Love Like Chess

5

'From Betrayal To Bliss: Billionaire Brother Marries Sister-in-law After Groom's No Show'

Kimberly staggered, the bunch of keys in her left hand fell loudly to the clean floor. Mr. Xavier had told her everything days before now. He had told her about how he wished to marry his Brother's bride in his stead and had instructed her to prepare his newly purchased mansion in Paris for their one week honeymoon. He had told her while she was in the gardens clipping roses. He deemed her more than a priceless servant, he saw her as friend, an adviser and she had filled the position adequately all these years.

But people didn't kiss their friends under a guise, didn't let them rid them of their clothes and make mindless love to them. People didn't love their friends so desperately, so dedicatedly, so faithfully, so wholeheartedly.

But the Mr. Xavier she knew didn't do commitments, rings or prim and proper women, so she had shrugged off the idea like a bad joke. And then their night in Madrid, that unforgettable, vivid, lusty night had made it seem laughable, the fact that he would get married the very next day, so impossible.

But then Mr. Xavier was not a man to toy with words.

She had taken the first flight to France, courtesy her boss, half-heartedly, slightly scared but still convinced that he hadn't meant any of the jargons he had said.

He must have been drunk, she hoped he had been, prayed he had been.

She had concealed it for years, fought for years, hiding it like a hideous scar she could not afford to expose, until that night. Thoughts of the most mind-blowing night of her life, her first with the only man she had truly loved; which she treasured with every fiber of her being, snuck back into her thoughts.

'Don't stop... don't...oh, Cameron'

She had said that, in between the moments of sweet passion. Then and there, in the safe haven of his embrace, with the sound of his steady breathing to rock her to sleep, she knew without one doubt that she had fallen recklessly, irrevocably in love with her boss, she had craved the forbidden.

She walked out of the last door, locked it twice and found the servants idyly chatting away intently when there was work to be done. She had wanted to chastise them to get back to their work when she heard one say "and I had thought the boss loved his bachelor title".

She paused. Cameron did love his title. It had a way of making him feel above human, which was why she pitied his flings and the celebrity women that flocked around him, who felt they and just them could melt his ice cold loveless heart.

How deluding.

Cameron's heart could not be melted.

Her fingers began to tremble and her throat was dry and she suddenly felt hungry. She closed her eyes and tightened her grip around the bunch of keys in her right hand.

"What is that?" She asked, her voice a little shaky, lacking its usual command. She began to wish she had not asked, that she had instead told them to get back to their work in a strict, professional tone, not the inquisitive tone which she had used.

"Well Miss, we may need to start the preparations at once, it's already noon". Mr. Robert, the cleaner said.

"What...what preparations?" She asked. She knew what he was talking about, what he meant, where he was going and what had happened, but it would be better to pretend, it would be less painful to deny the truth, to delay it.

"The boss is married ma'am". He said while he showed her the news headlines on his dented phone.

She broke into a thousand pieces of Kimberly.

*. *. *. *. *. *

The wedding ended in an orderly fashion, though much earlier than the typical socialite wedding. Cameron had insisted on returning back to his country immediately after and as soon as possible as his loving wife had obliged with glee.

She loved him, too much; and he knew. And he feared for her, that she would get her heart broken. For he seemed to have given his to a woman he didn't not know, a woman he may never find again.

Or so he thought.