Total pages in book: 19
Estimated words: 18755 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 94(@200wpm)___ 75(@250wpm)___ 63(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 18755 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 94(@200wpm)___ 75(@250wpm)___ 63(@300wpm)
Kendra Tully has spent her whole life being mistaken for her sister. But just days after burying her mother, she comes home to the one mistake she never saw coming: her husband Porter in their bed with her twin—and he’s calling Thelma by Kendra’s name.
Then the truth turns out to be even uglier than the betrayal. Porter knew. He always knew. He just liked Thelma better.
Enter Dario La Rocca, the ruthless billionaire tearing Porter’s company apart, and he has a deal for Kendra: marry him.
She’ll have his name. His protection. But most of all, he promises to be the kind of husband her sister could never steal. Because he only wanted her—
I will never hurt you, cara. Trust me.
She believed him. But his words…turned out to be another lie.
Note: This is a fast-paced after-divorce romance featuring an evil identical twin, a tall, dark, and handsome billionaire whose only desire is to possess his wife, and a guaranteed HEA. No cheating between the leads, no cliffhanger
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
Chapter One
KENDRA WASN’T SURE it was appropriate to buy a souvenir on her way back from a funeral. Her mother’s funeral at that, which both her sister and her husband had to skip because of work.
But when she got to the airport, she saw a little store selling postcards, and she had just grabbed the first thing that caught her eye.
I Miss You from Chicago.
And at the back of it, she had scribbled a short note for her husband.
I really do.
Love,
Kendra.
She tucked the postcard into her purse and slept the whole flight back to NYC. She considered calling Porter and asking him if he could fetch her from the airport but eventually decided against it. He was stressed and tired from work these days. His company hadn’t been doing well for the past several months. It wouldn’t be good for her to add to his stress.
It was raining hard when the plane landed, and so it took a full forty minutes for Kendra to hail a cab. She was all drenched and shivering when she slid into the backseat, and her teeth chattered as she thanked the driver as he switched the heater on.
Kendra could already feel a migraine coming. She felt so tired and sleepy. She just wanted to go...home.
A painful little ache squeezed her heart at the word, and she realized with surprise that she actually missed home. And she missed Porter, too, even though the past few months, they hadn’t been doing well at all.
She and Porter had always been happy when they were dating. But when she had become his wife, it was as if...
No, don’t think that!
Kendra couldn’t even allow herself to finish the thought. It was a bad habit of hers, pretending that she was fine, and that everything and everyone in her life was fine. It was something she learned in her childhood in order to cope with the things she couldn’t understand, like how her mother always seemed to favor her sister over her.
But anyway...that was the past. It wouldn’t do any good to even let herself remember any of the bad stuff, especially now that her mother was...gone.
Gone was a nice word. It was so much better than that D word which spelled the end of one’s life. Her mother was gone, yes, but when she put it that way, she could pretend that it just meant her mother was out of town while she...
She was finally home.
After four long days of arranging her mother’s funeral, she was finally back home, and Kendra thanked the driver profusely for his kindness and insisted that he take her twenty-dollar tip. She wished she could afford to give him more, but she didn’t really have money of her own. That was the last of what was left from the budget Porter had given her for the trip.
Life as Porter’s wife wasn’t how she had pictured it would be, but that was fine. No marriage started out perfect. What mattered was they kept trying.
It was completely dark when she entered the house, but she didn’t bother opening the lights. It was already two in the morning, and she planned on going straight to bed. Streaks of moonlight allowed her to see snatches of her surroundings, and the house was a mess.
Dirty plates in the sink. Empty bottles of wine and unwashed glasses on the coffee table. Had Porter been entertaining while she was away? It wouldn’t surprise her if he did. He was her opposite that way. He was a self-described party animal while Kendra was a bookish homebody. Honestly, she would have loved it if she could also be the proverbial cat lady in their neighborhood, but that wasn’t possible since Porter was allergic to cats.
Kendra was at the bottom of the stairs when she heard it.
A very familiar laugh.
A feminine laugh.
That wasn’t her own.
And that was when her heart started pounding hard and she found herself taking pains not to make any noise as she went up the stairs. This was her house, wasn’t it? Her home. So why was she acting like a burglar inside of her own house?
She had climbed these stairs countless times, but every step right now felt like hiking Mt. Everest, and she found herself holding on to the rail lest she lost her balance. And the way her heart was hammering, she couldn’t even count the beats. It was just pounding away like a jackhammer. And her throat—it was as if the air around her had suddenly become toxic, and she could hardly breathe.
What was going on?
Why did her home suddenly stop feeling like her home...just because she heard that laugh?
Her laugh.
By the time Kendra reached the landing, a part of her knew she was in complete denial. She knew what she was about to see for herself, but she just didn’t want to think about it. She wanted to keep pretending.