Areston thinks he can shield me from his past, but what he doesn't realize is I'm already part of it.
The darkness that haunts him? It's the same one that's been chasing me for years.
I've given him everything-my body, my heart, my soul-and still...
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If you're enjoying these chapters, do leave me cute comment/s. I am going through a little depressing phase workwise. Super hectic and all. Would love to feel cheered up from at least somewhere, lol.
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"Darina Ivanov wasn't a socialite roughly about fourteen years ago. She used to be a rich housewife and then a stay at home mother," one of my most prized investigative journalists is briefing me over the call.
"I don't think I understand," I frown, poring over an update report sent by Kiara on the Stephen Biggs case on my phone.
Areston is busy on the speakerphone as he drives the La Voiture Noire with one hand and holds mine with the other. Since the start of our relationship on his private island in Greece, I have come to realize that he has this compulsive need to constantly touch me whenever we're together, and I have been hopelessly addicted to it.
My husband has been a man who commands the very air of the space he enters, and it extends to his interactions with me. Every touch is assertive, an unequivocal substantiation of his dominant nature to keep me under his control and his obsessively possessive need to keep his territory claimed in the manner he knows best—through continuous, possessive contact. The intensity of his unyielding touch belies a profound, darker craving—something that transcends love and possessiveness.
Every brush of his thumb in the area between my thumb and index finger stirs an electric charge in me. And I need this. Desperately so. I need the way his heat seeps into my skin. All the time. Even when we're not having sex but doing something as simple as watching the TV or cooking or playing with the doggos.
"She was this quintessential traditional stay-at-home mother, always shying away from any society scene until 2009. I studied the photos from her extremely rare social appearances. Grippingly conscious and conservatively dressed—a far cry from the women we see now. And unlike black that seems to be her wardrobe of choice, back then it was white. All white. Like those damn virgins, Juliette. I am telling you, looking into her and comparing her gave me serious creeps."
I frown at the screen of my Mac on the report I am reading. "That... odd."
"I know, right? She used to work as a personal assistant to the manager at Macy's where she met her husband. Her former colleagues describe her as hardworking, loyal, and cripplingly introverted women. Never flirted with anyone or had any partner that they knew of. They used to call her 'the Macy Mouse' because of her reserved nature. So, of all the female staff, it came as a shock to everyone that she was the woman who caught the eye of the billionaire shopper who ended up marrying her."
"And this was until 2009?" I suck in a deep breath, tenderly stroking my fingers over my husband's hand entwined with mine who's clueless that I'm talking about his wretched whore-of-a-godmother as he passionately takes leads on some project from one of his Vice Presidents over the handsfree.
