Startseite / Romance / After Midnight With Him / Chapter One Hundred: The Secret

Teilen

Chapter One Hundred: The Secret

last update Veröffentlichungsdatum: 04.09.2026 14:15:43

Damien’s POV

I was still carrying the unfinished look on Sophia’s face when the knock came.

She was standing near the window of my office, arms tight around herself, the words she had started to say still hanging unfinished between us. Legal had already burned twenty minutes of my attention on Isabella’s latest press move, and all I wanted was to close the door again and let her finish whatever she had come here to tell me. The second knock was sharper than the first.

I opened the door.

One of
Lies dieses Buch weiterhin kostenlos
Code scannen, um die App herunterzuladen
Gesperrtes Kapitel

Aktuellstes Kapitel

  • After Midnight With Him     Chapter One Hundred Twenty: The Family He Never Expected

    Damien’s POVThe celebration ran long after the formal photographs ended.Music carried through the main hall and out onto the terraces. Glasses clinked. People who had spent years watching me build walls around my private life now drank to the fact that one of them had finally come down. I moved through it with Sophia’s hand in mine whenever the room allowed, the new band on her finger catching light every time she turned.My father found us near the edge of the dance floor a little after ten, flushed with the kind of open pleasure I still had not fully adjusted to seeing on him.“I’ve already told three people about the baby,” he said, as if confessing a minor crime. “Possibly four. If anyone from the old board looks scandalized, that is their problem.”Sophia laughed. “You’re going to spoil this child before it arrives.”“That is the idea.” He took her free hand briefly between both of his. “I waited long enough for a night like this. I intend to enjoy every excessive minute of it.

  • After Midnight With Him    Chapter One Hundred Nineteen: Mrs. Blackwood

    Damien’s POVI arrived at the altar before the music changed and realized I had no useful thoughts left.The room was full in a way that should have registered as strategy—board members, family names, people whose presence meant the city’s most careful eyes were on us. I barely saw them. Austin stood a step behind me saying something under his breath about breathing. My father sat in the front with a composed face and eyes that kept shining whenever he forgot to control them. Beyond the windows the late light was clean and pale. None of it held my attention for more than a second.I was waiting for her.When the music finally shifted, the room rose in one soft motion. I turned toward the end of the aisle and felt everything else fall out of focus.Sophia stood there with Eleanor at her side, one hand resting in the careful loop of her friend’s arm, the other lightly against the curve of her stomach. The dress was simple enough to belong to her and formal enough for every person watchi

  • After Midnight With Him    Chapter One Hundred Eighteen: Damien’s Father Comes Home

    Damien’s POVHe arrived two days before the wedding, earlier than expected and without the usual trail of assistants.I met him at the private entrance of the house myself. For a second, standing in the doorway, he looked exactly as he always had—composed, silver at the temples, the same assessing stillness that used to make rooms quiet when he entered them. Then his eyes moved past me into the hall, as if already searching for proof that this was real, and something in his face loosened.“You look tired,” he said.“I’m getting married,” I answered. “Tired is the baseline.”A short breath of amusement moved through him. He stepped inside, handed his coat off without ceremony, and studied me the way he used to study balance sheets—looking for the underlying position, not the presentation. Whatever he found seemed to satisfy him more than I expected.“I didn’t think I would see this,” he said.“The wedding?”“Any of it.” He set his case down by the wall. “After everything that went wron

  • After Midnight With Him    Chapter One Hundred Seventeen: The Wedding Everyone Wanted to See

    Sophia’s POVI thought we had agreed on quiet.Somewhere between the private yes and the first real planning meeting, quiet left the building. What replaced it was a machine with taste, money, and too many opinions. By the end of the first week the guest list had tripled. By the end of the second it had grown into something with gravity of its own—business leaders who never attended anything personal, relatives Damien hadn’t spoken to in years, a handful of public faces whose presence would be read as endorsement, and enough powerful family names to make the security plan look like a diplomatic event.“This is not what we talked about,” I said, staring at the revised list on the tablet.Austin didn’t even pretend to look guilty. “You and Damien talked about quiet. The city heard ‘Blackwood wedding’ and decided quiet was adorable but irrelevant. Half these people would take an exclusion as a permanent insult.”Damien stood at the window with his hands in his pockets. “We can still cut

  • After Midnight With Him    Chapter One Hundred Sixteen: The Proposal Again

    Sophia’s POVHe didn’t do it in a restaurant or under borrowed lights.Three days after I told him yes on the balcony, Damien took me back to the quiet house outside the city—the one with the trees and the long windows and no staff waiting to overhear. The place where he had first stopped performing long enough for me to see him clearly. We walked through the door into low evening light and the kind of silence that felt intentional instead of empty.“I have something for you,” he said.My heart kicked once, hard. I already knew what this was. We had already chosen each other. Still, the formality of the moment settled over me with a weight the temporary ring had never carried.He didn’t drop to one knee like a man copying a scene. He stood in front of me, close enough that I could see the nerves under the composure, and took a small box from his pocket. When he opened it, the ring inside was nothing like the stand-in I had been wearing for public rooms. Simpler. Cleaner. Chosen for me

  • After Midnight With Him    Chapter One Hundred Fifteen: One Decision

    Sophia’s POVThe house was quiet in the way it only got after something large had finally ended.No more court schedules. No more statements waiting for approval. No more bracing for Isabella’s next move. The verdict had settled. The cameras had eventually moved on to other people’s disasters. In the space that remained, Damien and I were still learning how to stand without an emergency pressing us together.He asked me to sit with him on the balcony that evening. The city was a spread of ordinary lights under a dark sky. I lowered myself into the chair beside his, one hand resting against the curve of my stomach out of habit more than discomfort. He watched the gesture with an expression I still hadn’t fully gotten used to—soft, focused, permanently changed.For a while neither of us spoke.Then he said, “I don’t want another arrangement.”I turned my head. “What do you mean?”“I don’t want another engagement that exists for a room, or a headline, or a temporary truce with the world.

Weitere Kapitel
Entdecke und lies gute Romane kostenlos
Kostenloser Zugriff auf zahlreiche Romane in der GoodNovel-App. Lade deine Lieblingsbücher herunter und lies jederzeit und überall.
Bücher in der App kostenlos lesen
CODE SCANNEN, UM IN DER APP ZU LESEN
DMCA.com Protection Status