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Chapter 25 - Our First Kiss
publish date:
2026-03-12 01:54:24
Latest chapter
The Billionaire’s Debt Bride Chapter 100 — What Gregory Left
Lucien POVThe call comes on a Wednesday, mid-morning, while I'm in a meeting about quarterly numbers, and the number on my phone is the estate's landline — the one no one uses anymore — and I know before I answer it.My father has a heart episode on a Wednesday.Not fatal, the doctor tells me on the way there, but significant — enough to keep him four days, enough to attach monitors and reduce a man who has controlled every room he's ever walked into to a hospital gown and a bed he can't leave without approval.I sit with him the first day through eight hours of tests and the particular hell of watching someone do a bad job of being helpless. My father doesn't do helpless. He does it badly, which is somehow worse than if he were dramatic about it — he's just quiet and compliant in a way that is more alarming than any amount of noise would be."You can go home," he says, on the second day."I know," I say."You have work," he says."Adrian has it," I say.He looks at me with an expres
The Billionaire’s Debt Bride Chapter 100 — Diana's Day
Mara POVThe message reads: Hearing moved up. Decision tomorrow. You should know.Lucien has read the same message on his own phone and is looking at me with a question in his face that is also already an answer."Tomorrow," I say."Tomorrow," he confirms.He puts his phone away and holds out his hand again, and I take it, because tonight is tonight, and tomorrow is tomorrow, and we have learned —slowly, at great cost — the difference.******She comes out of the examination room at two fourteen on a Tuesday afternoon, and before she even closes the door behind her, her face is doing the thing — the thing Diana's face does when she's won something she worked very hard for and is trying to be professional about how much she cares.The hallway outside the examination room holds: me, Lucien, my father, my mother with her hands clasped, Adrian, and Helena, who was not technically invited but arrived anyway with a card that said simply: Of course I'm here.Diana looks at all of us and says
The Billionaire’s Debt Bride Chapter 99 — The Gala
Mara POVThe room looks exactly the same and nothing like I remember.Same high ceilings, same long windows, same view of the city going gold in the dark. But I'm standing on the host side of the committee table now, and I'm wearing a dress I chose for myself, and there's no tray in my hands, and Lucien is somewhere across the room talking to the foundation director and occasionally glancing over to find me in the crowd."You're doing the thing," Diana says, appearing at my elbow with two glasses of champagne."What thing?""The thing where you look at a room like you're trying to remember what it was before it was this," she says. She hands me a glass. "Stop. Be here.""I am here," I say."Be more here," she says.The evening moves the way these evenings do when they're going well — speeches that land, dancing that starts stiff and loosens over an hour, the specific warmth of a room full of people who are here because they want to be. Thomas is at table four in his wheelchair, betwee
The Billionaire’s Debt Bride Chapter 98 — Thomas Walks
Mara POVThe call comes on a Saturday morning in March, and I am in the middle of making pancakes."Get here now," his physical therapist says, and those three words have a specific quality to them — not alarmed, not urgent the way medical emergencies are urgent, but bright. The kind of bright that doesn't have another word. We changed the other therapist handling him since he acted all creepy.I turn the burner off, call Lucien from the top of the stairs, and we're in the car in four minutes with Eliana in her car seat asking why we're going to Grandpa's therapy place on a Saturday when therapy is a Tuesday thing."Because sometimes good things happen on Saturdays," Lucien tells her."Like pancakes?" she asks."Exactly like pancakes," he says.We get there in eleven minutes. The therapist, a patient, quietly determined woman named Rosario who has been working with my father for seven months, meets us in the lobby and takes us back through the facility at a pace that makes me almost j
The Billionaire’s Debt Bride Chapter 97 — The Letter
Mara POVWe get home at nine forty-three. Eliana is asleep in her car seat before we’ve cleared the hospital parking lot, just drops off the edge of consciousness mid-sentence, still describing what the police car lights looked like, and doesn’t finish the thought. Lucien carries her inside and I follow, and he puts her down with her shoes still on because she is so deeply asleep that removing them would wake her, and we both stand at the edge of her bed for longer than we need to, not speaking, just listening to her breathe.In the kitchen I put the envelope on the counter and sat across from it.Lucien makes tea. He sets a mug in front of me and sits across from me and doesn’t say a word about the envelope. He doesn’t look at it pointedly. He doesn’t ask if I’m ready. He just sits, and I understand from that — from the simple fact of him staying — that I can take as long as I need.An hour passes. Then another.I pick it up twice and put it down again. The first time, my hands didn'
The Billionaire’s Debt Bride Chapter 96 - What Evelyn Wanted
Mara POVThe hospital smells of antiseptic and bad coffee, and I have been sitting in this plastic chair for forty minutes watching the door to the examination room like if I look away for one second something else will happen.Lucien is beside me, elbows on his knees, hands clasped. Neither of us has spoken in a while. That’s okay. We don’t need to.The doctor comes out, a woman with short hair and a direct way of moving, and my whole body goes rigid. “She is completely physically unharmed,” the doctor says before I can even stand. “Ate, drank, no signs of trauma or injury. Her blood pressure is perfect. She’s been asking about afternoon snack.”Lucien exhales beside me — the slow, shuddering kind of exhale that a person does when they’ve been holding something for hours without realizing it.“Can we see her?” I ask.“She’s right through that door,” the doctor says, and the warmth in her voice is the particular kind that comes from doing a job like this and occasionally getting days
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