Total pages in book: 105
Estimated words: 98398 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 492(@200wpm)___ 394(@250wpm)___ 328(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 98398 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 492(@200wpm)___ 394(@250wpm)___ 328(@300wpm)
I left my office during lunch and just took a walk around a nearby park. Trying to clear my mind a little. I needed the break to get away from the stress of work but mostly from seeing Eddie at a different lawyer’s desk day in and day out.
She had been assigned to a very promising up-and-coming prosecutor who, I was surprised, hadn’t just moved onto the corporate sector yet. Maybe he just wasn’t done making a name for himself. Having Eddie on his desk was definitely going to help him do that. It was a good place for her. It was a place where she could learn a lot and advance her career, but it also put her in my direct line of sight every single time I left or came back to my office.
The walk during lunch had cleared my head a little bit and helped me refocus. I was genuinely feeling better and like I could maybe be productive for a few hours before I had to leave to attend a private dinner with my fiancée where she and I would discuss exactly how our marriage would work and what was and was not expected of each other. And then I saw Eddie at her desk, flirting with that fucking Detective Doyle again.
A hot spike of anger flushed through my body, so intense I saw red. I tightened my fist and had to stop myself from assaulting a police officer in my own office. Instead, I turned and marched into my office, closing and locking the door and then moving back to my private bathroom, splashing cold water on my face.
Walking into this room was a mistake, though. All I could see was Eddie the first time we met when she was in here with her blouse pulled up over her head, in the middle of changing.
Or even the second time I caught her in here with her shirt off and her perfect breasts exposed. That was the first time I discovered exactly how wet her pussy could get for me.
I couldn’t be in the office. Without looking at anyone else, I grabbed my coat and headed straight for the elevator.
It was getting harder and harder to breathe. My hands were balled into fists, trying to curb the shaking that wouldn’t stop until the elevator doors closed and I was alone.
With a quick text message, I told my driver to meet me downstairs, and I left the building without looking back.
The second I got outside into the cold, fresh air, the pressure in my lungs eased a bit, but it wasn’t enough. I got into the back seat of the car before the driver had even come to a full stop.
“The penthouse,” I barked and then put up the partition.
The panic attack started fast. I couldn’t remember the last time it was this bad. Before Eddie came into my life, I hadn’t had a panic attack since school days. But now it felt like everything was out of control.
There was more work on my plate than I could handle by myself, and that had never happened before. I needed help, but there was no one that I could trust to help because I couldn’t control myself around the one paralegal that was on my level.
I couldn’t even control my social calendar. My mother was adding more and more events where I was supposed to be seen with Catherine to make a good impression and secure my future. I couldn’t control Eddie. The woman I wanted was openly flirting with another man in the office, and there was nothing I could do about it.
It was her right to flirt with whoever she wanted to. I didn’t own her, although I really wanted to.
The irony of the entire situation was not lost on me. I refused to be with Eddie the way I wanted because the best-case scenario for her was that she didn’t get to live a full life. So, I’d let her go so she could live that life. But seeing her living it, seeing her flirting with another man, sent me into a tailspin so intense I didn’t know how I was going to make it through the day. I couldn’t watch her live the life she had every right to live.
The car slowed to a stop, and I looked up. We weren’t anywhere close to my penthouse. I considered just getting out and making a run for it, but there were so many people on the streets it would have been inadvisable. The last thing I needed was for the Page Six headline to say “Golden Bastard Loses Grip on Re-Election Golden Egg.”
That would kill my career along with any chance I ever had of running for any type of public office again. If I let that happen, I would be lucky to land a job as a part-time attorney at a third-rate legal clinic.