Her Reluctant Wife: A Lesbian Age Gap Romance

knew the ruse might be over, but she thought, with a sickening

sense of dread that made her tremble as she threw herself into

the vehicle, that the most wretched, unfathomable part of her

life was just starting, and she had no idea what her future

looked like.

Chapter 12

r /> Giana

Fuck.

Giana had been called everything from influential to

elegant. She was the queen of Chicago development, a titan in

her own right. She’d been handed the family empire and she’d

grown it tenfold straight out of college when no one expected

she was anything more than a beautiful face and an empty

head. She’d tackled the worst problems—flaky investors,

funding gone awry, delays, permits, development headaches,

bylaws, city officials, her own board members not wanting to

follow the lead of a twenty-one-year-old green at the gills, and

a woman on top of all of that. She’d handled it all and she’d

come out not just on top but thriving there.

She might not have been conventional—she was young,

female, and she was open about being a lesbian—but people

had learned to respect her because she’d proved herself smart

and more than capable.

She’d kept a careful handle on her personal life, running it

much tighter than she ran her business. She’d kept her desires

and proclivities tempered, her identity a secret for the most

part. Masks and hoods were great things, and so were

darkened clubs where she could have been anyone and the

pleasure was always mutual. She kept things at her house,

things that were a carefully guarded secret, but she only ever