Paige

But I knew. I’d always known.

Just as I knew this beautiful love of mine wasn’t going to last.

As soon as Gavin Hawthorne found out who I really was? I’d lose him.

All my plans to stitch our lives together, all my hopes for something better than what I had, all of it was for naught.

Forty-three nights of lying in bed, feeling Gavin’s strong arms around me and the way his breath softly tickled the tiny hairs on the back of my neck, were over. I mourned that they would only continue to exist in my memories.

I was devastated but not surprised.

I’d been living on borrowed time. I knew it but still I tried to keep him, to make Gavin mine for just one more day.

One more week. One more month. One more lifetime.

And it almost happened.

Standing there in my wedding finery, dainty satin pumps on my feet and dark hair curling softly around my bare shoulders, I wanted to weep with how close I came to having all my youthful dreams come true.

We’d only been minutes away from eloping when the weight of my silence finally came crashing down in the form of one thunderous knock at the door.

Even now when my whole world was ripping apart at the seams, I couldn’t help but fixate on Gavin. My stepmother’s desperate shrieks flapped around us. My father’s bellows shook the earth.

They didn’t matter.

The only thing that mattered was Gavin.

I watched in morbid fascination as his achingly beautiful face cycled through the emotions of shock, disbelief, and sadness before settling on terrible blankness. His hazel eyes had never looked as empty to me as they did in that moment.

A tiny sliver of pain broke free from my compressed lips.

The man who’d given me a thousand kisses would never love me like he had before I’d opened the door and seen how deep the silence of my betrayal ran.

Patrick Brookstone, my father, stabbed the air once with his thick finger. His hateful stream of words blasted both of us. I should’ve spoken up then, told him that Gavin was blameless.

As always in his domineering presence, my words remained stuck uselessly in my throat. It was yet another piece of proof that I didn’t deserve to be with someone as wonderful as Gavin.

“I told you to stay away from anything about Gavin! Didn’t I? Didn’t I tell you that you had no right to him? Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I?”

Melissa Rice-Brookstone, my stepmother, pleaded in a tone that could crack glass.

I understood her desperation. She wanted my father to know she’d discouraged me from my wicked ways and that she wasn’t to blame. Only that discouragement first came when I was thirteen and Gavin was nineteen.

Back when I was a painfully-shy, gawky teenager out to lunch with my stepmother and happened to see a picture of her secret son, the one I, nor anyone in our tiny yet illustrious social circle, never even knew she had.

It was obvious Melissa wanted to talk about him, this beautiful boy that didn’t exist in her privileged world.

So I listened.

I listened to her go on and on about how clever Gavin was, how sweet a boy he’d been, and how his life in New York was more than she could ever want for him. His family’s wealth exceeded ours and how lucky was he to never go without?

Yet materialism couldn’t change the fact she abandoned him.

Gavin and I were the same—let down by women who should’ve loved us the most. For the first time in my life, I didn’t feel so alone.

Something in my gaze that afternoon must have triggered Melissa because she’d quickly shoved the picture back into her Birkin bag and whispered, “Don’t tell your father about this. It’ll upset him. Just leave it, okay?”

I didn’t say a word.

Instead, I simply wrapped all my hopes, dreams, and ambitions into being someone better than who I’d been. Someone beautiful, clever, and sweet.

Someone worthy enough of being like Gavin Hawthorne.

Someone who’d rise above the knocks life handed her and make something of herself. Someone who wasn’t afraid of sudden movement or who allowed unkind words to sink her into oblivion.

And I’d succeeded.

At least with creating the shell of that magnificent person. Underneath I was still me.

Scared and scarred.

Even now, despite my fixation on the man I loved more than myself, I felt the edges of my composure wilt.

I wanted Gavin Hawthorne so badly and I got him. I lost him just as quickly.

Worse, I deserved it.

I’d set Gavin up by withholding my identity. I’d taken away his choice as thoughtlessly as only a desperate, pitiful Paige Brookstone could.

Now my shell shattered, leaving me open to destruction.

I’d played a character in order to get the guy and if all the world’s a stage, then this was my final act and I truly was getting my just desserts.

It’d been worth it though.

For the first time in my life, I’d found true happiness and a place to belong. And it was all thanks to Gavin. The memory of my perfect life with him would have to be enough to sustain me in the upcoming years, because the villain never got a happy ending.

Especially not one like me.