

OCEANS.

I kept replaying the meeting with Gerald in my head on the drive back, turning it over, looking for any loose threads I might have missed or inconsistencies in some of his hesitations that I initially didn’t add up.

There was none.

The man was telling his truth. Every word of it. Which meant the most promising lead we had managed to surface in six years had delivered exactly one useful thing the confirmation that she had survived, walked away on her own two feet, and disappeared so completely that even the man who had held her while she bled didn’t know her name.

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I poured two fingers of scotch when I got back and sat with it without drinking it for a while.

My phone was on the desk in front of me,

11:16 PM.

I picked up the glass and drank.

She was already past the ten o’clock mark, which I was aware of and had been aware of since 10:03 when I had looked at the time and made the conscious decision not to call her. I wanted to see how far she’d take her disobedience. Whether she’d call or at least have the sense to send a message acknowledging she knew she was late.

But she didn’t.

I wanted this to play out naturally, so I’d see how far her disobedience runs.

But as soon as the clock hit 12:17 AM, I hit the dial button.

My jaw was set so tight as I pressed my phone to my ear with the unreasonable fury of a man who had told himself he wasn’t going to do exactly what he was currently doing.

It rang.

And rang.

And rang.

On the fourth ring of the fourth call, I had already decided I was sending men to her house.

Then someone picked up.

The voice that came through wasn’t hers.

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Chapter 26

It was a man.

“Yes?”

I pulled the phone from my ear and looked at the screen to confirm I had dialed the right number. I had.

I put it back. “Who is this?”

After a beat, he spoke. “Her fiance.” He said it the way men say things they want you to feel.

I kept my voice completely level. “Put Kisarel on the phone.”

“It’s past midnight.” He let that sit for a second. “Does your company make a habit of calling staff at this hour? Just curious, Oceans. Professional curiosity.”

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Every word he was saying was designed to do something specific, and he knew it, and I knew it, and we were both going to pretend otherwise for the duration of this call.

Jace and I have never been fans of each other. One could see the other drowning and watch with a smile on his face.

“Put her on the phone,” I said again in the same tone, using every functioning brain cell I had left to keep my voice exactly where it was.

He chuckled. “She’s asleep, man. Had a pretty hectic night.” There was another pause, and in that pause, he let everything that sentence could possibly mean hang between us without touching a single one of them directly. “I’ll let her know you called.”

The line went dead.

I stood still with my phone still in my ear. And when I slowly peeled it off my ear, my hands were already trembling.

The nerves.

The audacity of Jace to think I gave a fuck about what he and his fiancée did at the hour of the night.

All I wanted was to make sure she was coming for our trip. Nothing more.

But why did I suddenly feel the need to break something? Why did… Fuck.

I picked up the glass of scotch and flung it at the wall.

The shatter of it did absolutely nothing for what was happening in my chest right now. The vivid, specific, uninvited image already forming, of Kiss in that man’s bed, was a torment I didn’t willingly choose – her hair spread out on his bed the way it spread out in mine. Those

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Chapter 20

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sounds she made, the specific pitch of her moan when I hit the right spot, the way she said my name when she was close all happening for him. Her body, that body, responding to his hands, his cock, the way it responded to mine.

Logan’s words kept replaying in my head.

Jace also dips his cock in the same pussy!‘

Fuck!

I picked up the scotch bottle and sent it the same way the glass had gone!

The sound of it hitting the wall did nothing. Same as the glass had done nothing. Rage that size didn’t have an outlet that matched it – you just had to stand in the middle of it and wait for it to become something manageable, which it hadn’t done yet and didn’t look like it was going to anytime soon.

Kisarel was meant to be a good fuck. That was the full extent of what this was ever supposed to be. A release valve. A controlled indulgence with a clear end date that both parties understood. Nothing that required this standing in my living room at one in the morning with scotch littered on my walls, feeling the humiliating fury of listening to another man tell me, in the most polite possible terms, exactly where I stood.

All of it stopped. Right now. Tonight.

I’d made my decision before I went to bed, and I woke up with it still intact, which was all the confirmation I needed.

The hum of the engine muffled out all the noise around me as I stepped into my private jet, wishing I could also make the noise in my own head to stop.

My team was already seated. Logan, who carefully ignored me as we boarded, had the Sydney briefing open on his tablet. Everything was exactly as it should be and moving exactly on schedule.

I was determined. I’d made up my mind. But there was still this small, stupid, persistent part of me that kept pulling my eyes to the window.

Just in case my PA ran up to us, apologizing for being late.

I stared until the doors closed and the pilot announced take–off. I kept staring down the window until there was nothing but dark clouds beneath us.

And I fucking hated the resolve I arrived at in that moment.

It was a resolve that knew exactly what it was giving up.

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Chapter 20

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