Page 22 of The Sicilian Billionaire's Disposable Wife

Her heart had finally healed.

And it belonged to Dario La Rocca.

Chapter Six

TODAY WAS THE DAY.

Kendra had been preparing for an entire week, and she was ready. A plan was in place. Candles were bought. Three different recipes pulled up on her phone, all of which involved eggs, because eggs were the only thing Kendra La Rocca knew how to cook.

It was her greatest failure as a wife, sadly. Her one true domestic shame. Kendra could organize a charity gala for three hundred people, recommend the perfect book to a stranger based on nothing more than the way they held their shoulders, and even make arancini now, thanks to Mona, although Mona would argue that what Kendra made was not arancini but "a crime against Sicily."

But cooking? Real cooking? The kind that involved spices and timing and not setting off the smoke detector?

Well, um, anyway...

Tonight, she would surprise her husband with a candlelit dinner. Very romantic. Very traditional. Or so he would think—until he saw what she intended to serve, which was scrambled eggs, boiled eggs, and fried eggs.

On the good china.

With candles.

She had spent an embarrassing amount of time planning the presentation. The scrambled eggs would go in the little ramekins she'd found in the back of the kitchen cabinet. The fried eggs would be on the warmed plates, because Mona had taught her that warmed plates made everything look more intentional. And the boiled eggs would be in the crystal egg cups that she was ninety percent sure were not actually for eggs but were the most beautiful things she'd ever seen, and she was using them anyway.

Everything was perfect save for one last thing, and it was why she was in her favorite bookstore in the city and very seriously browsing the men's devotionals.

Kendra was comparing the table of contents of two different editions, angling one closer to read the tiny print when—

"I finally found you."

Her head jerked up.

"P-Porter?"

He was standing at the end of the aisle, and he was almost unrecognizable.

It was like someone had taken the man she'd married—the one with the confident smile and the pressed shirts and the easy charm that made everyone in a room feel like he was their friend—and left him in the rain for a few months. His clothes were wrinkled. He hadn't shaved in days. And his eyes had the hollow, jittery look of a man who had been losing sleep and replacing it with something worse.

Kendra's chest ached. She wasn’t in love him, she was sure of it now, but it brought her no joy to see him like this.

"I need to talk to you, Kendra."

But before he could take a step toward her, Bonnie was already between them, and Porter's face expecredly went white at Bonnie’s unsmiling expression.

"It's okay, Bonnie," Kendra managed.

"I have explicit orders from Mr. La Rocca—"

Porter's face twisted into something ugly at the sound of her husband’s name, and Kendra saw it happen in real time—the way the desperation curdled into rage, the way his jaw tightened, the way his hands balled into fists at his sides like a man who had been holding something in for months and had just lost his grip on it.

"That bastard ruined me because of you!"

He lunged toward Kendra, his hand reaching for her arm—

"Bonnie, no!"

But of course Bonnie was Bonnie.

She took her orders exactly as seriously as she took everything else, and in the next moment Porter was on the ground, face-down on the bookstore carpet, Bonnie's knee in his back, and there was chaos everywhere. Customers gasping, a woman near the front grabbing her child, a staff member running for the door, and someone shouting about calling the police.