“Maggie,” I exhaled.
“And he can drink a sailor under the table.” From her tone, she was amused with herself, but she cleared her throat and tried to get more serious. “You love him, I get it, and you want to do what’s right, but is that worth three people living a lie their whole lives?”
“You mean everything to me, baby. Everything. I’m so sorry I missed the wedding. I’ll never forgive myself. I’ll never stop trying to make it up to you, I swear.”
Jacob hadn’t stopped repeating the same phrases he’d first said to me in the lobby, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that with every repeat, they sounded less and less sincere. I wanted to believe him. I wanted so badly to believe him, but I couldn’t ignore what had happened. I couldn’t ignore the past, and I couldn’t ignore the warnings going off in my head, questions as to what he’d been doing to miss what should have been one of the biggest days of our lives.
I couldn’t ignore the way I felt.
I’d been doing that for years, and it had done me no favors.
As evidenced by the one person I was thinking about right now—and it wasn’t the one with his arms around me, his mouth close to my ear as he repeated his promises and apologies again and again.
Matt.
Where was he?
Where had he gone?
What did he think?
Matt. Always Matt. I was so exhausted by my secret thoughts of Matt that I felt ancient inside, like my conscience had lived an eternity while my body wasn’t even thirty.
“Please, let me make it up to you. Let me make this right, baby. There’s nothing you and me can’t get through, I know it.” Jacob’s mouth moved lower, tasting my throat, making me stiffen. “We’re meant to be together.”
The way he touched me, the way his mouth moved against me, the way his hands felt . . . why did it all feel so wrong now? For years, I’d known nothing but his touch, and now, it felt uninvited. Unwanted. It felt wrong.
All I could do was compare it to the way Matt’s touch felt—how his hands had moved over me, his lips touched me, his body fit against mine.
“Jacob, stop.” My voice sounded small, insignificant.
When his hands kept pressing into me, pushing me farther into the corner of the elevator until I felt like all of the oxygen had been drained from the car, I pushed him away. Harder than I’d intended. He staggered back into the opposite corner, looking at me like he didn’t recognize me.
“You’ve been drinking. And I’m not going to have this conversation with you until you’re sober.”
He’d recovered and was already making his way back to me. “Who said anything about talking?”
A slow smile pulled at one side of his mouth. I remembered a time when my heart would do crazy, erratic things whenever I saw that smile aimed my way. Now, it made me sad. Sad for what had been, what could have been, and everything that had been lost.
“I’ve missed you, Cora. I need to feel close to you.”
My fingers tightened around the handrail. “You didn’t show up to our wedding. The event we’d been planning for a year, the one that five hundred people attended. I’m not okay with turning my head and forgetting it ever happened. So don’t even think about it.” I pushed his hand away when it went to form around my waist.
His eyes flashed, his face turning red. “Yeah, and I’ve already apologized for that a million times. I’ve promised you I’m going to spend the rest of my life making it up to you. What more do you want from me?”
When the elevator doors opened, I couldn’t move fast enough. Jacob followed me, half a footstep behind, waiting for me to say something. Waiting for me to forgive him the way I had a thousand times before. It wasn’t happening. Not this time. Not until he disproved my theory for why he’d missed our wedding.
“Cora, stop.”
I didn’t.
“Baby, please.”
No way.
“Enough.” With that, his arms roped around me and he pushed me up against the hall wall, fitting himself against me so I couldn’t move, let alone keep walking away from him.
Jacob and I had fought like crazy over the course of ten years together, but it had never gotten physical. He’d never exerted his physical force over me like he was now, and it made me go blind with anger. Partly because he was using his strength to mold me to his will, and partly because I wasn’t strong enough to fight back. Like Matt, Jacob was big and took care of his body. He was strong, fast, and he knew it.
I’d never felt more like a puppet than I did right there, shoved against some hotel wall by the man I was supposed to marry yesterday.
“Cora, I’m sorry. I just need you to stop and listen to me for a minute. I need you to slow down and hear me out.” His breath was hot against my cheek and smelled of Jacob’s favorite brand of scotch. I was used to the smell of it on his breath. More used to it than I was its absence. “Let me make it up to you. Let me explain. Let me. . .” His mouth was on my neck again, more frantic this time, his hands moving with the same kind of urgency.
“Jacob, enough.” Without warning, I elbowed him in the stomach as hard as I could. Which wasn’t all that hard since he had me pinned so tightly against the wall. Still, it sent him back a few steps so I could turn around and back away.
One hand was covering his stomach where I’d just elbowed him, his light eyes so dark they couldn’t have possibly still been blue. “This is about him, isn’t it? You let that fucker touch you and make you feel good, and now you can’t stand a real man’s touch anymore?”
My mouth fell open. “Jacob—”
“You got your wish, didn’t you? You finally got a chance to see what my brother was like in bed. Was it good? Could he make you feel better than me? Did you like the feel of his cock in your mouth better than mine?”
“That is enough!” I hadn’t meant to shout—we’d probably already gotten all of this floor’s attention already—but I couldn’t help it. “How dare you turn this around on me! You were the one who started this whole sequence of events. Matt was the one who stepped in to try to help, and here you are, accusing me like I planned all of this.”
Jacob’s chest was rising and falling quickly, his shirt twisted and his eyes wild. “So you did fuck him?”
My eyes narrowed. That was all he cared about. If I did or didn’t sleep with his twin brother. “I’m not having this conversation with you when you’ve been drinking. So sober up and come find me. Then we can talk.”
I’d been planning to head back to my room to change since Jacob had suggested going on a walk to talk, but now that that talk wasn’t going to happen, I wasn’t going anywhere close to my room. Not with Jacob looking at me the way he was now—like he couldn’t decide if he’d rather hit me or screw me.
“Where are you going?” His voice was quieter, the notes of anger gone.