Her mother's lover

SCARLETT POV

I, Scarlett Hilary, never imagined betrayal could wear the face of the woman who gave me life. My mother, Maria, once draped in black mourning for my father, now wears a white lace as though grief can be erased with vows spoken too soon. She calls it love. I call it treachery.

And him-Damian. The man she chose. The man who stood beside her at the altar while the earth above my father's grave was still fresh. He is not my father. But he is everything my father wasn't . Hard muscle, rough edges, eyes that burn with secrets, a very huge visible cucumber and a presence that unsettles me more than I dare admit. I tell myself I hate him. I tell myself I hate her more. But my body betrays me every time he looks at me, every time his voice curls around my name, every time his touch lingers in the air even when he hasn't touched me at all.

I am caught between mourning and desire, between disgust and hunger. Maria (my mother) sees only her second chance at happiness. But me? I see danger. I see temptation. I see the one man I should never want becoming the only man I can't stop thinking about.

The scent of lilies still clung to the black dress I hadn't taken off since the funeral. Maybe that was why the world felt so unreal, as if the mourning wasn't done, as if the dirt covering my father's coffin wasn't still fresh under my fingernails.

Two weeks. That was all my mother needed to move on. Two weeks since I cried over my father's grave, and now I was standing in a hotel garden watching her in white lace, smiling like a bride should never smile so soon after burying her husband. Sometimes something in me always lingers to me that my mother is responsible for my father's death. But I don't have enough evidence to prove that.

I hated her for it.

I hated the way she held onto his arm-his arm, the stranger who had suddenly walked into our lives and taken the place my father should have occupied.

Her lover.

My gaze, though, betrayed me. It always betrayed me.

Because even as I told myself I despised my mother for marrying him, I couldn't stop staring at him.

He was nothing like my father. My father had been slim, quiet, a man whose presence filled a room because of his calm intelligence. But him oh my Gods my mother's new man was carved out of stone and sin. Broad shoulders stretching the fabric of his white shirt, veins snaking down tattooed forearms, and trousers that clung indecently to the outline of his thighs.

I couldn't look away.

"Scarlett," my mother hissed, her whisper sharp as a knife. "Stop frowning. Smile for me, just for today."

Today. As if this wasn't a mockery of everything we had lost.

I forced a curl of my lips,