Reborn to Dodge the Bad Marriage novel Chapter 15

Chapter 15 Two Disasters

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Nora knew how bad things were for her and that the Winters would never hand Wren money, which meant she had scraped this together a little at a time, so she started to refuse. “Wren…”

Wren cut her off. “Don’t do that with me, or I won’t feel able to come to you when I need something. I have to head back. I probably won’t be free on the day.”

Put that way, Nora let it go and walked her to the door, telling her once more, “Don’t sit there and take it. Anything happens, you come to me. I’ll back you.”

Wren nodded, agreed to it, got into her car, and hurried off.

She had to be home before 10 to draw Ingrid’s bath and rub her feet.

Coming home late made Ingrid angry, and an angry Ingrid said things to Damon, and after that, the two of them fought.

She did not want Damon walking in from a full day of work and having to referee between his wife and his mother, and she had no wish to put him in that position.

Nora stood in the yard with the card in her hand, remembering that in her last life Wren had sunk into a depression she never climbed out of and had taken her own life.

Nothing had ever explained what set it off, and Nora made up her mind that Wren’s ending was going to be different this time.

The next morning, Julian called Nora and arranged to meet her at City Hall at 5:30 that afternoon to sign the papers and make it legal.

Nora gathered her ID and paperwork along with the medicine she had put together for him, and she reached City Hall exactly on time.

So did he. The two of them arrived seconds apart.

Julian got out of the car and found her in a red slip dress and heels, looking bolder and brighter than ever, and his eyes caught on her bare shoulders before he frowned. “You’re punctual.”

Nora took in the gray in his face and the bruised skin under his eyes, and she frowned harder than he had. “You didn’t sleep again last night, and you’re running on stimulants?”

Her voice dropped cold. “Julian, you’re going to kill yourself doing this.”

The anger in it made him look at her a second time, and he had no intention of explaining

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Chapter 15 Two Disasters

himself. “Let’s go in and sign. I’m busy.”

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“The paperwork can wait. I’m taking you somewhere.” Nora caught him by the wrist and steered him back into the car.

“Where? Nora, I’m busy. After today…”

Nora told the driver to go, then turned to him. “A hotel. I’m getting us a room.”

Julian went rigid. He looked at how serious she was about it, then turned his face away, uncomfortable, and kept his voice low. “We sign first. Nothing else matters. If you’ve changed your mind about marrying me…”

Color was working its way into those washed-out cheeks, and the whole effect was that he was embarrassed.

She could not resist. “You’re dying. Getting an heir out of you comes well before a piece of paper.”

That deepened the color considerably, and it climbed all the way up to his ears.

He forced the heat back down, turned to face her, and delivered it perfectly straight. “My body can’t do that anymore. If you want a child that badly, there’s frozen sperm on file. Once the paperwork clears, you can go through IVF.”

His condition did not allow him to touch a woman at all.

From puberty on, any woman who came too close made it hard for him to breathe, and the bad episodes knocked him out cold and set his condition further back every time.

Nobody ever established whether it was the perfume or the women themselves.

Constance wanted a child out of him regardless, so the sample had been frozen years ago, though nobody intended to use it until there was no other option left.

Nora’s eyes traveled down from that face, came to rest below his belt, and her whole expression turned to distaste. “With a body that useless, I’m not remotely interested.”

Being looked over that openly put the cold straight back into his face. “Nora, I am a dying man.”

Nora nodded and reassured him. “Relax. I’m not that twisted. Corpses do nothing for me.”

“You!” She had gotten him three times now, and the anger had him ready to put her out on the

curb.

Nora saw the temper and stopped playing, and she leveled with him. “Get your mind out of the gutter. I’m taking you to a hotel so you can sleep. Your body was already failing and you’re

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Chapter 15 Two Disasters

forcing stimulants into it and running it well past what it can carry.

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“In this shape, you won’t last until the wedding. I could sign those papers with you today and be widowed on the way out of the building.”

He was breaking down faster than he had in her last life, and he genuinely was not going to reach the wedding.

As far as she could tell, he had given up working hours to come to the Sinclair house and to sign with her, and he had pushed himself back onto stimulants to square away his affairs, and his condition had worsened for it.

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