Cheated With Four Girls

The diamond necklace was cold.

Not just cool—cold, the way metal gets when it's been sitting in a velvet box in an air-conditioned room, waiting. Ryker's fingers brushed the back of my neck as he fastened the clasp, and the chill of it spread down my collarbone like ice water, settling against my sternum right where his black card had rested the night before.

I stared at my reflection in the floor-length mirror of his penthouse and tried to remember how to breathe.

The dress was worse up close. Better. Both. The red fabric clung to every curve I'd spent years learning to dress around—the soft weight of my hips, the roundness of my stomach, the fullness of my chest. In my apartment this morning, on the hanger, it had looked like a weapon. On my body, it looked like a confession.

I crossed my arms over my midsection without thinking.

Ryker's hands closed around my wrists and batted them away. Not gently. The motion was blunt, almost impatient, like he'd caught me doing something offensive.

"Stop that."

His voice came from just behind my left ear. In the mirror, I could see him—black suit, no tie, the top button of his shirt open in a way that somehow looked more deliberate than casual. His eyes weren't on my face. They were moving over my reflection with the slow, unhurried attention of someone taking inventory of something that belonged to them.

I felt my face heat. "I'm just—"

"I know what you're doing." He stepped closer, until his chest was against my shoulder blades and his hands settled on my waist—not gripping, just resting, heavy and certain. "You've been doing it since you put the dress on. Hiding."

"I'm not hiding. I'm just—it's a lot of dress."

"It's not enough dress." His thumbs pressed in, just slightly, against the curve of my waist. "That's the point."

I tried to look away from the mirror. His hand came up and caught my chin, the same way it had in the dark of the janitor's closet—firm, unapologetic, tilting my face back toward our reflection.

"Look," he said.

I looked. I didn't want to. I looked anyway.

His hands moved. Slow, deliberate—one sliding from my waist to the curve of my hip, the other tracing upward along my ribcage. Not hurried. Not testing. Like he had all the time in the world and no interest in wasting it. His palm curved over the fullness of my hip and stayed there, warm and heavy.

"You hide these curves like they're a sin, Sienna." His voice was low. Gravelly. The kind of voice that didn't ask for your attention—it just took it. "Tonight, I'm going to show you how a real man worships them."

The word landed somewhere behind my sternum and detonated quietly.

I watched his hand move in the mirror—across the swell of my hip, up the side of my waist, every place I'd trained myself not to look at in photographs, every place I'd learned to angle away from cameras and compress under shapewear and apologize for in the dark. His touch didn't apologize. It didn't accommodate or minimize. It simply claimed.

"Ryker." My voice came out smaller than I intended.

"Mm."

"This is still just strategy. Right?" I needed to say it out loud. I needed to hear what it sounded like. "Tonight is still just—"

"Tonight is whatever it needs to be." His eyes met mine in the mirror, and something in them was very still, very direct. "But right now, in this room, you're going to stop apologizing for what you look like."

His other hand pressed flat against my stomach—the exact place I'd been covering, the exact place I hated most. I felt my breath catch. Felt the instinctive urge to pull away, to suck in, to make myself smaller.

I didn't.

I stood there and let him hold me still, and I watched in the mirror as something shifted in my own face—the tight, braced quality around my eyes loosening by degrees, the set of my jaw softening. The diamonds at my throat caught the light and scattered it across the ceiling.

For the first time in longer than I could remember, I looked at my own body and didn't immediately start cataloguing its failures.

I looked like someone worth looking at.

Ryker's mouth curved. Just slightly. Like he'd watched the thought cross my face and filed it away.

"There," he said quietly. "Now you're ready."

---

The Voss family home was the kind of place that made you feel underdressed even in your best. All marble and warm amber light, the kind of lighting that cost more than most people's rent and made everyone inside look like they'd been professionally lit. The driveway alone could have swallowed my entire apartment building.

Ryker's hand rested at the small of my back as we walked toward the entrance. Light pressure. Proprietary. The diamonds at my throat felt warmer now, warmed by my skin, no longer cold.

I could hear the dinner through the closed doors—the low murmur of conversation, the clink of crystal, the particular hum of money and power gathered in one room pretending to be a family.

Ryker glanced down at me. "Ready?"

I thought about Kade's face this morning. The coffee on his shoes. The word *fiancée* falling out of the bodyguard's mouth like a grenade.

"Open the door," I said.

He did.

The room was everything I'd expected—long table, candlelight, the collected gaze of people who'd learned early that looking bored was a form of power. Every head turned as we entered. I felt the attention move across us like a wave, felt the moment it landed and stuck.

I kept my chin up. Kept my hand light on Ryker's arm. Let them look.

I found Kade in the crowd without trying. He was near the far end of the room, one hand wrapped around a glass of something amber, the other arm loosely around the shoulders of a girl I recognized from last night—blonde, laughing at something he'd said, tilting into him with the easy confidence of someone who didn't know yet that she was temporary.

He was smiling. That lazy, careless smile I'd spent months trying to earn.

Then someone near him said something, or maybe he just felt the shift in the room's attention, because he turned.

His eyes found me.

The smile died.

I watched it happen in real time—the way his face went through recognition, then confusion, then something that cracked open underneath both of them. His gaze moved from my face to the red dress to the diamonds to Ryker's hand at my back, and I saw the exact moment he did the math.

The glass slipped from his fingers.

It hit the marble floor and shattered—a sharp, bright explosion of sound that cut through every conversation in the room. Crystal and amber liquid scattered across the tile. The girl beside him flinched back. Several people turned.

Kade didn't move. He just stood there in the sudden silence, staring at me, with the broken glass at his feet and something irreparable spreading across his face.

Ryker's hand pressed lightly against my spine.

I didn't look away from Kade.

I let him see every inch of me—the dress, the diamonds, the way I was standing like I had every right to be here, like I wasn't the girl he'd left in a hallway last night while he laughed with strangers. I let him see all of it, and I kept my face perfectly, deliberately calm.

Then I turned away.

And walked further into the room with Ryker Voss at my side.