Chapter One

Lydia Sinclair gasped, the air catching in her throat.

  Her balance went first while her heels gave out, forcing her two jagged steps backward as the floor beneath her seemed to tilt. 

  For a split second, gravity almost won. Her eyes darted wildly, trying to find an anchor in the room, but the scene unfolding before her was indisputable. Atrocious.

  Now, the pieces clicked. 

  What a scumbag.

  He had hunted her down for the very sin he was committing.

  Was everyone in his orbit this shameless?

  Her thoughts didn't march as they blurred into a roar of pain rising and falling indiscriminately against her mind.

  Suddenly,the cacophony stopped dead. The moaning sounds that  choked her stomach with disgust.

  Through the space, two pairs of eyes pierced through her. 

  Henry and Natasha. Cuddled into each other and naked on the bed.They stared at her.

  After a few seconds of silence, Henry finally broke, shoving himself away from the disheveled, wild-haired girl on the mattress while dragging a tangled tail of bedsheets along with him. 

  Shit!

  His mind was scrambling. How was Lydia here? 

  He moved toward Lydia with practiced caution, forcing his trademark charming smile onto his face and extending his hands forward gesturing smoothly as if trying to placate an unpredictable animal.

  "Honey, look at me," he pleaded, his hands waving in a bid to shield her line of sight from Natasha and gain her attention. 

  "Babe, it's not what you think. Trust me. I can explain. I swear to god, it’s not what it looks like"

  Seriously?!

  Did he honestly take her for a fool?

  The closer he got,the more steps she took backward. At some point,her heel caught and made her stumble lightly.

  Henry's foot tangled into the long bedsheet that had slantly migrated to the floor,crumpled, and slightly damp with whatever their illicit filth had been.

  Nausea twisted in Lydia's stomach.The longer she looked at them, the more revolting they became.

  "Sis, please, I didn't mean..." Natasha’s voice died in her throat.A sudden flush of heat flooded her face.For one brief second, Natasha looked ashamed.It vanished.

  She should have known better.

  "Wait! I'm not even the one to blame here!" Natasha snapped, her demeanor pivoting violently. 

  "It's you. It's all your fault!" She spat the words out, her eyes bulging with a grotesque flood of righteous anger—a delusion so that seemed she had forgotten what she had just been caught doing.

  Lydia let out a dejected smirk. "Yeah. Of course it's me."She scoffed.

  She was the one.

  She was adamant in convincing him—Perhaps Natasha was thinking back to the days of her illness....times when she struggled just to survive, dependent on Lydia's fiancé to care for her day in and day out because he was a "professional." 

  A professional?

  God, she had been an idiot. Stupid enough to believe these two actually possessed a shred of benevolence between them.

  On the floor, the man scrambled to his feet and crawled toward her reaching out to her ankles blindly.Lydia didn't hesitate but forcefully kicked his fingers off her legs dismissively.

  Without a glance backward, she tore herself away and stormed out of the room. 

  Natasha in the room, looked like a ghost,her foundation was ruined, eyeliner smudged into dark tracks, and her mouth smeared in a messy trail of crimson lipstick that only made her look more despicable.

  "Why are you staring at me?!" Henry snapped from the floor. He found his way up, his eyes cutting toward the bare lady on the bed who was frantically covering herself with her hands.

 "I thought you had her under control!" she shrieked back, her face flushing a furious red.

  "So what? Are you trying to blame me for this?!" 

  Natasha's gaze screamed the line"you should have been more careful" without her having to say them out.

  "Hey! Look at me. It's you and i in this, get that through your thick skull!"

  Lydia, on the other hand, was flying down the stairs,moving in a hurry with the frantic click-clack of her heels hitting the steps while the train of her long black dress dragged roughly behind her.

  What she had just witnessed pressed down on her chest. She had been with him for a decade, and this was how it ended.

  She tried to come in terms with the fact that she had really wasted over a decade of her life on an absolute bum, only for her pesky, so-called 'sister' to turn traitor.

Well, she had always known Natasha was no saint but Lydia had never in her thoughts expected her to stoop this low.

  Amidst the daze,Lydia’s footing failed.She felt herself going down.Her balance distorted as she plunged forward into the air of the stairwell.

  She braced for impact, but instead of reaching ground,she slammed into a body.

  Just in time, two strong hands locked around her waist with a grip that was firm and unyielding, effortlessly saving her from what would have been a tragedy at the bottom of the stairs.

  Breathing unevenly, Lydia looked up to examine the features of the man holding her.

  It was Adrian Harold.

  Henry's older brother,the undisputed heir of the Harold empire. The one man in the family nobody dared challenge.

  He stared down at her, his gaze sweeping over her face with what seemed like unblinking curiosity. 

  Adrian’s

presence was arresting,radiating a sharp masculinity and an overwhelming aura.Calm.Dominant.

  For a second, the house went still while his grip was still around her waist. Then, out of the blue, Lydia parted her lips and whispered two words that threw the powerful heir off balance.

  "Marry me."