Page 31 of The Wrong Husband

"Why?" he asked curiously.

"It's too big. Oh, don't get me wrong, Bianca will love it. It's a lovely ring. Just not for me."

Duncan set the rings down on the dining table and rubbed a hand over the back of his neck in a gesture that was so like Damian that I had to smile. The brothers had a lot of similarities though Damian did look better in a suit.

"You don't want any of Damian's money, do you, Emilia?"

"No."

"You're not a gold digger."

"Enh…nothing wrong with being one," I remarked. "My friend, the paralegal, she's also an escort. That's how she paid for law school and what I learned from her is that there's nothing wrong with a woman sleeping with a man for money. Or marrying him for it."

"But not you?"

"I don't want to marry," I said sullenly. "Maybe later in life. I'm twenty-three, Duncan. I was working for my mother and sister because they needed help. I was hoping to save money and…anyway. I'm so tired. I want to go home and get some sleep."

"Alright, Emilia. Do you have a way to get home?"

He'd gone from man on the warpath to kind stranger. But I didn't trust that. He could go right back to being mean to me and I didn't have the energy to deal with that right now. I was about sixty seconds away from sobbing my guts out.

"Yes."

"Okay. Someone will reach out to you tomorrow with paperwork."

"Thanks, Duncan."

I didn't wait for him to change his mind about grilling me further and I skedaddled out of Damian's luxury apartment.

Chapter 8

Damian

"What are you doing here?" I asked my brother when I came home. "And where's Emilia?"

"She went to her place," my brother explained as he drank what looked like some of my good scotch while he sat on an armchair, facing a glass wall with a sprawling view of San Francisco.

"Damn it. I hope she took her pain medication with her."

"How did she get hurt?"

I sat down across from him and poured myself some scotch from the bottle resting on the coffee table next to whiskey glasses.

"Bianca pushed her and she fell. Hurt her head on the coffee table. It was an accident."

"She's not a gold digger, Damian."

"I know."

"You didn't fall in love with her, did you?" Duncan asked.

We didn't do love in our family, not the type Byron wrote about anyway. I sighed. I was happy to lie to my parents but not my brothers. "No."

"Then why the fuck did you marry her? And I'm not buying the you got drunk, and she took advantage of you nonsense. You proposed to her outside a fucking chapel."

I drank some scotch and laughed self-deprecatingly. "Bianca cheated on me."

That got Duncan riled up. "What the fuck?"