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2026-03-19 00:08:15
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CRAVING THE WRONG BLACKTHORNE BROTHER 78
Ella It was the way he looked at me over breakfast that gave it away.Not with warmth, not with the careful tentative thing that had been trying to grow back between us over the past week. He looked at me the way you look at a problem you have been turning over for a long time and have finally, exhaustedly, arrived at a conclusion about. I set down my tea before he said a word.“Say it,” I said.He looked up from his plate. “Say what?”“Whatever you’ve been working up to since you woke up. I can see it.”Nate put down his fork. He was quiet for a moment, and it wasn’t the deliberating kind of quiet. The deliberating had already happened, probably before he came downstairs, probably before he slept. He had made his decision and now he was just finding the door to walk through.“I need space,” he said.The words were simple. Stripped of everything except their meaning.I looked at him across the table. “Space.”“I thought I could do this.” His eyes met mine, and the worst part was the
CRAVING THE WRONG BLACKTHORNE BROTHER 77
Underneath the grief and the guilt and the constant low ache of Levi’s absence, I felt it. Warm and tentative and real. I reached across the table. My hand covered his. He turned his hand over and held mine, his thumb moving across my knuckles in the slow, absentminded rhythm of someone who doesn’t realize they’re doing it. Muscle memory. Something his body did without consulting the part of him still keeping score. I looked at our hands and let myself feel that too, the grief and this, both at once, coexisting the way they’d been coexisting in me for months without my permission. “Ella.” His thumb had gone still. “Whose baby is it.” Not a question. Seven days of building to it and it came out flat and final, and I felt it hit the soft place where the hope had just been sitting. I didn’t let go of his hand. “I don’t know,” I said. He looked at me. All the way at me, the phone forgotten, the carefully maintained distance of seven days collapsing into something raw. “You don’
CRAVING THE WRONG BLACKTHORNE BROTHER 76
I kept reaching for my phone.That was the embarrassing thing, the thing I couldn’t make myself stop doing. I would be in the middle of something eating, or trying to, or standing at the window watching the grounds go about their indifferent morning business and my hand would move toward my phone with the muscle memory of someone who has a person to check on. Someone to send a message to that said are you okay or where are you or just his name, just Levi, just the proof that there was still a thread connecting wherever he was to wherever I was.Then I would remember.I had no number for him. He had left before dawn without leaving one. And even if I had it, Nate’s estate had eyes everywhere, and I had already done enough damage with the things I’d done when I thought no one was watching.So I would put the phone down.And then twenty minutes later I would reach for it again.The silence between Nate and me started three days after the morning he’d held me and said mine.Not loudly, i
CRAVING THE WRONG BLACKTHORNE BROTHER 75
He stood at the window for a long time.I sat in the chair and watched his back and let the silence be what it was. I had learned, in the months of being married to this man, that there were different kinds of Nate silences. There was the silence he used as a weapon, deliberate, pressurized, designed to make the other person fill it with something they hadn't meant to say. There was the silence of him thinking, which had a particular quality of aliveness to it, like standing near something generating heat. And then there was this kind. The kind that happened to him. The kind that meant something had landed too deep for the usual machinery to process and he was simply standing inside it, waiting to find out what he thought.I did not rush him.Outside the window, the gardener had finished his pass along the lower path and moved on to somewhere else. The garden sat empty now in the flat morning light, dew still on the grass, everything very still. A perfectly ordinary Tuesday that had s
CRAVING THE WRONG BLACKTHORNE BROTHER 74
He was in his study when I found him. Not the study from last night — that room I couldn’t face yet, with its particular memories of blood and raised voices and a door closing. The smaller one on the second floor where he worked when he didn’t want to be found. I had only been in it twice. Both times because he’d forgotten I knew where it was. The door was open. He sat at the desk with his back to me, his jacket gone, his sleeves rolled to the elbows, surrounded by paperwork he was very deliberately not reading. His pen was in his hand but it hadn’t moved. I could tell by the stillness of his shoulders that he’d heard me in the corridor, that he knew exactly who was standing in his doorway. He didn’t turn around. I came in anyway. “You should be resting,” he said. “I’ve been unconscious for six hours.” “That’s not the same thing as resting.” I crossed to the chair across from his desk and sat down. He still hadn’t turned around. His pen made one small mark on the paper in fron
CRAVING THE WRONG BLACKTHORNE BROTHER 73
The ceiling was wrong.That was my first thought — not where am I or what happened but simply that the ceiling was wrong, too high and too white, and the light coming through the curtains had the particular flatness of mid-morning rather than the deep amber of the soiree. My body felt like something that had been taken apart and reassembled slightly incorrectly, every joint a degree off from where it should be.I turned my head.Dr. Hayes sat in the chair beside the bed, writing in her chart. She looked up the moment I moved, with the alertness of someone who had been waiting for exactly that.“There you are,” she said quietly.I opened my mouth. My throat felt like gravel. “What—”“You fainted. Exhaustion, dehydration, low blood sugar.” She set the chart down. “You’ve been unconscious for about six hours.”Six hours.I pushed myself upright slowly, taking inventory. I was in one of the medical wing guest rooms — not Levi’s room, a different one, smaller, with a window that looked out
CRAVING THE WRONG BLACKTHORNE BROTHER Chapter Thirteen: The Consummating
ELLANate’s bedroom was exactly what I expected. Massive. Dark. A bed that looked like it belonged in a castle. Black sheets, heavy furniture, floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the grounds.The door slammed shut behind us.I barely had time to breathe before he had me against the wall, his body
Last Updated : 2026-03-18CRAVING THE WRONG BLACKTHORNE BROTHER Chapter Eighteen: The Kitchen
I couldn’t sleep.Three nights since the construction site. Three nights of lying awake replaying the fall. Isabella’s hands. The ground disappearing. The terror.And Levi’s hands catching me.I threw off the covers and padded downstairs in bare feet. The house was silent. Nate would be in his stud
Last Updated : 2026-03-19CRAVING THE WRONG BLACKTHORNE BROTHER Chapter Twelve: The Aftermath
ELLALevi pulled out so fast I nearly fell over.One second he was inside me, and the next he’d tucked himself away, yanked my dress down, and put half the balcony between us. All before I could even process what was happening.The door swung open.Nate stood there, backlit from inside, those pale
Last Updated : 2026-03-18CRAVING THE WRONG BLACKTHORNE BROTHER CHAPTER FIFTEEN: THE BUSINESS TRIP (PART 2)
I made it to the suite, into my bedroom, before the tears came.I hated this. Hated him. Hated myself for caring what he thought, for wanting something from him he clearly couldn’t give.The door to my room slammed open.Nate stood there, his control completely gone. His tie was loose, his hair dis
Last Updated : 2026-03-18
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