“Go to sleep, Nina. It’s late, I’m tired. I’ll sort you out in the morning before I go to golf.”
My heart sinks and tears once again sting my eyes from his words… ‘He’ll sort me out in the morning?’ Like he was doing me some kind of massive favour? Like being a thirty-one-year-old woman and wanting to have sex with your thirty-five-year-old husband, after a night out together was a ridiculous notion. What was wrong with me? What was it he found so repugnant, that despite the fact that I was lying here next to him, wearing my black, lacy, Victoria’s Secret underwear and stockings, my husband wasn’t even interested in turning around and looking at me, let alone giving me a goodnight kiss, or heaven forbid, fucking me?
Fuck.
Fucking.
Marcus and I had never fucked that wasn’t his style. Actually, he didn’t really have a style and in the eight years we’d been married, he had never once given me an orgasm. I managed them easily enough on my own. Either by touching myself or by using my super duper, thrusting butterfly vibrator. But I wanted my husband to make me come. I wanted my husband to take his time, to lick and suck and fuck me to an earth shattering, leg shaking, clit twitching orgasm. Instead, all I usually got was three thrusts, a squeeze of my tit and a grunt to let me know it was all over.
I know that sex isn’t everything. But if he just paid me some kind of attention, if he could just notice me as a person, just once, it might help me not to feel so alone and so lonely. All I wanted was to feel loved and desired by my husband. He told me he loved me every day. He told me I was beautiful all the time, but he never showed it and he never made me feel it. He had chased me for so long, almost begging me to go out with him and yet, when I finally said yes, it was like all the fight and passion he displayed whilst trying to convince me to go for a drink or to dinner with him, just vanished.
I should never have married him! It was my own fault, I knew what I was in for. Our sex life was passionless from the very first awkward attempt and I didn’t love him, not then and I’m not really sure that I do now. But then my brother stepped in, bringing up my past indiscretion, threatening to take my story to the papers. Knowing full well the damage that might possibly do to my newly flourishing business and my mother’s political career. Then he pulled his trump card. He had loaned me thirty thousand pounds when I set up the first salon with Sophie and if I didn’t marry Marcus, he wanted it back, in full.
Much to my parents absolute disgust, instead of staying in school until I was eighteen and taking my A levels, I’d left school at just sixteen and found myself a job at a local hair salon. I had never had any desire to be a hairdresser, but after the way my life had changed on that New Year’s Eve and Conner had made the choices he had, never attempting to contact me again despite the letters I’d sent to him, I’d become a little rebellious and decided to set my life on a path that I had a little more control over. A path where I didn’t need to rely too much on other people.
I was desperately hurt and heartbroken inside, but curling up into a ball and crying all day wasn’t going to change anything. So I left school and took the first job that was offered to me. I did a three-month trial and discovered that hairdressing was what I was born to do. I finished my apprenticeship, did a further two years as a stylist, and then went into partnership with Sophie buying our own salon. Soph’s parents were great. They lent her the money she needed for her share of the setup. My parents, quite literally laughed in my face, and the bank did something very similar. My brother then stepped in and offered to lend me the money… as long as I agreed to go on a date with Marcus. Little did I know I was selling my soul to the devil.
Pearce and Marcus worked together at Marcus’s dad’s law firm. When Marcus’s dad retired, Marcus would be put in charge and Pearce was hoping to be made partner. Me, dating the boss’s son would be doing him a massive favour apparently. What I wasn’t expecting was for Marcus to propose just six months later. I was twenty-two at the time and I didn’t want to get married.