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“Fine. But I’m eating that delicious pussy on the car ride home tonight.” I growled and she gasped. “Oh and by the way, Reid is on the hunt for you. He’s appalled that I don’t want a bachelor party and he thinks he gets to take it up with you.”
“Oh great.” She deadpanned and laughed. “Thanks for the heads up.”
“I love you Cora.”
“I love you more Mav.”
I hung the phone up and couldn’t wipe off the stupid grin on my face from feeling so overwhelmed with joy. But I forced myself to get my head back in the game and focus on destroying a handful of companies that funded the Valentine household and the joy spread through my system, but it was laced with something darker.
Something that felt a lot like revenge.
And boy was it fucking sweet.
Chapter 16 – Cora
“I can’t believe you’re getting married.” Nat said as we walked down the busy sidewalk towards a store she was all but dragging me too. “You’re living my biggest fantasy and I’m stuck watching from the sidelines.” She fake pouted, but I knew better than to think for even one second she wanted anything to do with marriage.
“You just want the wild and crazy sex that comes with finding your soulmate.” I teased and she shrugged her shoulders.
“Well, yeah.” She snorted and pulled me along with her arm through mine. “Let’s go get you something super sexy to shock him senseless for Saturday night.”
She stopped at the front door of an incredibly high end lingerie and dress shop that I wouldn’t have even been able to think about affording two weeks ago, but today, with Mavericks platinum card in my purse, I contemplated it.
But only for a minute.
“I don’t need to spend that kind of money to wow him.” I said, nodding to the sexy as hell white set on a mannequin in the store.
“Need and want are two words you don’t have to keep mutually exclusive anymore Cora. Live it up a little.” She bumped her hip against mine and opened the heavy glass door.
Maverick had insisted I take his credit card that had literally no limit on it while I waited for my own cards to be replaced from my mugging last week. Even though we carpooled to work and back every day, he didn’t want me caught out on my own without access to money. And he had insisted that I use it leisurely as was my ‘right’ now as his future wife.
But it all still made me feel… icky. I’d never needed his money when we were growing up because I had my own from my own parents, who were all too happy to throw cash at me to keep up with the Jones’.
Literally.
But as we walked into the shop, I felt out of place instantly. This place was exactly the kind of place my mother would shop and was exactly the kind of place I would have shopped at as Maverick’s wife all this time, but I hadn’t gotten that chance. And now, looking around at dresses that cost more than three months of rent at my apartment, I had trouble stomaching it.
My life had turned out differently than I’d planned, and it left me with a different mindset about all of this.
The women working at the counter wore clothes worth more than the ones I was wearing, and they were the nice ones that Maverick had bought me the other night with the personal shopper. Their eyes traveled up and down me and Nat as she walked around the store oblivious to the condemning stares of the employees and other shoppers. She flicked through various dresses and accessories as we worked deeper into the store towards the lingerie in the back.
“Nat, let’s get out of here.” I said quietly, trying to pull her attention from the satin and lace that she had her sights set on.
“Not a chance. We have twenty minutes before we need to head back from lunch, and we are going to find something to make that sexy man of yours drool.”
A woman was standing a few feet away from us and I felt her eyes flick up and down my outfit before traveling over to where Nat stood wearing a black fitted Gucci dress, but it screamed knock off, even to me. And I’d been out of the game for far longer than this woman clearly had been.
“Ooh look at this one.” Nat said, pulling a baby pink set off a rack and holding it up to me. It was a plunging push up bra with a harness style strappy attachment that went from the neck like a collar, down past the bra and hooked to the panties and garter belt with rose gold accents.
It was incredibly beautiful, and I reached out to run my fingers over the fabric of it longingly.
“It will look divine on you with your flared hips and big knockers.” Nat said, putting it over her arm as she walked around the display to look at something else.
The woman that had been standing a few feet away was even closer now and scoffed at Nat’s lack of tact describing my body and I glared at her. Suddenly feeling protective of my new friend against women who felt superior than everyone else based solely off their husband’s bank accounts. I’d grown up around women like her, and I hated seeing my mother treat people like that regularly.
The woman was probably in her mid-thirties and wore her hair in a severe bun on the back of her head in a way most unflattering, but I knew without a doubt she did that because it accentuated her professionally sculpted cheek bones highlighted with filler. She wore a red fitted dress paired with gold jewelry and red bottom heels, but she looked over done for a mid-day shopping trip.
If I had to guess, she was trying to seem better off than she was. At least that’s what my spidey senses were trying to tell me, but they’d sat dormant for so long I could be a bit rusty.
