For His Brother's Wife
As soon as she started the washer, she walked into the den, booted up her computer and stuck the device into the USB port. She wasn’t trying to be nosy, but she wanted to be certain it was hers instead of Cole’s. All she needed to do was check the file directory and she would know for sure which one of them it belonged to.
As she scanned the files, her breath caught and her heart began to pound when she realized the memory device had belonged to Craig. She opened the first file, titled “My Marriage.” It appeared to be a journal Craig had been keeping from shortly after they had gotten married until his death almost seven months ago. As she read the first entry tears pooled in her eyes. It made her realize how much he’d blamed her for his life turning out the way it had. He had resented his father making him marry her and had even written that he wished she’d had the miscarriage before the wedding instead of a few weeks later. If she had, he wouldn’t have had to go through with their marriage at all.
As she read more and more of the files, it got worse. He talked about purposely avoiding making her pregnant by keeping track of her most fertile times of the month and avoiding lovemaking because the last thing he wanted was a brat to tie him to her even more so than he already was. In another one of the files he even seemed to find it humorous that he had been able to get her to move out of the master bedroom on the pretense of his being a restless sleeper.
All that time Craig had known how badly she had wanted to have a baby and how sad she’d been when she hadn’t become pregnant. He had even convinced her that she was infertile by pointing out that he had made her pregnant once and the miscarriage she suffered might be her body’s inability to support a pregnancy. How could he have done that to her? And why had she listened to him?
As she continued going through the directory, Paige found file after file filled with intense blame and loathing for her and how she had ruined his life. Craig had also written extensively about his “business trips” and how convenient it had been that his father’s health had started failing and how it had kept her busy taking care of the old man while Craig took his current mistress to a new spa or on a weeklong gambling junket to Las Vegas. After an hour of reading about his illicit escapades with other women, Paige lost count of how many affairs Craig had had over the years.
As she sat there staring at the computer screen, she had to admit that she’d wondered about his frequent out-of-town trips. Maybe if she had cared more for him she would have questioned him about them. But she hadn’t, and if she were perfectly honest, she had been happy for some time to herself and hadn’t minded his being gone all that much. Unable to read any more of the sickening passages, she started to exit out of the directory, but Cole’s name at the bottom of the list caught her eye. Why did Craig have a file with Cole’s name on it?
Clicking it open, she realized that Craig had been corresponding with Cole for the past couple of years. She frowned. That couldn’t be right. Cole had made it clear that he hadn’t had anything to do with Craig since leaving for college.
Why hadn’t Cole mentioned the email Craig had sent to him? And why had Craig saved the messages?
Unwilling to read more of Craig’s disgusting thoughts than she had to, she only opened a couple of the documents. As she read the last one, her heart sank and by the time she finished, Paige felt as if the world had suddenly spun out of control as she read Craig’s ramblings. He was telling Cole that he intended to leave her for another woman and that Cole could finally have his turn with her because Craig was done and moving on.
“Oh, my God!” she gasped.
How could she have been so gullible? Why hadn’t she seen through Craig’s deception and lies?
But of all the revelations, the one that shattered her heart into a million pieces was the realization that Cole had known what Craig had been doing and the hurtful things he had said about her. Tears poured down her cheeks as she thought about the last line of Craig’s email. “Now that I’m done with her, you can finally have your turn with Paige.”
Had she been a pawn in a sick game the twin brothers had been playing all these years? How could they do that to her? What had she ever done to them to make them want to ruin her life?
Her stomach lurched and she had to run for the downstairs powder room to be sick. She had married one brother because she was pregnant, and now she was pregnant with the other brother’s baby. It appeared that history was repeating itself.
But she wasn’t going to be trapped in another depraved game with another Richardson brother. Once was enough to last her an entire lifetime and then some.