Paper Marriage Proposition (Gage Brothers 1)

He’d taken things from her he shouldn’t have taken, abused her in mental and emotional ways she should never have allowed, trampled her innocence, her self-respect. Do you know how to do anything except stand there looking pretty, Beth? Are you goddamned stupid?

Bethany had sucked it up, because that is what her mother had taught her to do. “Beth, if your father didn’t like the eggs, I’d suck it up and make him new ones. Suck it up, baby, I didn’t raise whiners in this house.”

Except with Hector it wasn’t the eggs. It was how Beth ran the house with a free hand, how she put their child in danger if he licked his hands and ate germs from the supermarket cart. It was everything about Beth.

Her father had been strict and her mother had sucked it up. But her mother had received love and praise from her husband, too, while Beth had received nothing. Months after a lavish wedding and a hopeful “I take thee,” Beth had found herself a shell of a person, glancing at women out in the street and envying how carefree they looked, how independent.

Beth had forgotten how to laugh for her kid.

By the day she packed her and David’s bags and left Hector, she’d spent months building up her self-esteem, gathering the remains of what had once been a person and trying to become someone again. A mother.

Even that he’d taken away from her.

Now they faced each other, and she wasn’t sure who appeared more stunned. They’d spotted each other in the same instant. His mouth parted. She expected something would come out of it, but for a moment nothing did.

He took in her appearance—the dress Landon had provided at the last minute. Elegant and midnight blue, it made her skin seem smooth as porcelain and her eyes more electric.

Her heart beat one, two, three times.

Hector’s doctorly face—the one he used to persuade his patients to do whatever he told them to because he, in fact, was a god—failed him. His mouth clamped shut and color rushed up to his face, as though the sight of her—alive and looking well—infuriated him. He took a step.

“You’re marrying Gage.” The sneer lashed at her like a whip crack, and she hated that she instinctively flinched, panicked into immobility.

“You’re marrying Gage and you expect me to let you see our son? Why did you call him? You’re forbidden to talk to him. You’re forbidden to see him, or have you forgotten?”

Confrontation. God, she hated this.

Not here, not here.

Beth glanced around the patio, and when she saw nothing but shadows, her chest constricted with foreboding.

No one was within hearing range, unless she screamed.

But with reporters here?

She didn’t want to. She hadn’t screamed the time she’d found a hairy tarantula in her kitchen, and she wouldn’t scream now.

Oh, God, taking in the sight of his boyish, pretty face, she couldn’t believe she could be disgusted by any living being so much. Not even cockroaches.

In the space of six years, this man had managed to turn a healthy human being into a puddle of fear, a nobody, a robot, and even now as she stared at him, she felt that fear, that anger, that despair that he had her son with him and she didn’t.

He had everything.

But she had Landon.

Struggling to tame her emotions at that thought, she eased back a step, but that only made him move forward. Hector seethed with palpable anger, while fury and hurt churned inside her belly. He took my little boy from me. Her voice sharpened. “David is as much my son as he is yours.” How dare Anna tell him she’d called? How dare he take David away from her? How dare they?

“And you’re not seeing him again, I’ll make sure of that!”

Blasted by the frigidness of his words, she could do nothing as he caught her elbow before she could run and yanked her forward, his serpent’s hiss thrust into her ear.

“If you ever, ever, tell Gage anything about me or my practice…”

With a breath-clogging twist, Beth wrenched free and cried mutinously, “What? What are you going to do?”

“You don’t want to know, Beth, but I assure you, you’ll wish you hadn’t opened your mouth to speak.”

A gust of wind lashed at her, kicking up strands of her hair. She pushed them back and glanced around one more time, frantically now, unable to help wishing Landon could see her. Hell, she almost wished his dogs were here, flanking her. She’d never thought she’d be so happy to see two beasts like that near her person before, but the relief she felt thinking of the bodily harm they could inflict on Hector made her suddenly love that pair.