My Sweet Seduction

Chapter 1 Emma’s POV Love can turn to hate much quicker than you'd believe. Yet that’s not the actual end of your feelings. That only happens the moment your love turns to apathy, which is the dangerous part. Interestingly enough, it didn’t take nearly as long as I thought it would for that to happen. I had just thought I was just being paranoid at first because of my childhood. I thought that it was just hard for me to trust anyone. Turns out my gut protected me from a threat I never saw coming. I first began to suspect that my fiancé, Brett Anderson, was cheating on me in October. He was missing every single time I tried to call him, then replying with a text saying he was in a meeting or couldn't speak on the phone. Even when we were spending time together, he was always on his phone texting. I’ve caught him smiling at his phone several times when he didn’t realize I was watching. The smile he wore was one I hadn’t seen since he started pursuing me in our junior year of college. That year had been the only time Brett had ever given me his full attention. After we graduated, he took me out once a week, but we no longer saw each other as often as we did in college. It was only after I’d started my company and had started designing the flagship store that he ended up talking me into hiring him as my CFO. It was after hiring him that I started to notice a difference in his actions. He never took me out to show me off. Choosing odd places to go out, instead of busy restaurants. It was almost as if he were embarrassed to be seen with me. Not going to lie, I'm a little curvy, a nice size twelve. Brett started trying to get me to change how I dressed first. Then he started telling me how I needed to set up my company. It was still small, but with the third location about to open in Chattanooga, it was doing very well. I had opened my first store in Atlanta, in the downtown area. Brett wanted to be on board, and he proposed to me after I hired him. I thought that we were building the company for us, for our family. I had trusted him completely at the time. I no longer trusted him. He's a smooth talker, but I knew he had someone else in his heart. The second location we built was in Marietta because my customers were begging me for a second location. They didn't want to have to drive downtown all the time to buy my cupcakes, which are our best sellers. Business was booming at both locations. I had been flying back and forth, from Atlanta to Chattanooga, because driving took way too long. Being out of town had given me an opportunity to see if Brett was cheating on me. I knew in my heart that he wasn’t going to leave quietly. In his mind, we built this company together. But I had spent over a year developing the recipes and figuring out how I wanted the flagship store to be. I knew that I needed to be prepared when I decided to approach him. He always managed to lure me back when he knew I was upset with him. He could read me like a book. A charmer who knew just how to bring me back in line. He would flirt before taking me out to a nice restaurant. He would also compliment me, but never about my appearance. It was always about how good I was at business. How I was such a great baker. How glad he was that we met. I admit I hadn’t noticed that at first. I loved how he made me feel important when we were together. I didn’t notice it sooner because he never complimented another woman around me. I thought he didn’t know how to flirt, as I was his first official girlfriend. I was patient with him because I had been learning along with him. He was my first boyfriend. I didn’t know how things were supposed to be between us. I only went by how I felt about him, and I had fallen for him hard. Brett seemed to be perfect for me, like he had been made just for me. His values were the same as mine, and we only had one argument in all our years together. It would be months later before I fully realized what a fool I’d been. I knew that, with me out of town getting our latest location up and running in November, it would provide ample opportunity to test his loyalty. I wanted the new location up and running by the first week of December. I didn't know if he was just clueless as to how to interact with me, or if I would be exposing an affair. He wouldn’t have to hide while I was out of town. I was praying that I was wrong, but I couldn’t shake the fact that something was off. I just never expected to find out just how wrong I was about him. My mother, Andrea, had divorced my father right after I was born. She had immediately moved forward with the divorce the moment she had proof he had cheated on her. My father never tried to fight for custody of me. His new wife, Joan, didn’t want me around. Her daughter, Noel, is the only daughter my father acknowledged. Dad divorced Mom and then married his pregnant secretary, Joan. Yes, my father knocked up his secretary, as cliché as that was. Every single time that he felt guilty about not having any interaction with me. He would ask to take me out to dinner, but Joan and Noel made the experience almost unbearable. I remember asking my father to take me out to dinner, just the two of us, when I was sixteen. "Why can't you accept your stepmother, Emma? She's been in your life since you were a baby. You've never tried to get along with her or Noel. Your mother has spoiled you too much, and it shows," he had answered. He never saw Joan or Noel for who they were. "You go out with them all the time. Noel has you every single day, but me asking for an hour of your attention is asking too much?" I had replied. I didn't even try to hide the disappointment that I felt that night. Noel couldn't leave things alone and tried to make me look bad in front of him, while her mother sat there like a martyr. They both wanted me to look as bad as possible in front of my father, but what they didn't realize was that night was the last straw. I finally understood that I was the daughter that he didn't want. The daughter he was secretly ashamed of, but he refused to admit it. "We go to school together, Emma. The least you could do is get to know me," Noel chose that moment to speak up, tears shining in her eyes. "You ignore me at school even when I say good morning to you. We're sisters, but you won't even acknowledge me. How do you think that makes me feel?" "You're a bully, Noel. You don't want to be my friend. You just want to make sure that Dad has a bad opinion of me. You don't want him to have anything to do with me. He always takes your side, and if that is how things are going to continue, don't bother coming to get me again. Just know that he's the only one who falls for your tricks. You are just like your mother," I had replied before I felt a stinging pain on my face. My father had slapped me, just for speaking the truth. She was a bully and just as underhanded as her deceitful mother. I stared at him in shock, as he had never put his hands on me before that night. He apologized, but only because the other diners had seen what he had done. To save face, he loudly berated me, "You cannot speak like that about your sister and your stepmother. I won't allow it." That was the last night I went out with them. Once my mother saw my face when I got home, she told him he would not be allowed to have me for any unsupervised visit. I’ve never liked Joan or her daughter, Noel. Noel was born on Christmas Eve and was almost exactly six months to the day younger than me. Finding that out had been a huge slap in the face to my mother, who had come from old money. Mom had been the one who set Dad up for success. He used her family's contacts to build up his business, as well as the finances that my mother provided. She had loved my father with her whole heart, and she wanted him to be successful. Dad had loved her, at first, until his company was successful. Then his eyes started wandering to his secretary. Mom was pregnant with me when he suddenly started working a lot of overtime. Dad didn’t even try to hide Joan’s pregnancy from her. Joan ended up rubbing it in my mother’s face. She knew my mother would never accept the fact that my father had cheated on her, and Joan refused to be Dad’s dirty little secret. Dad honestly thought that Mom would never leave him. He was wrong. Mom took the funding she had loaned him back as soon as she found out about the affair. My grandfather had never liked or trusted my father. My grandfather was the one who told Mom to make Dad sign the loan paperwork stating that he would pay it back, with interest, over a period of ten years. Mom called in the loan, despite the penalty for paying it back early. That didn’t matter to her, as it was only the interest she lost in that deal. The five million she had provided had to be paid back. It took him almost ten years to recover from having to pay that loan back early. He also lost his biggest clients because of it. During that lean time, he couldn’t give Joan the kind of life she and Noel expected. She almost left him over it. She thought everything had belonged to him when she seduced him. That was the main reason she hated my mother and me so much. She blamed us for the amount of suffering they experienced, but Joan had no one to blame but herself. It actually could have been worse. Mom could have asked for half of his company's value. She had given him two million dollars to get it up and running before Grandpa caught her. Dad had nothing when they got married. Everything he had had come from her. If she had asked for what she deserved and was willing to fight him in court, he would have been completely ruined. Dad should thank his lucky stars Mom was kind enough to just let him go. In her eyes, he was tainted, and she didn’t want him anymore. I ended up going with my gut and hiring the best private investigators in Atlanta. I paid them in advance for four months of investigation. I knew it would take a while to get to the truth, so I paid them from my personal account. I wasn’t going to allow any mistakes or Brett accidentally seeing a payment to them. I knew by the time the new location was up and running smoothly, sometime around the end of January. I would know exactly how deep his betrayal ran. I never realized I would find out even sooner.