Yours Suddenly

Chapter 13

Roman

I don’t blame Alexandra for avoiding me.

I've changed. I'm no longer spending so much time away from home.

I don't get up and leave in the morning before she wakes up, I make sure to stay and say good morning to her.

The first morning I do this, she mumbles a greeting back and gets up to go use the bathroom. She takes a quick shower and then immediately leaves our bedroom to go down for breakfast. I take a shower too and head downstairs, intending to join her at the table but she isn’t there. She’s already with Mama and Adrianne in the endless decorating of my hotels scattered across the city, Freddy, Blake and Matthew watching over them.

It goes on like that for a week. The only time we have an extended conversation is when I ask about the bruise, which she tells me is getting better thanks to a pair of my cousins who are the family doctors. Sometimes she, Adrianne and Mama plan family trips with the cousins and the kids and Tristan and I are excluded because we have to… work.

We could simply abandon our… escapades , and the deals we're trying to make with our various partners, seasoned businessmen who would love nothing but to take my wealth for themselves.

Fucking pieces of shit.

All they do is fuck and spend money and kill, no family values, no morals, nothing. The amount of people they screw over to get what they want? Diabolical. These are the bastards I had to kill or make missing so I could get to where I am. They wouldn't have allowed any other competition in unless you were willing to get your hands dirty.

Wayne Johnson, the millionaire owner of a tech company, shakes my hand in the conference room of one of my hotels. I know he's watching every single move I make. The deal that'll give me half a billion dollars is the one he wanted, and I know he'll try to do anything to take it for himself.

There have been numerous intimidation tactics over the years from various competitors. Three years ago, one of my cousin's kids, Sammi, almost got kidnapped because I acquired a piece of land in the north of New York. That's when we decided to beef up security: every single family member had to have a bodyguard with them at all times.

Since she used to spend nearly all her time with me, I was my wife’s bodyguard, but I had to assign Blake after I began to work too much. Blake updates me on how she’s doing three times a day.

She's happy, boss, he texts.

She’s having cinnamon rolls from that real expensive place you like .

Or she looks tired, I’ll suggest taking her home

Good is all I always text back.

Whenever I get home, which is much earlier these days, I try to take her out or have a solo date on the rooftop terrace of the mansion, telling the kids they can camp in the spa room or aquarium chamber instead. But she always turns me down and, shit, it gets to me bad .

She's too tired. Or she has to do some research on the curtains she wants to put up in some obscure suite.

“Let Adrianne do it,” I say. My hand wraps around her waist, and I pull her to me as we stand outside our bedroom door early in the evening. As always, she smells so fucking good, looks so fucking good with red lipstick and her hair all wavey. It's like she's putting in so much effort to look good but keeping herself away from me. I feel my cock harden in my pants when she looks up at me with those big doe eyes, deliberately trying to look as seductive as possible. I miss tasting her pussy, her tits, her mouth.

“Adrianne has too much work on her hands already,” she says. “She did the linen and the mirrors and the carpets. I'm supposed to do the curtains.” She sounds annoyed and steps back from me. “Now, if you don't mind, I have to go and discuss with Mama about our schedule this week. It's looking really busy for us.”

Her emphasis on the word “busy” tells me she's definitely getting back at me. Not just for the other woman drama, but for abandoning her. A look of mild smugness comes on her face when she notices the expression I’m wearing. I don't show much, but I know she can tell every little emotion that passes over my stoic features.

“If you'll excuse me, Roman.”

I’ll be honest, I feel super jealous of my mother and Adrianne right now, who both are avoiding me and giving me the partial silent treatment in solidarity with my wife.

“No men allowed!” Adrianne says when I enter the casual family room.

I raise my eyebrows, pointing at my med-student cousins Ryan and Logan lounging on a sofa as they watch a documentary on TV.

“Oh, my mistake,” Adrianne says. “No men named Roman Trent allowed.”

I smile, my gaze moving to my wife. She’s watching me and when our eyes lock she looks away, turning red.

“Don't you have a huge business deal to get to?” Mama says to me sardonically, not unlike when she used to ask me if I didn’t have homework to do as a kid.

“I do actually,” I say. Tristan is not happy with how distracted I've been during our, uh, interesting meetings with our competitors and partners. I keep texting my wife during them but she doesn't answer of course. Sometimes I call right as we’re in the heat of battle, our lives on the line, and she lets it ring and ring.

“Alexandra,” I say to her, “you know a fifth spinoff to Yours Suddenly, Sawyer is coming out on Friday?”

“Duh,” she says. “ Yours Forever, Sinclair is literally all I've been thinking about.”

“Can I take you?” I feel much less confident asking this question than when I asked her to marry me.

Her eyebrows rise. “The only free showing is at three p.m., you'll probably be in a meeting or something.”

“I won't,” I say. “Please let me take you on a date.”

Her eyes soften. She thinks about it, regarding me.

“Okay fine,” she grumbles. “But I'm not going because of you .” She points a damning finger at me. “I'm going because I love Yours Suddenly, Sawyer .”

“Of course,” I say with a nod. Something lights up in her eyes and fuck, that's all I want to see. Over and over again.

***

It's two p.m. on Friday. I've just come out of a meeting and I’m headed home in my Porsche when I get a call from Tristan.

“Rome, you're not gonna fucking believe this, but we found a couple of suspicious people lurking close to home.”

“What?”

I shouldn't be surprised. This is something we’ve been on the lookout for for months now.

“Yeah,” Tristan says. “We were able to neutralize them and take them away. Things got a little ugly, Logan got grazed in the thigh… He’s a doc so he’ll be fine.”

He describes to me more what happened and then gives me the location they’re all at.

“Okay, I'll be there in twenty.” I hang up. “Fuck!”

Just then I get a text from my wife.

What do you want me to wear? She puts that smirking emoji next to it.

The last time she asked me a question like this was months ago when we went to dinner around midnight. I told her to put on something sexy and she had the hottest lingerie underneath her tight black dress. We ended up in the men's bathroom, my hand over her mouth, my other rubbing her clit and my teeth sinking into the back of her neck. Never cummed harder in my life.

Something sexy I text guiltily. I add I hear theaters are pretty dark and empty if you get there ten minutes before the movie starts but then delete the paragraph.

I can only get home in fifteen minutes and then it's going to be another twenty minutes to drive to the cinema so we’re definitely not going to be early.

And I have to deal with the threat that Tristan neutralized right fucking now. It's a lot more important.

Fuck. The one time I was about to mend my relationship with Alexandra is when this bullshit had to happen close to home .

I speed my Porsche to the location Tristan gave, but guess fucking what? Traffic. I call my cousin and say I'm going to be thirty minutes late because an accident occurred on the fucking freeway.

Slowly I move forward, and when I finally break free from the congestion, I drive like a maniac. By the time I get to my destination, the movie is twenty minutes from starting.

Radio silence from Alexandra confirms to me she's pissed off. I'm pissed off, too.

The people who made me miss precious time with her are going to pay.

Getting out of my car and moving past the black cars parked outside an abandoned warehouse, I call her.

“Baby, something came up,” I say regretfully.

She doesn't say anything.

“Baby?” I say.

“I'm here, I'm listening.” I don't imagine the wobble in her voice. “I knew it was too good to be true. You have fun with work.”

And before I can say anything, she hangs up.

“Fuck!” I launch my phone into the wall where it shatters to pieces and storm inside the warehouse.

It's dark, but I can make out the men who are kneeling in a line. Their hands and feet bound, their eyes blindfolded.

Tristan walks up to meet me.

“Whose men do you think they are?” I ask him.

“Johnson’s,” he replies.

The old tech fuck I had a meeting with. He will pay for this. Not just for having people spy on my family. But for making me miss one of the most important moments of my life. We were going to fucking watch Yours Forever, Sinclair . I mean, we could always watch it tomorrow. Or on Sunday or any other day of the week. But the point is me keeping my promises and spending time with her, especially since I’m already on marriage probation.

Now she thinks anytime I want to spend time with her, there's a high possibility I might cancel because of work. That I don’t prioritize her and I’m not committed to her, which couldn’t be further from the fucking truth.

“And you've 100% confirmed this?” I say to my cousin.

“100%. They were heavily armed.”

He points to a pile of guns and knives on the floor.

A dark laugh comes out of me. I don't enjoy killing people, but ever since I was a kid, some pleasure comes from taking out people who do nothing but cause misery to others in this world.

Without me asking him, Tristan hands me a gun, and I step toward one of the kneeling men to start interrogating them.

Afterward, when the place is smelling of blood and gunpowder, I commend Tristan on a job well done and then drive to Johnson’s place with a few of my men. The six p.m. news will say he died of natural causes.

At least after today, there’ll be no more bullshit. That's one thing gone right today, at least.

Everything will go back to normal.