Mag-log inWe're getting dressed when the knock comes.I open the door.Vivian.She's in a silk robe, hair perfectly arranged for someone who claims to have just woken up, eyes doing a rapid sweep of the room the moment I step back. Her gaze lands on Liam — buttoning his cuffs, unhurried, in the middle of my childhood bedroom at seven-thirty on a Sunday — and something moves across her face before she locks it down."Brother-in-law." Her voice is warm enough to frost glass. "Mom made fish soup noodles. She wants you both downstairs for breakfast."Liam walks toward the door.He stops beside me."Can you—" He tips his chin toward his collar, where the top button has come loose. "I can never get that one."I turn.He's already done everything else — the shirt perfectly pressed from Secretary Fang, the jacket ready on the chair. Just the collar. Just this one button.I reach up and do it.It takes
The shirt never fully dries.I know it the moment I walk into the bathroom the next morning, still warm from sleep, and pick it up from where it ended up in the sink — crumpled and slightly damp and deeply, irreversibly wrinkled — and I stand there holding it with the specific expression of a woman reconstructing the sequence of events that led to this outcome.The sequence is: I was washing the shirt. Liam came in. The shirt went into the sink.The rest of the sequence is not relevant to the shirt."It's ruined," I say, when I walk back into the bedroom.Liam is sitting up against the headboard, the quilt pooled at his waist, watching me with the unhurried contentment of a man who slept well and is in no particular rush to begin the morning. There is something criminally unfair about how he looks right now — the morning light through the curtains, the particular dishevelment that happens when someone sleeps hard — and I hav
He is shameless.I realize it the exact moment the pain evaporates from his face and the triumphant smile takes its place — slow, deliberate, aimed directly at me — and I stand there for a full three seconds with my concern evaporating into something hotter."You faked it," I say.He stretches out on my childhood bed like he owns it."I needed to know how worried you'd get." His voice is warm. Easy. The voice of a man who has won something and is comfortable letting you see it."I nearly had a heart attack.""You went white as a sheet.""Because I thought I had—" I stop. Take a breath. "You are the most—"I step on his stomach.Not hard. Enough. He makes an extremely satisfying sound.Then I crawl back under the quilt, turn my back to him, and pull it over my head.He lifts it."Are you angry?""Go away.""You're not angry. You're embarrassed that you cared.""Go. Away."He doesn't go away, but he does, eventually, stop talking. The mattress shifts as he gets up. I hear the bathroom d
"Let me go."She doesn't scream it. She says it low and tight, pressed against the mattress with Liam's weight above her and his mouth at her throat and two weeks of distance and fury and missed meals and sleepless nights colliding in the space between them with nowhere to go."Liam—"He kisses her instead. A deep, claiming kiss that isn't asking anything, that is only saying — you are mine, you were always mine, I have been miserable without you every single day — and for a moment she goes completely still because it lands everywhere at once, through her chest and her stomach and the stupid, traitorous parts of her that missed him the way you miss sunlight in a cold house.Then she gets her head back."I will scream," she says against his mouth."Your father's house," he says. "That would be embarrassing for both of us.""I will absolutely scream.""Allie." His voice is rough. He pulls back just enough to look at her — and she sees it, sees all the things he hasn't said. Two weeks of
"That's not his shirt."Allie says it without thinking — the words just come out, automatic, the way you correct a small wrong when your brain is running on tired and you've lost the energy to calculate every sentence before it leaves your mouth.Liam goes very still."You still remember what he wears," he says. Flat. Not a question."I said the shirt isn't his. Nick doesn't wear blue dress shirts—""So you've inventoried his wardrobe.""Liam."He turns away, jaw tight, and she watches him discard the shirt back on the chair with the disgust of a man who has decided this particular piece of clothing is personally offensive to him. Which, given everything, it probably is.She grabs clothes from her closet — the same impulse she's had since she was seventeen, when this room was a refuge and the first rule was always when overwhelmed, shower — and heads for the bathroom.Sh
"If you don't believe me," Liam says, "ask him."The sentence lands like something dropped from a building.Allie looks at his face — really looks — searching for the tell that this is overprotection, irrational jealousy, a man spiraling past the evidence. But Liam Hart doesn't spiral. He doesn't say things he doesn't mean. He doesn't build accusations out of nothing.His face is completely, devastatingly serious.She thinks about Adam in the hospital — head lowered, flushed, saying the porridge was good like it cost him his whole composure. The camera sessions, how his eyes kept finding her when he wasn't monitoring them. The balcony Liam won't explain but clearly cannot unsee.He likes you. The way a man likes a woman."That's—" she starts.A knock at the door.Both of them go still.It gets louder.Liam releases a breath through his nose, crosses the room, turns the han
AllisonVivian was just fishing.Tossing bait into still waters, hoping for chaos to bite back.But what she hadn’t expected—what none of us had expected—was how fiercely Liam would defend me. Even now, I could still hear his voice echoing at the dinner table, clear and resolute: "That guy was neve
Scarlett Renwick stood off to the side, arms folded tightly beneath her chest, that signature smirk curling her lips like she was permanently entertained. “He’s in the lounge. Alone. And from what I heard,” she added, her voice dipped in amusement, “even his assistant barely made it out alive.”I d
“Oh? An actor confessed to you, and you turned him down?”“I don’t like him.”Allie could barely breathe. Liam’s gaze burned through her, dark and unreadable.He tilted his head slightly, studying her. “You’re sure?”Her heart pounded. “Yes.”Liam leaned in, his voice a whisper against her lips. “G
Julian Ford leaned back in his chair, casual as ever, with a smirk dancing on his lips. “She met you first, so I guess I have to accept my fate. But Mr. Hart, if you don’t treat your wife well, I won’t hesitate to steal her away.”Liam, standing beside me, didn’t even flinch. His voice, as cool and







