Deceitful Vows (Marital Privileges #2)

2. Andrik

2

ANDRIK

A s I watch the blonde hustle to a rusted car parked at the back of the lot, I feel Dr. Hemway’s eyes on me. He’s probably wondering why I’ve brought the murkiness of my industry into his sterilely clean world instead of waiting for him to come to me as agreed.

I’ve asked myself the same numerous times in the past hour.

No reasonable explanation appeared other than impatience.

I’m now skeptical that is the sole cause of the changeup.

People fall to their knees when they see me coming. They don’t return my watch like the blonde did. They’re usually too fearful of the repercussions their unwanted gawk would demand to unearth if my look is in covetousness or disgust.

They cower away. Wither like a picked flower left in the midday sun.

The blonde did no such thing.

She made me look like a дурак who’s never sampled a cunt, much less an untouched one.

Her laugh when I ran into the pamphlet table like a soft cock… fuck.

It made me the hardest I’ve ever been.

She doesn’t fear me—not one bit—and the knowledge has me torn on how to respond. I want to bend her will, but is that solely so she will be in a better position to take my dick between her pouty lips?

Ten minutes ago, I would have said my interest in her had nothing to do with the way her nipples budded against her shirt when I couldn’t conceal my wish to kill anyone who had ever placed her in the position displayed on page seventeen. Now I’m struggling to conceal the interest in my voice when I finally answer one of Dr. Hemway’s numerous silent requests as to why I have arrived at his office.

I spin to face him like our meeting was scheduled for 6 p.m. this evening instead of 6 a.m. tomorrow morning. “Is she?—”

“No.” His clipped tone already has my mood skating from the playful, harmless bachelor I wanted to fool the blonde with to the calculated, menacing business mogul everyone in my realm encounters daily, much less what he says next. “She isn’t a good candidate.”

“Why?” My curt reply announces I hate urging responses. If you can’t be upfront, move aside and let someone else do what you can’t. Don’t make me pry answers out of you unless you want to leave our exchange with fewer fingers.

I work my jaw side to side when Dr. Hemway reminds me why I selected him for this assignment. “It’s confidential.”

I need discretion. His inability to break doctor–patient confidentiality is the sole purpose I scoured his personal life for something I could use to blackmail him. But I’m two seconds from breaking the fingers that had me so incensed with jealousy I entered a sterile room to see if the blonde’s presence altered its scent as well as she did my personality with something as simple as a sideways glance.

The equipment at the side of the bed appears untouched.

The good doctor should consider himself lucky.

I’m not sure what my response would have been if I had discovered the sordid thoughts in my head had been accurate.

With Dr. Hemway unwilling to give me answers, I seek my own. It is how I have operated over the past thirty years.

The chunky patient medical file on the desk could be for anyone, but the way Dr. Hemway shoots up from his chair when my eyes stray to it announces it belongs to the blonde.

Acting like a maniac instead of a future contender for the presidency, I force Dr. Hemway back into his seat when he attempts to rip Zoya Galdean’s file out of my hand. After I pin him to the backless chair, red-faced and angry, I flick through the extensively documented record with my spare hand. It reveals that Zoya is twenty-seven and a multifaceted foreigner, as indicated by both her accent and unique facial structure.

Although my focus should be on Dr. Hemway’s disclosure that Zoya isn’t a good candidate for my current political campaign, I center my focus on the personal side of her medical record.

My grip on Dr. Hemway’s throat loosens enough for him to breathe without a wheeze when the name cited in the next-of-kin section is also foreign and female.

No spousal details are supplied.

I’ll still check, though. Spousal indiscretions aren’t my forte. I’d rather take out Zoya’s significant other before fucking her.

After will make it seem as if my interest is based on more than lust.

“Is she married?”

My back molars grind as deafeningly as the pompous antique clock in the reception area when silence is the only answer I am given.

“Is. She. Married?”

Spit sizzles on Dr. Hemway’s face with my words. It would have been followed with blood if I hadn’t spotted the faintest shake of his head.

He’s obliging—just.

With my reputation too fearful for Dr. Hemway to budge an inch from his chair, I use the hand once pinning him to his seat to hasten my search through a file decades in the making. It starts before Zoya was of age and was added to regularly up until two years ago.

“Did she visit another gynecologist during the discrepancy in her record?”

Dr. Hemway’s voice is husky either with annoyance or because of the grip I had on his throat. “No.” I don’t care about the cause. I am just grateful he’s finally taking me seriously.

“Was she with child?”

Again, his answer is short and blunt. “No.”

When I glare at him, warning him my patience is stretched thin, he wets his lips before he thumbs the green tab in Zoya’s record and opens it to a report from two years ago.

It is filled with jargon anyone outside the medical profession would gloss over, but one word stands out above the rest: infertile .

“Now do you understand why she isn’t a good candidate?”

He slams Zoya’s file shut like I’m not two seconds from prying his fingernails off with tweezers, before he covers it with a stack of twenty. These have Polaroids attached to the front, and although the women featured are gorgeous in their own right, they don’t spark a tenth of the reaction Zoya forced from me when she sauntered to the receptionist desk.

She has an almost clumsy walk, like the top half of her body is too heavy for the rest. When she reached the waiting area of the reception room, her spine straightened and her shoulders rolled back to showcase the spectacular reason for her weighted steps.

In less than a second, she forced the sadness in her eyes to fade into the background with a bright smile and presented a completely different persona.

She’s a chameleon. A puzzle I want to solve. But even admitting that is ludicrous. Centuries of traditions are on the line, years of planning. I can’t throw that away for a woman I’ve just met.

Not today.

Not ever.

I deserve answers, and as much as I wish Zoya Galdean could help me find them, her patient file advises that she can’t.

That doesn’t mean she can’t answer the many pleas of my cock, though.

Perhaps that’s what I need? I need to fuck her to get her out of my system. Then my head will switch back to game mode, and the plans I’ve been working on for the past thirty years will be closer to transpiring.

Ignoring the screaming denials of my cock that one taste will never suffice, I enter the consulting room next to Dr. Hemway’s examination room to collect my suit jacket.

As I stuff my hands into the starched sleeves, I spin to face the doctor, who’s never been more quiet. “Scrap what you have and start again.”

“What? Are you insane? That list took weeks?—”

I interrupt him before his denial of my demand has me reaching for my gun. “The women you selected are boring. Lackluster.” They didn’t inspire a single twitch of my cock, let alone the pandemic of throbs Zoya’s giggle caused. “I’m going to be stuck with her for possibly years, so I want some sort of”—I’m tempted to punch myself in the cock for the choice of my last word—“spark.”

He waits for me to adjust my collar before returning my attention to what it shouldn’t have deviated from for a single second. “You asked me to find a candidate capable of birthing you a healthy offspring.” His following statement exposes he has more gall than I’ve given him credit for. “If you want spark, you should have blackmailed a matchmaking service provider.”

“Scrap what you have and start again.” I speak slower this time, more deadlier. It announces I am not asking him to do this. I am demanding it. “Once you have compiled a more suitable list, forward them to this address.” I remove a gold-embossed business card for the latest hotel added to my extensive real estate portfolio and place it on his desk. “Leave it with the receptionist. I don’t want to be disturbed.”

I’m halfway out the door when Dr. Hemway’s ethics get the better of him for the second time today. “She’s too smart to fall for your tricks.”

I smirk evilly. “I can only hope you are right.”