Chapter 206 I’m Disgusted

Chapter 206 I’m Disgusted
Chapter 206: I'm Disgusted 

Lizzie 

Reese had been gone too long. It felt like days. 

I knew the conversation with Ramsey mattered. I understood why he had left the room with that tension in his shoulders. 

None of that stopped the restless, irrational ache that kept circling under my ribs. 

Before the manor, his attention had belonged entirely to me. His wife. Now there were brothers and sisters and entire wings of family crap pulling at him, and I was left pacing the same stretch of floor like a wife whose husband was at war. 

It was selfish. I knew that too. Knowing it did not make the loneliness quieter. 

I was selfish with Reese. I knew that as well. He's my husband. He belonged to me first. Everyone else should come second. 

I walked from the window to the bed and back again, inventing and discarding excuses to barge into Ramsey’s room. 

They wouldn’t mind, would they? I could claim I needed water. Or that I had heard something strange. Or that I simply missed my husband’s face and was done pretending otherwise.

I had just decided to stop being reasonable when the door opened.

One look at him and the half-formed joke died in my throat.

Reese looked furious in a way I had only seen once before. His eyes moved over the room like he was cataloguing threats. The air around him felt tense. Something was very wrong. 

“You’re back,” I said, trying for lightness and missing. “I was about to come find you.”

He didn’t answer. He walked straight to the vase on the table, lifted it, and began examining it with a focus that made my skin prickle. 

Flowers came out one by one. He turned the glass in his hands, checked the base, the water, the stems. Everything. 

“Reese… is something wrong?” I kept my voice careful. The last thing I wanted was to sound like another problem he had to manage. “What’s going on?”

Still nothing. He carried the vase into the bathroom. When he came out, the water was gone and the flowers had been discarded. He went to the open window without a word and threw the empty vase into the dark.

The sound of it shattering on the ground below was so loud I could swear the entire manor heard it.

I stayed where I was, hands curled at my sides, and waited. Pushing him never worked when he looked like this. I already learnt that the hard way. 

He would speak when the worst of whatever was inside him had somewhere to go.

Only when he finished staring down at the broken glass did he turn and finally see me.

Then he was across the room, pulling me into him hard enough that the breath left my lungs. One hand cupped the back of my head, protective and almost rough with urgency.

“I’m sorry, baby.” His mouth pressed to my hair. “This is so fucking messed up.”

I held on. Questions crowded my tongue and I swallowed them. He would tell me when he was ready. When it was easy for him. 

In the meantime I pressed my cheek to his chest and listened to the hard, elevated rhythm of his heart. “I love you,” I said.

“I love you too.”

I tipped my face up fiercely with the need to say it again. “I love you more than anything. I love you so much, Reese.”

Something in his expression softened. He stroked my hair once, then settled his fingers under my chin and kissed me. It was slow, careful and reverent. When he drew back, his hand stayed, keeping my eyes on his. 

I rubbed my palm along his arm. “You looked troubled when you came in. What’s bothering you?”

The softness vanished.

“There isn’t an easy way to say this.” He shook his head once. “Randall put a camera in our bedroom. He watched us. He’s been watching us the same way he’s been watching Sav and Roman.”

Time did something strange.

The words reached me, but the meaning arrived in meaningless, jagged pieces. Every private moment we had shared inside these walls rearranged itself behind my eyes. 

The way he had touched me. The sounds I had made intimately thinking we had our privacy. The ordinary, sacred stupidity of believing a locked door meant anything in this house.

A sob tore out of me before I understood I was crying.

Reese looked briefly startled, then pulled me back against him. “You’re crying.” The observation sounded almost helpless. “Baby, stop—”

I couldn’t. That was the entire problem. 

The tears kept coming as if some internal switch had broken and no longer remembered how to turn off. My chest hitched. 

My face was wet and I kept wiping at it only for new tears to replace the old ones. My heart was racing hard enough that I could feel it in my throat.

“I don’t know why they won’t stop,” I managed.

The frustration only made it worse. I was angry—hot, skin-crawling, violated angry—and somehow my body had decided the correct response was this helpless, streaming grief. 

I felt preyed upon. I felt exposed in a way that made my stomach turn. Reese was the only one who had permission to see me that way. Not Randall. Not that creepy bastard. 

I felt like every inch of skin my husband had ever kissed in this room now belonged to an audience I had never consented to.

Reese lifted me without ceremony and carried me to the bed. He sat with his back against the headboard and pulled me into his lap, one hand steady between my shoulder blades, the other stroking my hair while I shook apart.

“I’m sorry,” I choked out, furious at myself and at Randall and at the entire cursed manor. “My hormones are completely insane right now. I swear I don’t know why I'm crying. I feel more angry than sad. But it still hurts. My skin is crawling. I’m disgusted, Reese.” 

“He will not get away with it.” Reese’s voice was low. He thumbed tears from my cheeks only for more to follow. “I will make sure Randall pays for every second of this. I swear it.” 

The anger in me spiked sideways into panic.

“What if he has copies?” The words tumbled out too fast. “What if he’s shown them to people? What if your father is involved? What if Reginald ordered it so he would have something to hold over us later? It makes sense, Reese. Think about it. Both of them are sick. Reginald lives for having people by the throat.”

“It tracks,” he said quietly. His hand kept moving up and down my spine, absent and soothing, while his mind clearly raced ahead of the conversation.

“Bella is part of it.” I said, completely convinced at the moment. “I know she is. The flowers. The timing. The way she looks at this room.”

“Definitely,” he agreed, still half elsewhere.

Then his other hand slid from my shoulder, down my side, and settled over the soft curve of my stomach, touching me there. 

I immediately felt self-conscious. My body didn't look its best now. Especially my belly. 

I tensed instantly and tried to pull the muscle tight, to make myself smaller, flatter, less noticeable. The bloating had been constant for days—an unwelcome, persistent reminder that my body was doing things I hadn’t authorized nor understood.

Reese felt the attempt to suck my belly in immediately. “Don’t.”

I let the tension go, cheeks burning. “It’s the implant. It’s been wrecking my hormones. The bloating is just—” 

He didn’t let me finish the insecure spiral.

“I know this might sound stupid. I know I’m a man and I don’t get the half of what your body is doing. I know I could be completely wrong. I know there is no way this could be fucking possible—”

“Get to the point, Reese.”

The snap in my voice surprised even me. My heart was trying to climb out of my chest. Nervous energy crackled under my skin with nowhere to go. 

One second I had been drowning in violation and tears. The next I was bracing for a sentence I somehow already feared. I knew what was coming.

He looked at me with an expression I couldn’t quite name. Then he voiced out my biggest fear. 

“I think you need to take a pregnancy test.”