Eight years ago, at his coming-of-age party, he'd gotten drunk and punched a classmate who was pressuring me to drink and making crude jokes at my expense.
Now the person on the receiving end of that hateful glare was me.
I was used to it by now.
We'd grown up together for twelve years. He'd always known he was supposed to marry me. But after he took that bet with his friends—lived as a nobody, fell in love with the tough, kindhearted Alice Frost—and his mother used their family's expectations to force them apart, everything changed.
He was convinced I'd poisoned his mother's mind. That I was the reason he couldn't be with the woman he loved. His contempt for me turned savage.
Ruining my family wasn't enough to satisfy him. At every single step of the wedding preparations—dress fittings, guest lists—he found ways to humiliate me. Small things, like refusing to look at me. Big things, like showing up with a different woman on his arm and getting handsy with her right in front of everyone.