Chapter 2 - The Roar of a Protective Father
Fifty yards away near the grand stone fountain, forty-nine-year-old Marcus turned sharply at the sound of his daughter’s muffled scream.
Tall, broad-shouldered, and impeccably tailored in a bespoke black tuxedo, the billionaire groom possessed the instincts of a former military officer who feared nothing.
The split second his dark eyes locked onto his bride violently shoving his daughter into the shattered cake, something primal ignited within his chest.
Without uttering a word of explanation to the dignitaries surrounding him, Marcus broke into an all-out sprint across the emerald lawn.
His polished dress shoes tore through the grass as his jaw clenched into a block of iron.
The sheer kinetic force of his approach made guests scramble backward out of his path like fallen leaves before a hurricane.
Victoria was still screaming down at the weeping girl when Marcus crossed the final ten feet in a single explosive stride.
His large, calloused hand clamped around Victoria’s bridal wrist like a hydraulic steel vice.
With an authoritative jerk of his forearm, Marcus ripped Victoria’s fingers entirely away from Maya’s hair before she could do any further harm.
The blonde bride gasped sharply in shock, stumbling backward on her high heels as the sudden counter-force dislodged her grip.
Marcus instantly dropped to one knee, wrapping his left arm around his trembling daughter to support her failing weight.
"I’ve got you, baby, I’ve got you," he whispered in a low, fierce murmur that cut straight through Maya’s mounting hysteria.
Gently and deliberately, he lifted Maya’s frosting-covered face away from the ruined silver platter.
Maya clung to the lapels of his black tuxedo with desperate strength, burying her sticky, sobbing face against his broad chest.
Thick streaks of white frosting smeared across his crisp silk shirt and diamond cufflinks, but Marcus did not care in the slightest.
He rose to his full six-foot-two height, pulling his daughter completely behind his broad back and shielding her from the entire crowd.
His dark eyes swept across the courtyard until they locked onto Victoria with a look of absolute, unadulterated fury.
The bride rubbed her reddened wrist, her face flushed with indignant rage that her groom dared touch her so roughly.
Before she could open her mouth to spin a lie, Marcus unleashed a roar that shook the heavy crystal chandeliers suspended from the terrace pergola.
"Get your filthy hands off my daughter!" his thunderous voice boomed, reverberating against the mansion’s limestone walls.
The silence that followed was so suffocating that the distant chirp of summer birds sounded like gunshots.
Victoria flinched visibly beneath the sheer magnitude of his wrath, taking an involuntary half-step backward against the terrace balustrade.
Yet her arrogance quickly overtook her fear, her golden eyebrows knotting in bitter defiance before the assembled guests.
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Maya peeked out from behind her father’s shoulder, tears cutting clean paths through the white paste caked over her cheeks.
Marcus stood like an impenetrable fortress between his broken child and the woman he had vowed to cherish only twenty minutes earlier.
