The Ticket Was Never for His Mistress Chapter 06

The Ticket Was Never for His Mistress Chapter 06

“You.”

Brooke stopped two feet from me, shaking. With cold. With fury.

“You planned this. The whole thing. You set me up!”

People on the sidewalk slowed down to watch.

“Hello, Brooke,” I said. “How’s London treating you?”

“Don’t you dare.” Her voice cracked. “He put me on a plane like luggage. He wouldn’t even look at me. He

blocked my number before I landed. Do you know what that feels like?”

I did, actually.

Nine times. That’s how many calls I’d made to him that month.

“He was supposed to choose me,” she hissed. “He loved me. He said I was the only person who made him feel

alive.”

“He said the same thing to me. In a garage. In 2017.”

She flinched.

“Brooke, let me tell you something nobody told me at your age.” I kept my voice low. Almost kind. “Real love

isn’t crying on someone’s couch at two in the morning. It isn’t a necklace charged to his company card.”

“You don’t know anything about-”

“Real love is selling your dead mother’s house so he can make payroll. It’s writing code until your eyes bleed

and letting him put his name on it. It’s sitting beside his hospital bed for nineteen hours.”

I stepped closer.

“What did you give him, Brooke? Besides your panic attacks and your fake birthday?”

Her lips trembled. “I gave him passion. Something you couldn’t.”

She yanked out her phone and shoved it in my face.

The video. Her couch. Grant with his shirt open.

“He wanted me,” she said, triumphant. “That night. He wanted me.”

I made myself watch it. All of it this time.

Her lips on his jaw. Her hand on his chest.

And then him, suddenly, shoving her away so hard she stumbled backward.

The video cut.

I looked up at her.

“You sent me half a video.”

Her face went gray.

“He pushed you off,” I said quietly. “And the same morning, he drove you to the airport. Men don’t exile women they love, Brooke. They exile the ones they’re ashamed of.”

Something broke in her eyes. Real tears now. Not the pretty kind.

For one second, I almost felt sorry for her.

Then she wiped her face, and when she looked at me again, the tears were gone.

What was left was something cold.

“You think you won,” she whispered.

“I don’t think about you at all.”

“I saw you.” Her lips curled. “Last week. At the clinic on Harley Street. With him.”

My heart stopped.

Rhys had driven me to my twelve–week scan. He’d waited in the lobby. He hadn’t even come inside.

“Rhys Callahan,” she said, savoring each syllable. “Grant’s worst enemy. Holding the door for his pregnant

wife.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I don’t need to know.” She smiled. “I just need Grant to believe it. And the internet.”

She pulled her suitcase closer.

“Everyone will know Grant Mercer’s saintly wife ran off with his rival. Pregnant. And nobody will ever know

whose baby it really is.”

It’s Grant’s baby,” I said, and my voice shook for the first time.

Brooke tilted her head.

“Prove it.”

She walked away, pink suitcase clattering over the cobblestones.

I stood on that sidewalk with my hand over my stomach until my fingers went numb.

A car pulled up beside me. The back door opened.

Rhys.

He took one look at my face and got out of the car.

“What happened?”

“She’s going to tell Grant the baby is yours.”

His jaw tightened. For a moment he looked like a very different man. Someone dangerous.

“Get in the car, Hazel.”

“Rhys-”

“Get in. You’re freezing. We’ll handle it.”

We.

Nobody had said “we” to me in a very long time.

I got in the car.

But Brooke had a head start.

And three days later, Grant Mercer landed at Heathrow.