“Now you listen.” His voice was evil, but his face was the picture of a pleasant, devoted fiancé. What a fucking sociopath. “You will marry me, like we planned. You will forgive me for hiding a few details of my past. Your father accepted my reasons, and they should be enough for you.”

I snorted.

“You have some nerve—”

“If you think I’ve spent my time in and out of Colombo just helping you out with your charity, well, that’s sweet. But I’m no idiot, Kaavi. Do you think your father is the only one who runs background checks?”

I laughed.

“What do you mean? You ran a background check on me? I don’t have a fucking thing to hide except that my engagement is a goddamned sham.”

“Not on you, Kaavi. I just happened to stumble onto something very interesting about your father.”

I was caught off guard for a moment.

“On my dad?”

“Yes. I don’t think he ever intended on me seeing it. I’d just dropped by his office quite late and unannounced one day when I caught wind of it at first. And then a little more digging and, well, let’s just say that no one likes to be caught with their pants down.”

“Oh please, Spencer.” I rolled my eyes. “If this is about some woman or the other that he’s been with over the years, or, well, even right now, it’s really no big deal.” And I was right. You didn’t get to be where we were without some rumors flying around. I’d heard it all—that Nadia was the love child my father had with a mistress, that my mother had a lover that my father had killed, whatever you could come up with, the gossips had been there before. I steeled myself.

“This is Colombo—nearly every man in my father’s position has a mistress. If you’ve got information about some woman—”

“It’s not a woman, Kaavi. It’s a man.”

I choked.

“You’re bullshitting me.” There was no fucking way.

“I don’t bullshit, Kaavi. You should know that. Not when the stakes are so high.” He pulled out his phone, tapped around, and showed me the screen. It was an image of my father with another man who looked familiar. I think I had seen him before, maybe it was at the office? Yes, it struck me. The interior designer. My father had introduced him to me the other day.

But regardless of who the man was, this was a picture my father would never want getting out. One that could destroy him in a place like Colombo. His reputation, my mother’s, my sisters’, and most of all my own will be dragged through the mud. And this would stick. He’d struggle to live this one down.

“This won’t fly, Spencer, you know that, don’t you? This is Colombo, not the US. We have connections here. Hell, we’re fucking royalty here. You think that you, a nobody who’s not even from here, can just waltz in and threaten us? You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”