LOGINEve’s POV
The seduction campaign continued for three more days.I had become shameless. Every morning I paraded around the villa in increasingly skimpy outfits. Tiny shorts and cropped tops. Bikinis that were more string than fabric. A silk robe that kept slipping off one shoulder no matter how many times I adjusted it. Devin's eyes followed me everywhere, and he thought I didn't notice, but I did. I noticed everything.I noticed the way his hands tightened on his cDevin's POV The meeting with my grandfather had gone exactly as badly as I expected. I had suspected that Victoria would be there. My grandfather never missed an opportunity to remind me of the path I had refused to take. What I had not anticipated was the surge of protectiveness I felt when Harrington started talking about annulment and settlements and Eve's expression flickered with hurt. She had handled it beautifully but I knew her well enough to see the cracks beneath the polished surface. Now she was asleep in the bedroom while I stood in the living room, staring at my phone and trying to process the latest update from Mark. Martin's legal challenge had gained traction. A board member named Sterling, a man who had resented the Lovelace family for decades due to some old business deal that had gone sour, had thrown his support behind the investigatio
Eve's POVThe honeymoon was over and it was time to face Devin's grandfather.The Cresswell estate made my family home look like a modest cottage.We drove through iron gates that must have weighed several tons each and up a gravel driveway lined with ancient oaks whose gnarled branches formed a canopy overhead, blocking out the late afternoon sun. The house itself was a stone colossus that sprawled across the landscape like a crouching beast. It had turrets. Actual turrets as if someone in the Cresswell family had looked at a medieval castle and thought, yes, that seems appropriately intimidating."Your grandfather lives in a fortress," I said."He would have preferred a volcano, but the zoning laws wouldn't allow it."I laughed, but the sound died in my throat as we pulled up to the front entrance. A butler in full formal attire opened the car door, his spine ramrod straight, his expression so carefully blank it
Eve's POVI woke on the morning of my birthday with no expectations.That was the trick to surviving birthdays. If you expected nothing, you couldn't be disappointed when nothing arrived. It was a philosophy I had developed over years of forgotten dates and half hearted gifts, a protective armor I had learned to wear before I even understood what I was protecting myself from. My father once gave me a pen set meant for his secretary, still wrapped in the wrong paper with someone else's name crossed out on the tag. Delphine used the occasion to announce her engagement to a minor prince from a country I couldn't find on a map, her diamond glittering under the chandelier while I stood in the corner with a glass of warm champagne and a smile that made my cheeks ache. After that, I stopped mentioning my birthday altogether. I let it pass quietly, a date on the calendar that required nothing from anyone.But Devin had remembered.I stood in the
Devin's POV I woke before dawn on Eve's birthday with a plan I had been refining for weeks. She wasn't big on birthdays. She had told me once, years ago, that her father forgot her sixteenth birthday entirely and Delphine had used the occasion to announce her own engagement to a minor European aristocrat. After that, Eve stopped expecting anything from anyone on the day she was born. She treated it like a regular Tuesday, ordered takeout, and refused to let me make a fuss. But this year was different. This year she was my wife, even if she didn't know how much I wished that word were real. And I was going to make this birthday one she would remember. I slipped out of bed while she was still sleeping, her dark hair spread across the pillow, her face relaxed in a way it never was when she was awake. The villa was quiet. The sea was a sheet of hammered silver in the early light. I made coffee and reviewed my checklist one more time. The flowers were arranged. I had spent an hour the
Devin’s POVI was losing my mind.Five days into the honeymoon, and I had taken more cold showers than I had in the entire previous year. Eve was everywhere either in a bikini or in a towel. When she decided to wear clothes, she would peel her dress off in the middle of the bedroom while I sat there like a stunned animal, my phone clattering to the floor because my hands had stopped working.She had to know. There was no way she didn't know. The woman was brilliant and observant and she had spent years reading people's motives. She had to see what she was doing to me.But if she knew, she wasn't letting on. She just smiled that innocent smile and asked if I was feeling okay and suggested I might need to hydrate more. As if water was going to fix the problem of my wife wandering around in lingerie that should have been classified as a weapon.Every night was the same exquisite torture. She would curl up against me in bed, her body soft and
Eve’s POVThe seduction campaign continued for three more days.I had become shameless. Every morning I paraded around the villa in increasingly skimpy outfits. Tiny shorts and cropped tops. Bikinis that were more string than fabric. A silk robe that kept slipping off one shoulder no matter how many times I adjusted it. Devin's eyes followed me everywhere, and he thought I didn't notice, but I did. I noticed everything.I noticed the way his hands tightened on his coffee cup when I walked into the kitchen in nothing but a towel, the ceramic nearly cracking under his grip. I noticed the way his jaw clenched when I leaned over him to point at something in a guidebook, giving him an unobstructed view down my top, and how he held himself so rigidly still that he barely seemed to breathe. I noticed the way he excused himself to take showers at odd hours. Late at night, when he thought I was asleep. Early in the morning, before the sun had fully risen. And once







