Truth Untold (Eligible Bachelors #1)

Chapter Twelve

Waking up with a hangover was never a good feeling. Of course, it was nothing compared to the turbulent rush of emotion – anger, frustration, betrayal – that he felt the night before. He recalled a little of what happened after he and Carson went to the club and he managed to get hammered by nine o'clock. It was much needed.

But he remembered the photographs. He remembered all that he felt. He remembered snippets of the conversation he and Carson had after he'd drunkenly flopped to the ground.

Daphne had orchestrated the Twitter scandal that brought unrest into their lives for weeks. She had used him like he meant nothing, and for all intents and purposes, maybe he didn't. She was only after his money and social prestige, and he finally understood why Tomi stopped coming around, and why his parents never accepted Daphne. His sister, and their parents had sniffed out the Steins' intention from day one.

It made him nauseous that it took four years for him to realize he'd been coddling the enemy all the while the woman who never meant him any harm or distress had been constantly on the receiving end of his unwarranted hatred.

He grimaced as he checked the time on his phone, the bright light shocking his eyes and increasing his nausea tenfold. He felt sick, and that he would unload everything in his stomach if he didn't make it to the bathroom.

Instead of being a productive COO of Roche International, at 11:19 AM on a Tuesday morning, he was hunched over his toilet, retching his guts out and wallowing in self-pity at how far from grace he'd fallen. Everything was still flashy on the outside, but the inside was rotted away and eaten by termites.

There was unrest in his life, and he wanted control back. But the one thing he wouldn't give up was his relationship with Vanessa. It had been the one unexpectedly good thing to come out of this sham of a marriage in his plot to make her miserable.

Oh, how that had backfired!

He could see a future with her. The question that remained was if she felt the same. Would she even entertain the idea of staying with him? They maybe on better terms and might even consider one another 'friends' but there was no guarantee her heart was in it the way his was.

If she would stay, he'd spend the rest of their lives making it up to her. If she chose to leave, he could honour her desire and let her go, though with a heavy heart because with her, he had unexpectedly found a sliver of normalcy. She didn't care about appearances or the things other women he had dated cared about. All he had to do was show up and she would appreciate the living daylights out of his existence.

There was no doubt she was disappointed, and maybe a little hurt by him standing her up on what was supposed to be their real, first date. He promised himself to make it up to her if she would give him the chance.

Freshening up as best he could, he decided against the bustle of rushing to the office opting to work from home. He contacted Sarah, and the meeting she had to postpone that morning given his absence, he'd had her reschedule for later on in the week. He spent a few hours in his home office, tapping away on his laptop, drafting, and sending emails, conducting phone calls, and reading reports.

One of the calls he'd made was to his family's accountant. He wanted statements done on his own finances since the project he had in mind was something he wanted to begin soon. With a rough estimate of the cost, he could begin planning expenditure. Yesterday, he'd emailed the office of the city's mayor to discuss the project's development. As he finished off a separate email, there was a response from the mayor's office informing him of a date and time when he would hold a videoconference with the mayor.