Paper Marriage Proposition (Gage Brothers 1)
He met that with silence.
Dark, emotionless silence.
“I didn’t kiss him,” she repeated, her voice threatening to crack. Landon’s face was twisted in torment, and Beth felt twisted on the inside. “Hector wanted me to…to go back to him. I froze when I saw David in the car, watching us, but I swear to you when Hector pulled me close I shut my mouth tight and I—”
Landon growled so angrily, so deeply, so possessively, she fell quiet.
The wind rattled the window casements. Beth shook with the urge to set things right, but she didn’t know how. “I spat at him,” she continued, after a moment. “It felt amazing, it did…until he drove away with David.”
She made a choked sound at the memory and put her arms around herself.
Revenge had been so simple once. Now Landon thought her a liar, as vile as Halifax, as vile as Chrystine had been, and the thought of being compared to them in his mind distressed her.
“I didn’t kiss him,” she insisted, staring down at the floor when looking into his accusing eyes became unbearable. “Please believe me.”
“Those pictures, Beth—” his voice was low, weary “—could be used against us at court if he ever finds them. He painted you as a Jezebel once—he’ll do it again.”
She gathered her fortitude and met his gaze. “I don’t care what anyone thinks as long as you believe me.”
Watching her, he plunged his hands into his pants pockets as though he didn’t know what to do with them. “What we need is to convince the judge you’re a good woman, Beth.”
She made a distressed sound and flung her hands up in the air. “He threatened me! He grabbed me! I yanked away when I could. What was I supposed to do!”
“I’m going to goddamned kill him.”
Stunned by the words, Beth blinked.
Landon cursed and approached, the concern and anger etched across his face making her hope soar. “Did he hurt you?” he demanded.
Beth held her breath as his hands briskly sailed down the front buttons of her shirt, unbuttoning and parting the material, then she gasped when he shoved the material down her shoulders and arms until it dangled from one of her wrists.
Dying with lust, she stood meek as Landon frowned and studied her, skimmed his fingers along her throat, the tops of her arms, her elbows. The skin was unmarked. He expelled a relieved breath and met her gaze, a look of male awareness settling in his eyes.
When he cursed low in his throat and left her standing there, struggling to rearrange h
er clothes, she’d never felt so cold, so abandoned and rejected.
“I had a child once,” he began, his ragged words gaining force as he turned around, “and if you cared for yours as much as you say you do, you’d have played it safe and stayed away from Hector Halifax, Bethany.”
“He wasn’t even your son, Landon!” she screamed, out of her wits with fury over his accusations, his blindness. Didn’t he know, damn him? Couldn’t he see she was achingly, painfully in love with him? She hadn’t kissed Hector. All she wanted, needed, was Landon’s support tonight, not his accusations.
The tomb-like silence that followed her cry shattered when Landon spoke.
His timbre was dangerously, warningly soft. “What did you just say?”
Beth lowered her voice. “He was Hector’s son. He wasn’t yours.”
His hands balled and his arms trembled and then, then he made a low, terrible sound that tore through her like a knife cut.
That’s when it struck her. When the horrible words she’d said dawned on her. What she’d said, how she’d said it, angrily, meant to hurt him.
“Landon, I’m sorry, I—” When she reached out for him, he cursed and stepped aside, giving her his back. “Landon, I didn’t mean it like this. It’s just that Hector demanded a DNA test before he and Chrystine ran away. I saw the results. He’s the father. They fooled around for years, he and Chrystine. They loved making each other jealous. They married us to spite each other off, Landon. Chrystine loved to rub it in Hector’s nose how she was able to snag you when you were the best catch—”
His smile grew chillier, and he began to laugh, holding up a hand to stop her. “Don’t. Say anymore.”
Stopped by that cynical sound, Beth helplessly stood a few feet away, and the ground under her feet had never felt so perilous. What had she done?
Her throat was so clogged she barely heard her own voice, which sounded strangled when she spoke. “I realize I should’ve told you before, about your son.”