Forbidden Fate (Crowne Point 3)

“Friends don’t get their friends’ husbands kicked out of their wings. Friends don’t give curfews, friends don’t send friends poetry—”

“So you did get my last text,” he cut me off.

I rolled my lips to the side. “As if Grayson Crowne has never left anyone on read?”

He smiled a little, like a teenager caught with a girl in his room.

I missed that.

Fuck, I missed his smile.

That’s the problem.

I stepped back. “No more poetry. No more of this. We’re supposed to be friends.”

He grabbed my elbow. “I’m your friend, Snitch? That’s it? That’s all this is?”

It’s what it has to be. He’s married to Lottie. He wants to be married to Lottie. Every action has proven that from the very fucking beginning.

I looked away.

“What if we could be more?” he asked.

As if fate heard us conspiring against it, Lottie called through the frosty winter breeze for her husband.

“Grayson? Is that you?”

Behind Grayson, Lottie gripped the gates of his private balcony, leaning ever so slightly over it to try to see us in the dusky twilight. The inky spires and turrets of Crowne Hall jutted into the frosty twilight.

“Don’t write to me, Grayson. Don’t protect me. Just…don’t. You don’t get to hold on when you refuse to fight for me, when you never fought for us.”

He grabbed my wrist as I tried to walk by him, eyes blazing like there was something he wanted desperately to say.

But he let me go.

GRAY

* * *

“It really was you on the news,” Lottie said the minute I got inside our wing. “You carried her. You saved her. You rescued her. You’re her savior. You should have just taken a mistress. I could have handled that.”

“Should I have abandoned her there? Like you did?”

Lottie’s lips parted at my words. After a moment she said softly, “I don’t understand why you hate me so much. We were friends before we fell in love. The only answer I can

come up with is…because I’m not her.”

I ground my jaw, going to my desk to grab a sucker.

“It was a du Lac publication, Lottie,” I said, rooting around my drawer for a sucker. “This situation never would have happened if that article wasn’t published.”

“You think I did this?” she asked my back.

“I know your father has someone on the inside. If not you, then who? Who has the most to gain?”

“You do. You think I did this.”

I turned around. The wind blew like a soft scream against the windowpane. She stared at me with open brown eyes. I wanted to believe her, wanted to believe the woman sleeping in my bed wasn’t capable of this, but every bad thing happening to the woman I loved was either traced back to a du Lac or my grandfather.