Once his brother had finished speaking, he leaned down and whispered in Beth’s ear, “I’ll be right back.”
Hoping she would assume that he was using the restroom, he strolled out of the ballroom as casually as possible, accepting handshakes and congratulations on behalf of his family, and exiting through a side door that led down a corridor to the back staircase. He quickly climbed until he’d reached the second floor landing, striding down the gallery to his father’s study which his mother had kept preserved as a place for all of the Winslow children to find communion with their father after his passing. He slammed the door shut behind him and stood in the dark, empty room that still smelled comfortingly of cigar smoke even after eighteen years.
Clenching his fists together, he bellowed a sound somewhere between a roar and a sob, his chest heaving with the ragged force of his breathing. Finally taking a deep breath through his nose, he held it for a long moment before releasing it slowly and crossing the room to the bar where his father had always kept good scotch on hand. Preston picked up the crystal decanter, holding the bottle up to the moonlight that flooded through the massive windows behind his father’s desk. The amber liquid sloshed around in the cut glass, the angles catching the light from Chateau Nouvelle next door.
Setting the bottle down unopened, Preston stepped behind the desk, sitting down on the window seat that looked out over Westerly’s lawns and gardens to the Rousseau mansion…where his wife was presently in residence.
His wife.
His breath caught as he stared at the house in the distance, wondering what she was doing. She’d been on the verge of tears when he left her on the patio. He could see them in her eyes and hear them in her voice. They had almost softened his heart at the last moment…made him forget how she’d callously rejected him when he’d visited her in L.A.. Even now, his heart lurched with compassion and regret at the very idea of upsetting her.
Old and inconvenient feelings, he thought, turning away from windows.
She was every bit as beautiful today as she’d been two years ago—not as fresh-faced and far more sophisticated, he thought with a sad smile, but she was still Elise and his masochistic heart had throbbed with love for her as they’d stood together on the moonlit patio. Over the past two years, he’d desperately wished for someone to unseat her as the loveliest woman he’d ever seen, but now that he’d seen her again, he knew it was impossible. He couldn’t imagine being as attracted to another woman alive as he was to his wife. At one point, before Beth had interrupted them, he’d actually considered yanking Elise into his arms and kissing her wildly, madly, punishingly…for every torturous night without her, for every moment that he’d missed her, for every beat of her treacherous heart, wishing it didn’t still belong to her.
Huffing at himself with disgust, he shifted his gaze back to his father’s darkened study, remembering how quickly she’d agreed to sign the divorce papers tomorrow. She hadn’t even hesitated, only asking him for a time and confirming where he worked. Huh. She’d known where he worked. Did that mean she kept tabs on him? His stupid heart leaped with pathetic hope, and Preston crushed it as quickly as possible. Of course she knows where you work. Asking her for a divorce was probably just beating her to the punch. She wanted her freedom. That was more than clear.
Pulling out his father’s desk chair, he couldn’t help thinking back to the last time he’d seen her in person, (which excluded the six or seven or fourteen times he’d watched The Awakening drunk before banning himself from further showings.) After Elise left New York, she’d called him a couple of times, leaving him weepy voicemails, even though he refused to answer her calls or call her back. At first, he’d been incredibly hurt by the way she’d left New York, abandoning their brand new marriage. But as days turned into weeks, he’d had ample time to think about his whirlwind proposal, their 48-hour engagement, and the fact that she’d not only gotten married, but lost her virginity in the space of an afternoon.