Free The Pretend Boyfriend 2 (Inhumanly Handsome, Humanly Flawed Alpha Male Erotic Romance) by Artemis Hunt

Friday.”
    “Great.” He means it.
    “Thanks to you.”
    “I didn’t do anything. He just happened to be there.”
    “And you just happened to suddenly be partial to opera. You’re such a bad liar.”
    “I wish I was,” he says pensively, and she falls silent.

16
     
    It is early morning. Sam knows that she has to haul her ass to the office, and she doesn’t have a clean change of clothes right now in Brian’s penthouse. But she’s glad she stayed. He needed her, as much as he doesn’t want to admit it. She hates to see him like this – a pale shell of himself.
    He’s sleeping in his bed. After tossing and turning half the night, he finally drifted to sleep in the wee hours of the morning. She didn’t wake him when she crept out of his arms.
    What he told her disturbed her more than she thought it would. Beautiful, brilliant, successful and sophisticated Brian. A sexually abused child. It didn’t matter if it only happened once. Brian had been physically abused for most of his childhood. And the worst scars that he retained had not been made on his beautiful body.
    Over the years, he developed a caustic veneer – icy and impenetrable. He built a barbed wire fence around his own heart. He is unable to love and unable to be loved – pushing people away before they can get too close, unless he is really comfortable with them, like with Caleb.
    Only he has the last part down wrong.
    She loves him. More than any man she has ever loved.
    She knows that now.
    She watches him sleep for a while. Even in sleep, he is not at rest. His closed eyelids flit with the sleep of dreams, though in his case, they will more likely be nightmares.
    Her heart wrenches.
    She pads downstairs in his bathrobe before she can become fixated on watching him.
    Downstairs, she surveys the carnage. The crime scene. The police have already combed the place, photographed whatever they needed to photograph, collected whatever evidence they needed to collect. She examines the broken table, trying to envision what happened. Was there a struggle? How badly were both parties hurt? Brian has the claw marks on his chest, but what happened here had to be more than just a catfight.
    She treads carefully around the broken glass. Brian has no cuts on his body other than the ones on the soles of his feet. His blood smudges portions of the carpet, but that’s the only blood she can see.
    She frowns. With this kind of struggle, the woman, Delilah, has to be hurt more than the police suggested. Surely the police would have picked up on that. But the police didn’t care about Brian. To them, he was just some rich schmuck who deserved to be taken down a peg or two.
    Brian’s clothes are strewn on the floor. No doubt the police have gone through that, she notes in chagrin. She picks them up – a grey wife beater and a pair of crumpled jeans. They didn’t look torn. They look as if they have been slipped off deliberately. Brian said he didn’t remember taking off his clothes before he blanked out.
    Sam sinks onto her haunches, trying to piece together the scene. Such a struggle. Someone had to be hurt real bad.
    Maybe it was time she paid Delilah a visit.
    A movement at the door arrests her. There are shadows beneath the lower edge. Several newspapers are shoved into Brian’s hallway. So he has his newspapers delivered this way in the morning.
    Suspicion makes her climb to her feet to pick them up.
    The headlines are about the elections. But on the front page of the Tribune , a news item immediately catches her eye.
    ‘PROMINENT BUSINESSMAN, BRIAN MORTON, BROUGHT ME TO HIS PENTHOUSE AND RAPED ME,’ CLAIMS VICTIM.
    In it is a stock photo of Brian, probably taken some time ago at a businessman’s luncheon. He is in a business suit – well-groomed, impossibly handsome, and smiling smugly into the camera.

17
     
    Brian walks into his office sometime around ten. He has tried to dress up as immaculately as possible. His hair is neatly combed and he is