Standing half a pace behind his right elbow in an off-the-shoulder cream chiffon maternity gown, her left hand resting possessively over her prominent seven-month baby bump, was his twenty-seven-year-old wife, Brielle. She wore a diamond cluster necklace that had once sat in my own jewelry armoire, her glossed lips curved into a triumphant, porcelain smirk as she leaned her head against Preston’s shoulder.
“Seven years,” Preston repeated, his baritone booming across the silent lawn with the calibrated resonance of a courtroom litigator:
“That’s how long I waited for my first wife to give me a child, and all that time was completely wasted.”
He turned his pale blue eyes across the lawn, letting his gaze travel deliberately past four tables of banking partners until his pupils locked dead-center onto Table Nine.
Onto me.
“Luckily,” Preston continued, his lips curling into an icy sneer: “I finally found a real woman who could give me the family, the legacy, and the biological heirs a Holloway always deserved.”
