The Kiss Thief

I’d asked Ms. Sterling to tell Wolfe not to come to my bed that night, and he hadn’t. Since it was the night before the wedding, he chalked the fact that I stayed in my room for dinner up to nerves. He did insist that Ms. Sterling bring me my dinner upstairs and made sure that I ate it.

There were waffles drowning in maple syrup and peanut butter straight from the diner down the road. He obviously did not care for a swooning bride tomorrow morning.

I didn’t sleep a wink.

At five in the morning, Ms. Sterling walked into my room, bristling and singing with a herd of stylists at her heels. Clara, Mama, and Andrea also came along, whisking me off the bed like Cinderella waking up with the help of tiny furry creatures and canaries. I decided to push aside the fact that my father was a bastard and my fiancé was a heartless man, determined to enjoy the day. As far as I could tell, I only had one wedding to celebrate in this lifetime. Might as well make the best out of it.

I wore a rose-gold Vera Wang wedding dress with floral lace appliqués and a pleated tulle skirt. My hair flowed down in luscious waves all the way to the small of my back, complete with a Swarovski tiara. My bouquet was simple and contained only white roses. When I arrived at the Little Italy church where we were to get married—honoring my family’s tradition—the place was already swarming with media vans and dozens of local journalists. My heart accelerated. I didn’t even talk to my husband the night before our wedding. Didn’t have the chance to confront him about the horrid things he once again said about me to my father. According to him, he was going to toss me away when I got old. The reality of my situation sank in at that moment.

We hadn’t gone on one date (the diner was an apology, not a date, and the entire time I shoveled food into my mouth, he worked on his phone). We hadn’t texted regularly. We never slept in each other’s bed. We never talked for the sake of talking.

No matter how I tried to spin it, my relationship with Wolfe Keaton was doomed.

I walked down the aisle to find my seamlessly dressed, clean-shaven fiancé waiting for me by the priest with a solemn look on his face. Next to him stood Preston Bishop and Bryan Hatch. It did not escape me that Wolfe Keaton had no real friends. Only work friends he could benefit from. I didn’t have any real friends, either. Clara and Ms. Sterling were triple my age. Andrea, my cousin, was twenty-four, but she was mostly there for me out of pity. She worked in a salon and dated Made Men regularly, though she always said she wouldn’t let them touch her, not even a kiss. My mother was twice my age. This left both Wolfe and me in vulnerable positions. We were both lonely and guarded. Wounded and distrusting.

The ceremony went off without a hitch, and once we were pronounced husband and wife, Wolfe offered me a chaste peck on the lips. He was more concerned about the cameras flashing in front of us, and making sure we looked nice and proper, than our first kiss as a married couple. We still hadn’t spoken one word to each other the entire day, and it was nearly noon.

We drove in silence from the church to my parents’ house. I wasn’t sure this would not escalate into a fight had I confronted him about what I’d heard yesterday, and I didn’t want to kill the already-charged mood. After the engagement incident, Wolfe had sent out a list of demands which were to be met if my father had wanted us to set foot in his house. Sure enough, the house was filled with people who were pre-approved by my husband. Unsurprisingly, Angelo was not there, but his parents arrived, congratulated me curtly, dropped off their gifts, and shot straight for the door. People were talking, laughing, and congratulating us before the grand dinner when I turned to my husband and spoke the first words since we tied the knot and made it official.

“Have you done something to Angelo?”

There was significance in this exchange. Our first conversation was about another man. Another man I’d lusted after not too long ago. He continued shaking hands, nodding and smiling brightly, the public figure that he was.

“I told you I will not be so tolerant toward Angelo should a third incident occur. Though I profoundly apologize for jumping to conclusions about what you did with him, there’s no denying that he tried to cross the line and coax an engaged woman.”

“What did you do?”

He grinned, turning to look at me fully now from the guests fighting for his attention.