"#Hawthorne Family Patriarch Spotted on a Late-Night Date with A-List Actress in a Foreign Country#"
"#Wedding Bells Ringing Soon?!#"
Nowadays, the entire entertainment industry was swooning over their romance. Everyone called them a match made in heaven, but little did they know...
Simon Hawthorne was already married.
Zoe Lancaster gripped her phone tightly. Two years ago, on the very next day after they got their marriage license, Simon had flown far away to Kaelan. He hadn’t returned once, and he hadn’t called, hadn’t written, hadn’t so much as glanced in her direction.
Meanwhile, he was apparently busy enough to take an A-list actress on a late-night date halfway across the world.
Why did Simon get to live so freely while she was stuck here, rotting in place? To hell with this widow’s life!
The heavy metal music around her was deafening.
After downing several glasses of alcohol, Zoe was already dizzy and lightheaded. The dim, suggestive club lights occasionally swept across her flushed cheeks. Right now, her palms were pressed against the shoulders of a strange man in the club.
His body temperature was scorching, and his muscles felt incredibly firm under her touch. She couldn’t clearly see his face, but she could sense an overwhelming, raw masculinity radiating from his body. It completely ignited the wicked desires in her mind. Her lips parted as she dropped a bombshell.
"How much? For the whole night."
She wasn’t sure if it was just an illusion, but the surroundings seemed to fall into a dead silence for a moment, the atmosphere freezing over.
Driven by the alcohol, Zoe completely ignored these details. The shoulder muscles beneath her palms were taut and hot. Intense hormones practically washed over her through the thin fabric of his clothes. Amidst the inexplicable clamor, she heard his voice.
It was a faint, yet inexplicably dangerous and chilling tone.
"Are you sure?"
Perhaps because he had also been drinking, the man’s voice was steeped in a deep, throaty lust. Like the first handful of winter snow on a barren branch, he gave off an aloof, untouchable vibe mixed with... taboo sexual tension.
Zoe had made up her mind. Her body was limp, and she could barely stand straight. The man’s rhetorical question sparked her defiant nature. She gripped the fabric at his chest tightly and snapped, "Are you a man or not? If you can’t do it, I’ll go find someone else!"
"Heh..." An extremely cold chuckle rumbled by her ear.
For some reason, that single laugh inexplicably sent a chill down Zoe’s spine. It felt like a fragile neck being clamped between a beast’s jaws—an eerie sense of imminent danger.
She tried to sober up, squinting through the dim lighting to see his face. However, in the very next second, the man’s strong fingers wrapped around her wrist. With a tug that was neither too light nor too heavy, she tumbled into his embrace, and he effortlessly picked her up.
As her mind wandered, she vaguely heard a cold, mocking remark. "You’re quite the wild one... Zoe Lancaster."
Zoe was already under the control of alcohol, stripped of her ability to think. Yet, in her final moment of rationality, she thought, "Today is mine and Simon’s anniversary. I’m giving him a great gift—a massive pair of cuckold’s horns!"
Winter had arrived in Kingsford. Heavy snow fell that night, and the temperature plummeted by ten degrees.
Zoe, however, felt as if she had been tossed into a scorching sauna. Her entire world was shrouded in a dizzying mist that left her gasping for breath. She was repeatedly tormented at the precarious boundary between suffocation and pure ecstasy.
A layer of steam fogged the mirror. It reflected a man’s broad, beautifully muscled back. Two slender, fair hands scratched red marks across his shoulder blades. High heels dangled from pointed toes, swaying back and forth, on the verge of falling off...
Zoe was woken up by the glaring sunlight. Three seconds after opening her eyes, she bolted upright in shock. She threw off the blanket, staring at her naked body and the shocking, suggestive marks all over it. Everything screamed of what had happened last night—and just how perverted that gigolo was!
Zoe instantly regretted the absurd thing she had done yesterday. Her face paled significantly. After all, under the influence of alcohol, people were easily driven by their emotions. She had simply been infuriated by Simon’s scandalous affairs. But what if that gigolo from last night actually had some sort of disease?
Zoe glanced at the other side of the bed. It was completely empty. She had no idea where he had gone so early in the morning.
The only thing left behind was a piece of paper on the nightstand. On it was a single line of clear, forceful, and elegantly sweeping handwriting: *This is my new number, 131********.*
Zoe frowned. What was this? Did he want to hook up again? Did he not realize how much of an animal he was last night?
Zoe took a deep breath. Ignoring the discomfort in her body, she snatched the paper and casually stuffed it into her coat pocket. She quickly got dressed and left, not even bothering to put on her earrings or necklace before fleeing the scene.
To her surprise, the room the gigolo had booked yesterday was actually a BGL suite. Word had it that a single night there cost at least six figures. Was this line of work really that lucrative nowadays? How many rich sugar mommies did he have to service in one night to afford that?
The more Zoe thought about it, the more disgusted she felt. Without a second thought, she booked appointments with the gynecology and infectious disease departments at Kingsward Hospital, the best private hospital in Kingsford. Not even caring to tidy up her appearance, Zoe hailed a cab and headed straight there. She had always valued her health highly.
At ten o’clock in the morning, Kingsward Hospital was bustling with crowds.
Zoe hurried frantically between various departments for her check-ups. After a long and exhausting ordeal, she ended up squeezed into the corner of an elevator, clutching her test forms. On her phone, her best friend, Crystal Hayes, was speaking with a mix of worry and exasperation. "Zoe! I can’t believe you did something so absurd! How many men in a club are actually clean and reliable? They sleep with a different girl every single day. Who knows how many infectious diseases they might have!"
Zoe pressed her forehead against the elevator wall, nursing a headache. She felt utterly mentally and physically drained. "I just drank too much and wasn’t thinking straight. There’s no use lecturing me now. I’m just terrified about the pregnancy issue. I can’t even remember if he wore protection yesterday..."
Crystal laughed out of sheer anger. "Then you’d better pray he was a gigolo with professional ethics."
Zoe continued to bump her head against the wall. Perhaps because her body felt like it was falling apart from the hangover and the night of debauchery, her brain hadn’t completely booted up yet. She actually had the mood to crack a joke. "If I really am pregnant, do you think my husband, all the way in Kaelan, would believe that his wife managed to give him a baby without him coming home for two years?"
"What?" Crystal retorted. "Is his junk long enough to stretch right across the Pacific Ocean and deliver warmth to you?"
Zoe was speechless.
The elevator doors opened at the gynecology floor. She kept her head down and pushed her way out, only to walk straight into someone coming the other direction. The person apologized quickly and jogged off. Zoe was in no mood to dwell on such trivial matters. She rubbed her shoulder and prepared to head to the waiting area.
However, before she could even take two steps, she heard someone call out to her from behind.
"Wait."
Still suffering from her hangover, Zoe’s head was throbbing, and she couldn’t think straight. For a moment, she thought the voice sounded somewhat familiar, yet she felt a bit dazed. Exhausted, she turned around.
In the hospital corridor, there was a window directly across from her. The morning light streamed in, almost blindingly bright. She could only make out a very tall silhouette approaching.
He wore a loose, dark gray overcoat, and his straight, long legs were clad in black suit trousers. As he approached, he brought with him a crisp, cold wave of cologne with white musk base notes, cutting through the hospital’s oppressive smell of disinfectant.
It wasn’t until her eyes adjusted to the light that she finally saw who it was.
Her barely functioning brain felt as if it had been doused with ice water, shocking her entire body into a frozen stupor. Zoe almost forgot how to react, her breath caught in her throat.