CHAPTER TWO

Her dress was pooling around her like a deflated parachute. As she cried so hard her entire body shook terribly. She wiped away the tears that had completely blocked her vision.

Three years.

Three years of dinner parties with the Hales where Eleanor critiqued everything from Cassie's posture to her choice of graduate program. Three years of molding herself into the kind of woman who could stand beside Marcus Hale and not look out of place. Three years of telling herself that love could grow, that partnership mattered more than passion and security was worth the compromise.

And he'd been in love with Vanessa?

While Cassie had been picking out wedding invitations and seating charts and trying to decide between the poached salmon or the filet mignon for the reception dinner. Vanessa was busy spending time with her man. Hell, she was fucking her man!

All the while giving an excuse of trying to enroll for a PGD and it was draining that's why she wasn't available.

She was being played and she didn't know which betrayal cut deeper.

Her phone buzzed in the hidden pocket of her dress.

She ignored it but it buzzed again, and again, and again. She pulled it out with numb fingers and watched notifications flood the screen.

I*******m tags, t*****r mentions, text messages from numbers she didn't even recognize.

She was trending. Someone had already made a hashtag:

#ReplacedBride

It was trending, of course it was trending.

Cassie Reeves, daughter of business mogul Richard Reeves, publicly dumped at her own engagement party for her college best friend. It was the kind of story that fed news cycles for weeks. Humiliation p**n for the masses.

She opened T*****r against her better judgment.

BREAKING: Marcus Hale calls off engagement to Cassie Reeves, declares love for her best friend Vanessa Laurent at their engagement party

The tweet had a video attached. Cassie pressed play and immediately wished she hadn't.

There she was on someone's phone screen, standing frozen beside Marcus while he delivered his little speech. The camera was too far away to catch her expression clearly but close enough to see the exact moment her world ended.

Close enough to see her run. And worst, the comments were already vicious.

She should have seen this coming, he's been flirting with Vanessa for months.

Poor girl, that's what happens when you marry for money instead of love

Vanessa is way hotter tbh

Cassie threw her phone across the room. It hit a rack of coats and clattered to the floor, screen cracked but still buzzing with incoming notifications.

She pressed her palms against her eyes and tried to stop crying but she couldn't. She couldn't think logically about next steps and the only thing she felt was shattered.

A knock on the door made her jump.

"Cassie?" Her mother's voice was laced with worry. "Sweetheart, please open the door."

She said nothing.

“I know you are in there. I can hear the whimpers, baby.”

"Go away," Cassie managed, her voice wrecked and raw.

"Your father wants to leave. We should talk about this at home."

Home. Where photographers were probably already camped outside? Where she'd have to face her parents and explain how she hadn't seen this coming? How she'd been so blind?

"I need a minute," Cassie said.

"Cassandra—"

"Please, Mom. Just give me a minute."

The place fell silent, then she heard the footsteps retreating down the hallway.

Cassie dropped her head back against the door and closed her eyes. She could stay here and live in this coat room forever.

She would live off the mint notes they forgot in their pockets. It was a solid plan.

Another knock came, softer this time.

"Mom, I said—"

"Not your mother," a male voice said, smooth and dark with something that might have been amusement. "Though I'm flattered you think I sound maternal."

Cassie's eyes snapped open. She knew that voice.

It was Dom. Dominic Hale.

Marcus's younger brother and the black sheep the family didn't talk about at dinner parties because he was too embarrassing, too reckless, too everything that old money feared.

"Go away, Dominic," Cassie said.

"It's Dom," he corrected. "And I would, but you're sitting against the door and I'm assuming you don't want me to shove it open and send you sprawling across expensive outerwear."

Despite everything, despite the crying and the humiliation and the fact that her life was currently imploding in HD across social media, Cassie almost laughed.

She shifted away from the door and heard the lock click open.

Dominic stepped into the coat room and closed the door behind him like he had every right to be there. He looked nothing like Marcus. Where his older brother was polished and controlled, Dom was all sharp edges and deliberate carelessness. Dark hair that looked like he'd run his hands through it too many times. He wore a tux that fit perfectly but somehow it still managed to look rebellious on him.

His eyes were too calculating for someone with his reputation.

He surveyed the room, gaze landing on Cassie crumpled on the floor in her engagement dress, then on her phone face-down across the room with its cracked screen.

"Well," he said, leaning against a coat rack with his hands in his pockets. "This is thoroughly pathetic."

Cassie stared at him. "Excuse me?"

"You. On the floor, crying over my brother." Dom tilted his head. "It's pathetic."

White-hot anger cut through the grief like a knife. "Get out."

"In a minute." He reached into his jacket and pulled out a silver cigarette case, flipping it open with practiced ease. "Want one?"

"I don't smoke."

"Neither do I, usually." He offered the case anyway. "But tonight feels like an exceptional kind of night."

Cassie looked at the cigarettes, at Dom's infuriatingly calm expression and then at the door she could throw him out of.

Then she reached up and took one.

Dom's smile was small and dangerous as he pulled out a lighter, crouching down to her level to light her cigarette first, then his own. The flame cast shadows across his face, highlighting the sharp line of his jaw and the scar above his left eyebrow that society gossip said came from a bar fight in Prague.

They sat in silence for a moment, smoke curling between them.

"My brother's an idiot," Dom finally said.

Cassie laughed, bitter and broken. "Your brother just humiliated me in front of everyone who matters."

"Like I said. An idiot."

"Why are you here?"

Dom took a drag from his cigarette. "I saw where you went and figured you could use some company that wasn't trying to fix you or photograph you."

"How thoughtful." She scorned.

"I have my moments." He studied her through the smoke. "How long were you two together? Three years?"

"Three and a half."

"And you never saw this coming? Him and Vanessa?"

The question should have hurt but it was too blunt to be cruel. "No. I didn't."

"That's because you weren't looking," Dom said. "You were too busy being the perfect girlfriend."

Cassie's jaw tightened. "You don't know anything about me."

"I know you were marrying my brother for the wrong reasons." Dom's eyes were sharp. "I know he was marrying you for business. I know your father brokered this whole thing like a corporate acquisition. And I know that right now, you're more angry than heartbroken."

"You don't—"

"Am I wrong?"

Cassie opened her mouth to argue, then closed it.

He wasn't wrong.

She was angry. Furious, actually. At Marcus for the public spectacle. At Vanessa for the betrayal. At herself for not seeing it. But heartbroken? She'd cried because of the humiliation, not because she'd lost the love of her life.

That realization was somehow worse than everything else.

"What do you want, Dom?" Cassie asked, exhausted.

“You know, so many times, I passed by Marcus's room and heard sounds at odd hours but I always thought it was you. I thought you were a tiny, innocent looking devilish…”

“Answer the darn question.”

Dom took one last drag from his cigarette and stubbed it out on the bottom of his shoe. Then he looked at her with those calculating eyes and said,

"Marry me instead."