Chapter One - No Names

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Lover by Design is the sequel to Bride by Default and begins six months after Sienna and Adrian’s story.

While this book follows Celeste Hartwell and Michael Harbinger as the main couple, it continues the conspiracy, characters and events introduced in Bride by Default. For the best reading experience, I recommend reading Book One first.

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Celeste

His mouth was on the inside of my thigh, and I still didn’t know his name.

That was the point. The whole point.

I hadn’t come to The Veil to be courted. I didn’t want candlelight, or a man deciding I was special, or the soft violence of being chosen. For six months the world had made me a story about being left. Tonight I wanted one hour that belonged to me and to no headline.

He’d let me set every step of it. That undid me before his hands did. In the gold dark of the private room he had waited, watching me through that plain black mask, steady and unhurried, until I closed the last of the distance myself. Until I was the one who pushed him back onto the bed.

Now he was rewarding me for it.

He spread me open and took his time, slow, deliberate, learning what made me lose the rhythm of my own breathing and then doing exactly that until my fingers knotted in his hair. He didn’t rush toward anything. He read me the way I read rooms, catching every shift, every sound I tried to swallow, and he used all of it against me.

The mask covered his face from forehead to cheekbones. Mine did the same. I had no idea what colour his eyes were, what he did for a living, whether he owned the obscenely expensive watch I’d noticed downstairs or had stolen it from someone richer.

The Veil took our phones at the door. No photographs. No names. Private rooms booked through encrypted membership credentials. Half the people downstairs could probably destabilise a small country before breakfast, yet everyone had agreed to spend the evening pretending they had no surnames.

For once, mine wasn’t Hartwell.

I wasn’t the woman Adrian Swift had abandoned at the altar.

I wasn’t the woman whose sister he’d married instead.

Nobody here wanted a statement about whether Sienna and I had reconciled.

Nobody pitied me.

Most importantly, this man hadn’t asked a single question about my life.

“Tell me what you want,” he said against my skin.

I lifted my head.

“If you’re waiting for applause, I’m busy.”

“Tell me what you want.”

“You were doing perfectly well.”

He gave it to me until my spine arched off the sheets and I had to bite down on the sound.

When I couldn’t stand it any longer I pulled him up the length of my body. He let me roll him onto his back. His hands settled on my hips when I straddled him. He didn’t move me. He waited.

I lowered myself onto him. The stretch made me stop halfway. His fingers tightened once.

“You good?”

“Yes.”

I sank the rest of the way.

Very good.

I set the pace. He let me, met it stroke for stroke, and his eyes never once left my face. I rode him until the room shrank to heat and friction and the low, rough sounds he made when I moved just so.

Until pleasure made control less interesting. Then he rolled me beneath him and drove into me harder, one hand under my thigh, his mouth against mine.

“Still doing well?”

“Fuck you.”

“That’s currently happening.”

I laughed against his mouth.

Then his hand slipped between us and I stopped laughing. He found me with his thumb, and I came apart around him. My orgasm arrived hard enough to tear a sound from me I would deny producing in any court with competent legal representation.

He watched me through it.

That should have made me self-conscious. Instead, I dragged him closer.

“Your turn.”

He came seconds later, face buried against my neck.

Neither of us had a name to shout in that moment. That was the best part. Nobody was making love to or simply fucking Celeste Hartwell. Nobody was doing anything to Celeste Hartwell at all.

There was only the mask. Only me, and everything I’d walked in there to take.

Afterward we lay in the dark and promised each other nothing.

He traced one idle line down my spine. I let him. Then I got up, found my dress, and left first, because leaving first was mine too.

Out on the wet street, my phone back in my hand and my real name waiting inside it, I felt something I hadn’t touched in half a year.

Triumph.

For once, no one would turn this into a story about me.

***

The next evening I put on a silver gown and my public face and walked into the Whitmore Foundation gala to remind London I was still standing.

That was the plan. Cameras, society press, a livestream, a careful interview in which I’d be gracious and unbothered and entirely uninterested in my own scandal.

Sienna offered to come. I told her no. This one I did alone.

The interviewer had warm eyes and a cruel job. “Celeste, a lot of people have wondered how you’ve coped this year. Has public humiliation made you stronger?”

“I think it’s made me less tolerant of questions about public humiliation.”

She laughed. The room laughed. I had them. This was my comeback. Controlled. Elegant. Mine.

Then the phones started.

One, then a dozen, then a ripple of light across two hundred faces, all tilting down, all catching the same thing in the same second. I’ve spent my life reading rooms. I know the exact shape a crowd makes when it turns.

Behind the stage, the screens meant for the charity montage went black.

Then they filled with me.

Masked, yet recognisable. Unmistakably me. Bare-shouldered. A man’s hands on me in the gold dark of a room that was supposed to stay sealed forever.

You couldn’t see his face. You could see everything of mine that counted.

Someone gasped. Someone else laughed, and that was worse.

The footage cut. In its place a bank record bloomed across every screen, clean and enormous and impossible to argue with.

£250,000 paid by Vesper Holdings to Celeste Hartwell Consulting.

An account I’d forgotten I owned. A number I had never seen.

The interviewer’s warm eyes flattened into hunger. Before she could speak, a man near the front stood and shouted the question that would follow me for months.

“Celeste, were you with Sebastian Huxley last night?”

The name meant nothing to me. Someone shoved a phone into my sightline, a photograph, a silver-haired man in a tuxedo, handsome and married, smiling at some other gala on some other night.

I had never seen him before.

This was not the man from The Veil. I was certain of it the way I’m certain of my own name.

I opened my mouth to say so.

Then the screens changed one last time.

BREAKING: Vesper Holdings’ Billionaire Financier Sebastian Huxley found dead.

The room went silent. Two hundred people held a single breath.

And through that silence, unhurried, certain, two police officers began walking toward me.