Dangerous Love: You Are My One and Only Bride novel Chapter 1657

Arianne’s thoughts were about to meander when suddenly, her phone beeped. A text.

Spam messages did not usually make rounds at midnight, so with a frown, she unlocked her phone and peeked at the message sent from an unknown number.

‘I know Mark’s with you again. He threw a big fit at me before running away. Oh, but don’t get cocky, deary; he only thinks of you when he’s in the dumps. That’s literally all this is. FYI, a man can have multiple women in his life, but he only has one mother.’

Shelly-Ann Leigh. Arianne had blacklisted that woman’s number last time, and now she had returned with a new one to torment her. Arianne was not in the mood to respond, so she simply blacklisted the new number again.

At the very least, Mark ended up on her bed. No matter how low in the dumps he was, he would never seek solace in the arms of any other woman.

That, alone, was enough of an assurance.

The next morning, Mark felt headaches assaulting him. In the midst of grogginess, he felt someone pinching his nose.

His eyes snapped open, and Smore’s adorable, round face leaped into his sight. It was enough to stave off his annoyance, and quickly, Mark scooped the boy up into his arms. “Up already, you? Are you not gonna sleep a little more, little man?”

Smore rode Mark’s back as babyish chuckles burbled out of him. “Mommy says only lazy bums wake up late! You’re a lazy bum, Daddy! Mommy told me to wake you up for breakfast.”

Mark shook his head. How did he end up here? The details were lost on him. All he remembered was that this was what he had been dreaming of for so long—of waking up to a beautiful morning like this.

As he was wont to do every time someone mentioned Shelly, Mark’s brow furrowed into a deep frown, as though someone had spat in his soup and he still had to drink it. She was someone he could not, for the life of him, become intimate with, and yet was just as impossible to remove from his life for good. He was helpless—choiceless.

“What else? I’m certain it’s not something you can’t imagine. She wants me to build a wall between the two of us so that we’ll never see each other again, and I told her ‘never in a million years’,” he began. “Ari, I was thinking… Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps I should stop honoring her whims, you know? No matter what her demands are, I don’t want to bend over backward in anguish for her anymore. I… I want to marry you again. Want you to come back to the Tremont Estate in the grandest, most official way possible. I want a wedding—the biggest, the best—and tell the whole world that you, Arianne Wynn, are my one and only wife.

“I’ve been thinking a lot on my own lately, and I’ve realized… Why try to hide something that can’t be papered over? Not being able to hide a secret is not what’s truly lamentable—it’s losing the one person you love, back when she’s right within your reach. My foster mother might have been heinous against my birth mother, but she has provided me with nothing short of motherly love. To me, my foster mother is my real mother,” he continued. “What my foster mother owed my birth mother, I’ll atone in her stead, but it shouldn’t be in this way. I’m not adverse to supporting my birth mother until she shrugs off her mortal coil, but on the condition that you don’t suffer a single wrong in the process.”

Arianne was stunned into silence. Mark’s proclamation shocked her profoundly primarily because she knew of the reason behind him enduring all of the trial thus far. Why else did he subject himself to such anguish, if not because his foster mother’s reputation depended on it!

And Arianne would always, unconditionally, support him, even if at a little cost of her happiness. But now he spoke of giving everything up—for her sake.