With that, she stalked into the attached bathroom, banging the door shut after her.

—

I often get asked how I manage everything I do. How I’m a director of a company that turns over millions, while running a successful charity, while managing multiple social media accounts and maintaining a presence as an “influencer,” while also working out, eating healthy, and being so fucking perfect it makes you want to scream. And if you come up with some smart-ass comment about how it was easy for me because I have my father’s money, I’ll slap that smug grin right off your face. Sure, he helped me out at first, but how many parents help out their kids when they have money to spare? And how many of those kids built award-winning, successful charities? So what if I got dealt a good hand? People with so much more, men with so much more, have fucked it all up. But not me. I’ve managed to do it all.

And the reason for that, if you must know, is that I am able, I believe more so than the average person, to compartmentalize. I can remove myself emotionally from most situations while I search for solutions. You might say that makes me cold, but I say it makes me smart. Besides, no one would ever accuse a man of being a cold compartmentalizer. We get fed too much of that genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist bullshit. Men are allowed to fuck around, more so when they are rich. No one ever asks a man how he maintains his waistline while running a company. Men marry trophy wives all the fucking time. Why was it so wrong that I tried to seek out a trophy husband?

The only difference was that my golden trophy turned out to be cheap old brass underneath his glossy exterior, and actually had the audacity to blackmail me.

I couldn’t do anything that would mess things up for my dad. It would shatter him, and frankly, it would be shit for business. I can’t believe I didn’t have a clue though. I mean, I knew he and my mother had literally no love life. I just didn’t think . . . But, then, what did they know about me? I guess we were all in the same boat.

Maybe it would be better to just marry Spencer? I’m marrying him in Sri Lanka, after all. I could always put safety measures in place. Make sure I’m smart about where I move my money, if that’s what he was after. I’d have to keep all this bullshit about his company going belly-up and his disastrous family life under wraps, but knowing everything was out in the open now made it easier to control the narrative. If it came down to it, we could always say that Spencer liquidated his company in San Francisco to work more with the charity. That he was searching for a more meaningful life.

And then, after riding out all the publicity my Insta will get after the wedding, I could keep a low profile for a few months. I won’t even have to publicly announce the divorce for a while. This is what high-profile couples in Sri Lanka do all the time—they allow themselves to drift apart. As long as I can keep Spencer from making a stink, I should be okay. Actually, now that he’s showed his hand and I know what his real motivations are, all this should be much, much easier. If it’s money he wants to walk away, well, I happened to have a fair bit of it, even though it pains me that I’m in this position because of him. But still, I had to keep my emotions aside. Like my mother said, I got myself into this mess, I had to get myself out of it.