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Chapter 84
publish date:
2026-09-15 14:10:44
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Married to the Wrong Billionaire Chapter 130
"Fourteen," Caiden said, from the top of the stairs."I told you," said Catherine, in the doorway below.The girl on the hostel's front desk hadn't asked many questions. Nineteen, a ring through one eyebrow, a chewed biro. Caiden had said, "My mother lived here in 2001," and she'd said, "I've lived here since Tuesday," and waved us through.He hadn't asked Catherine to stay. In the garden on Monday he'd held out the green book and said, "Saturday. Come to York with me." She'd looked at the suitcase for forty seconds. Then she'd carried it back up the studio steps herself.The stairwell smelled of wet plaster, floor polish, somebody's toast. A skylight dripped onto the fourth tread. Caiden sat down on the top step with the sketchbook on his knee. I climbed after him and took the step two below, level with his shoes.He drew. Graphite, a small dry scratch. He bit the inside of his cheek, the way he did when a line wouldn't behave. Fourteen treads seen from the top, falling away into a s
Married to the Wrong Billionaire Chapter 129
"Ask me," Caiden said.Past midnight, Sunday. He sat on the bedroom carpet with his back against the mattress and his knees drawn up, a man built like a doorway, folded into a corner. I'd carried the notebook in out of habit. I put it face down on the rug."Ask you what?""What you ask them."So I sat across from him, wool pile prickling under my palms, and used the sentence I'd used on forty strangers and one dying woman."Tell me about the last room that got it wrong.""The stairs."He'd been waiting three days to be asked. "Third from the bottom. A brass rod holds the runner down and it's loose on the left, so it clicks if you put weight there. I knew that. I stood in the dark for ten minutes with everything on my right foot." His eyes weren't on me. "From the third stair you can see the whole hall. Letterbox, coats, front door. The banister hides you. It's the best room in the house." His hand turned over on his knee. "I stood in it for twenty-five years.""What would the right ro
Married to the Wrong Billionaire Chapter 128
Thirty yards. That was the distance I settled on, somewhere between obeying him and not.He walked fast, hands in his pockets, past the allotments and a shuttered pub and an underpass that smelled of wet concrete and old chip fat. I stayed behind. He never looked back once, which meant he knew precisely where I was.The bakery sat on the corner before the station, window steamed white from inside, doughnuts in rows like a small sugared army. A bell rang over the door when he went in. Of course it did.He paid with a note and left the change. The woman behind the counter handed over a paper bag and he held it a second longer than the weight justified.Then he sat on the low wall outside and opened it, and the smell reached me across the pavement: hot oil, burnt sugar, cheap jam. It went straight through my stomach."Thirty yards," he said, not looking up. "I counted.""You said don't follow.""I said don't follow *me*." He bit into a doughnut. Jam welled out, orange-gold, and ran over
Married to the Wrong Billionaire Chapter 127
"You did ask," Eleanor said. "I said yes. Then a girl sat on my floor with a notebook, and I heard what I'd been doing to every one of you for fifty years."Catherine's hands pressed flatter against the cloth.Eleanor turned her chair a quarter-turn, soup forgotten, until she faced her grandson across the corner of the table. "Caiden. I'm asking, not telling. You may say no. I'll take it with me, which is convenient, since I'm going."Nobody laughed. Steam still lifted from five bowls, tomato and garlic and the something underneath. When Victor breathed, Arthur's jacket gave off cedar.Caiden looked at me instead of her."You know.""Since Monday.""And you waited.""You told me not to be gentle." My voice came out steadier than my knee under his hand. "I didn't know another way to wait."He held that a moment. Then, to Victor, without turning his head: "Do you want me to know?""Yes.""Say it," Caiden told his grandmother.She said it the way she'd set down plates."April, 2001. A Tu
Married to the Wrong Billionaire Chapter 126
"You'll take sugar," Eleanor told the officer.Not a question. The man in the tie that had given up looked at the cup, then at his colleague, then took it. Two officers, one pot, and my husband's grandmother pouring like a woman who had never been escorted anywhere by anyone. They'd come through the front door at two with Victor between them.In Arthur's suit.Charcoal, double-breasted, fourteen years in a wardrobe. Eleanor had sent it to Hertfordshire in a plastic bag with a note I would never see. It fit him across the shoulders and not the stomach, and it smelled of dry-cleaner's plastic and cedar and, under both, the institutional soap of the place he'd come from. He stood in the hall like a man at the wrong funeral.Eleanor looked at the lapel for a long time. Smoothed it with two fingers."He wore it worse," she said.Victor's throat moved. That was all either of them gave.Beside me Caiden hadn't spoken since the car. At the door I'd asked if he was sure, and he'd said, "No," a
Married to the Wrong Billionaire Chapter 125
"Carbolic," Caiden said.One word, from the kitchen doorway, keys still in his hand. I was at the stove with my back to him and a pan of onions I wasn't watching. I'd meant to shower. I'd meant to be scrubbed and smelling of nothing by six, and he'd come home at five forty, the way he'd been coming home all month.The smell had gone into the knit of my jumper and the roots of my hair. Floor polish. Boiled cabbage. Hand sanitizer. I'd been breathing it for four hours without noticing, the way you stop smelling your own flat."Floor polish," he said, more quietly. "Cabbage."I turned the heat down. The onions hissed and settled.I could have said the pharmacy. Mara's cleaning rota. It would have taken one breath, and the lie was already in my mouth, cool and shaped like a coin."Yes," I said.His keys went down on the counter, carefully, so they wouldn't ring."In the bath, I asked if there was anything else I should be asking.""I said no. That was a lie." It had been easy. That was wh
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