Page 62 of Beg for You

The door opened.

My nerve endings lit up, fire shooting through my body. I straightened…then frowned at the fucker with the slicked-back blond hair and expensive suit staring back at me.

Mr. GQ looked me over and frowned as well. “Can I help you?”

Something unwanted started clawing inside my gut instantly, something ugly. “I’m looking for Cassy. This her place?”

The guy gave me another once-over. “There’s no one here that goes by that name.”

Relief hammered me hard enough to knock me on my ass. She must have gone to the main house. Maybe they rented this one out? “Sorry, wrong place.” I turned to walk away.

“There’s definitely no one here named Cassy. But Cassandra Deighton lives here,” he said, voice smug.

I stopped and turned back, that clawing feeling intensifying. “She here?”

The other man’s blue eyes turned cold. “My fiancée is in the shower right now.”

“Fiancée?” I couldn’t stop the word from exploding past my lips.

The guy’s back straightened. “Who the hell are you and what do you want with Cassandra?”

She was getting married?

Married.

Which meant this wasn’t new, that she had to have been seeing this asshole for a while. It also meant she’d been with him while she was fucking around with me.

My brain felt like it was short-circuiting. None of this felt right. But this fucker, her fiancé, was standing right the fuck in front of me.

I felt like the wind had been punched out of my lungs with a crowbar.

The Cassy I thought she’d been showing me was nothing but a goddamn lie?

Jesus, I’d felt shit for using her, and what do you know, she really had been using me right back.

Cassandra Deighton was exactly who I thought she was when she walked into my shop all those weeks ago. She’d played a part, played me. She’d taken her walk on the wild side, had fucked the monster. Had gotten off on the ink, the scarred face, my fucked-up mind—had used me for a last fling before she married the Ken doll still staring at me from her front door, and it had backfired on her big time.

“I’m no one.” I shook my head. “And I don’t want a damn thing from Cassandra Deighton.” I turned and strode back the way I’d come.

I didn’t know who the fuck she was. And I sure as hell wasn’t interested in finding out, not anymore. But even as I thought those words, I knew I was lying to myself. Even now. I glanced down, almost expecting to see blood spurting from my chest. Shit, I felt like I was bleeding out.

This whole fucking thing had backfired on me as well.

Because I’d gone and fallen in love with her.

With a goddamn lie.

Two weeks had passed since I went to Cassandra’s place and made a fool of myself. I’d been trying so fucking hard to put her behind me, which wasn’t easy with Dane waving a picture of her under my nose. I yanked the newspaper from his hand, balled it, and fired it into the trash.

“You need to stop that wedding,” Dane said. “At least talk to her.”

I shoved up out of my seat. “Why would I do that?”

Dane’s hands went to the counter. “I saw you together, the way you looked at her.”

“It was an act…little brother—”

“The way she looked at you,” he said over me. “And don’t think I haven’t noticed when you talk about her your speech starts giving you shit. We both know exactly why that is.”