Paper Marriage Proposition

Sixteen

Lisa was waiting in the living room, listening to the patter of rain while the dogs slept by the dark fireplace, when she heard Frederic’s car pull up in the driveway.
    After chewing most of her nails off wondering how to describe her encounter with Jungkook, she felt so glad to see Frederic walk through that door, his hair wet, rivulets sliding down his jaw, tiredly dropping a portfolio at his feet, that she flung herself against him and eagerly pressed her mouth to his. “Thank God you’re home!”
    Stiff and unresponsive, Frederic set her aside and commanded the dogs to back off.
    Stunned, Lisa watched him carry his portfolio over to the desk where he kept his agenda. He set it down on the surface with a thump. “Do you have anything you wish to tell me, Lisa?”
    He trapped her gaze, and her already-wrung heart seemed to die a sudden death.
    She sensed something was wrong.
    All around Frederic—her husband, her lover, her new best friend—was a wall, emitting a signal to stay away.
    The romantic fantasies she’d been entertaining, the ones of kissing him and loving him before she confessed she’d seen Jungkook, were destroyed by this harsh reality.
    Frederic was as closed to her as she’d ever seen him.
    Tight-lipped, he retrieved a folder from the inside of the leather case. With an impenetrable look in his eyes, he went to the small bar and prepared a drink. “Cat got your tongue?” he prodded, file in one hand as he poured with the other.
    “What’s wrong with you…?” Lisa asked, confused and wide-eyed. “And what’s with the file?”
    As he brushed past her, he put the folder in her hand. He fell into the chair behind a small desk with his drink in hand, and said, “Open it.”
    Lisa’s hands trembled as she obeyed.
    It wasn’t the tone he’d used, icy with contempt, or the way he held himself unapproachable as he sat there that unnerved her. It was the look in his eyes.
    He knew.
    “Recognize the woman in those photographs, dear wife?”
    She stared at them and almost keeled over.
    The images were staggering, images of her and Jungkook, speaking and arguing and kissing. The bile rose to her throat as she tossed the photos aside. “It’s not how it looks, Frederic.”
    Frederic smiled, deceptively. Lisa opened her mouth to explain more but was dazzled by the gleam of his eyes, stormy with something raw and masculine. Storming with jealousy.
    Lisa could almost hear the trust between them shattering like glass.
    Oh, God, what had she done?
    “I promise you, Frederic, it’s not how it looks.” With legs that felt ready to buckle, she approached the desk one step at a time and struggled to find the words. But the words seemed to tumble one after the other, fighting to come forth. “He insisted on seeing me, and I needed to know what he wanted. I didn’t…kiss him. He forced me. He… Frederic, I didn’t kiss him.”
    All expression left his face, but his eyes blazed hot enough to incinerate her. “And what did he want? Huh, Lisa? You?”
    It hurt to speak. “Yes,” she said tightly. But I’d rather die.
    Lightning struck outside. Rain slammed against the windows, and the howl of the wind echoed in the household. Like the night Frederic’s first wife died, the night Jungkook abandoned Lisa to meet her; the weather was just as tempestuous and volatile tonight.
    Lisa felt a worse kind of storm brewing inside her. Fury. It came with a vengeance, overpowering her. She leapt forward as though she’d just been unleashed from captivity and pushed her finger into Frederic’s chest as he leapt to his feet, too. “How dare you spy on me, how dare you! I did nothing wrong. I’m not…I’m not Chrystine! My baby is with that beast. How can you expect me to not do anything?”
    He caught her finger in his hand. “I told you to stay away from him, Lisa!”
    Her chin jerked up in defiance. “I’m a mother and I’d do anything for my child! What about you, huh? Are you even helping me? Or do you conveniently find obstacles in order to keep me around to slake your lust?”
    He scoffed. “Slake my lust, that’s what you call it?”
    “That’s what it is! What else would I call it?”
    “I didn’t slake my lust with you last night, Lisa. I made love to you. Love, damn you!”
    “Well, excuse me if it doesn’t feel like it!” she lied.
    Making a sound of frustration, he flung her hand aside as if she’d singed him and drained his glass in one long gulp.
    Breathless with fury and emotion, Lisa cradled her finger to her chest with one hand, hating that it tingled after he’d grasped it, and when he remained quiet, she shook her head.
    “I’m your revenge, Frederic, why don’t you just admit it!” she cried. “Tit for tat. A wife for a wife.”
    He’d been so insistent about getting her in bed, she just knew it was his personal war against Jungkook.
    She heard a faint click outside and saw a sudden flash of light then…thunder.
    Frederic moved far away from her, to the opposite side of the room. He put a hand up to the window as he watched it rain. A strange gravity entered his voice. “Then the joke’s on me.”
    The tension thickened between them, black like tar in an equally black silence.
    The clock ticked under the staircase.
    She gazed at his wide broad back. She was so angry and at the same time so in love her throat hurt. Inside she felt dark, dark and lost. She was paralyzed, shattering in panic. Because she loved him. And suddenly it felt like he would never return that love.
    “Why did you let him touch you, Lisa. Do you miss his touch? Do you want it?” he asked raggedly.
    “No!” She gasped, aghast that he would think it.
    “You rejected mine all this time because it was him you wanted? Did you pretend I was him last night? When you came for me did you—”
    “Stop it, stop it!”
    His head fell forward, against the window, and he shook his head ruefully. “Why don’t you trust me?” he hissed.
    “I do, Frederic, I do. I was frightened. I had to know my son was okay. I was helpless all my life, standing like a good little wife by his side. I don’t want to be that person anymore!”
    He whipped around and pointed a finger. “You’re not his wife anymore, Lisa, you’re mine. My wife!” he thundered. “I know that!” she shouted back.
    “Then aren’t I entitled to know my wife is meeting my mortal enemy? I vowed to protect you, Lalisa—you and your son. My God! That man, that bastard takes my first wife, and he thinks he can take my second?”
    She sucked in a gust of air, for the first time realizing that he’d not only been concerned for her safety, but he was terribly jealous, too. And he was speaking of her as a real wife. Touched in places no one in her life but Frederic had ever touched before, she lowered her voice. “I’m all right,” she said, so vaguely she wondered if he’d heard her. “And I’m not going anywhere.”
    He met that with silence.
    Dark, emotionless silence.
    “I didn’t kiss him,” she repeated, her voice threatening to crack. Frederic’s face was twisted in torment, and Lisa felt twisted on the inside. “Jungkook wanted me to…to go back to him. I froze when I saw Leo in the car, watching us, but I swear to you when Jungkook pulled me close I shut my mouth tight and I—”
    Frederic growled so angrily, so deeply, so possessively, she fell quiet.
    The wind rattled the window casements. Lisa 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 Leo.”
    She made a choked sound at the memory and put her arms around herself.
    Revenge had been so simple once. Now Frederic thought her a liar, as vile as Jungkook, 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, Lisa—” 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, Lisa.”
    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, Lisa blinked.
    Frederic cursed and approached, the concern and anger etched across his face making her hope soar. “Did he hurt you?” he demanded.
    Lisa 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 Frederic 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 her 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 Jeon Jungkook, Lalisa.”
    “He wasn’t even your son, Frederic!” 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 Jungkook. All she wanted, needed, was Frederic’s support tonight, not his accusations.
    The tomb-like silence that followed her cry shattered when Frederic spoke.
    His timbre was dangerously, warningly soft. “What did you just say?”
    Lisa lowered her voice. “He was Jungkook’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.
    “Frederic, I’m sorry, I—” When she reached out for him, he cursed and stepped aside, giving her his back. “Frederic, I didn’t mean it like this. It’s just that Jungkook 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, Frederic. Chrystine loved to rub it in Jungkook’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, Lisa 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.”
    “You knew, all this time. You knew about my son and you let me think…you let me talk to you about him…you—”
    “It makes no difference!” she cried.
    He roared and slammed his chest with one fist. “It makes a difference to me! ”
    He’d still been holding his drink in his other hand, and a slosh of whiskey splashed onto the carpet. Cursing, Frederic drained what was left and set the empty glass on the desk, then he stared into its depths.
    She considered how she’d take it if someone came up to her and told her Leo wasn’t her son. How she’d feel if Frederic, a man whose respect she wanted, had told her this news in the same way Lisa had told him.
    She shrunk inside her skin, feeling so small.
    “I’m sorry, Frederic,” she said, her voice small, too.
    Her eyes welled up for the second time today. She was afraid the tears wouldn’t stop until morning.
    She didn’t know where she found the courage to speak. “Where d-do we stand now? With us? With…Leo?”
    He wouldn’t tear his gaze off that empty glass. “I said I’d get you your son back. And I will.”
    And us?
    She couldn’t ask it again—somewhere deep down, she knew. Could hear the word “divorce” as clearly as she heard the thunder.
    They’d become each other’s enemies.

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This chapter is so intense. I didn't even breath when Im writing this HAHAHAHHAHAHA