LOGINShare
Chapter Thirty-Six
publish date:
2026-10-23 08:01:01Scott
I had been a poor liar all my life, and I had never before regretted it as much as I did in the thirty seconds after Isabella Vanguard looked at my telephone.
She did not accuse me. She stood in the doorway of the tea shop with one arm in her coat and the other hanging empty, and her dark eyes searched my face with an intelligence that made my stomach drop. I opened my mouth to produce one of the smooth evasions that I had rehearsed in the mirror that morning, and I found
Latest chapter
The CEO’s Ruined Bride: My Ex Wants Me Back Chapter Eighty Three
TravisI doubled her guards on the morning after the library, and I did it without speaking to her, which was the first of the cowardices that I committed that week.Hale delivered the order to the Ashbourne house at nine o’clock, standing in a hall of black and white marble with his hat in his hands. He had returned from Wimpole Street with a face like old paper, and he reported what he had found in the ravaged clinic in the stiff voice of a soldier giving evidence at a court martial. Six of my best men took up positions around the terrace, and four more settled into a van at the end of the lane, and I watched the whole operation from the back of a car with the engine switched off.I did not go in. I had meant to, and I had rehearsed the apology for six hours in the study at three in the morning, and my feet had refused to carry me across the pavement. A curtain had moved in an upstairs window, and a pale shape had stood behind the glass for a long
The CEO’s Ruined Bride: My Ex Wants Me Back Chapter Eighty Two
PuertoI learned that Isabella was pregnant three days before I learned that the camera in my storage unit had been watching me discover it, and I have never decided which fact frightened me more.The woman in the grey coat had told me to tell no one, and for once I had obeyed her. I pulled the lead from the camera and stamped the lens into the concrete beneath my heel, and I stood among the photographs breathing like a man who had run a mile. Then I went home to the flat in Clerkenwell and sat in the dark with a glass of water, and I let the knowledge settle through me until it found the bottom.It did not make me angry, and that was what astonished me. I had expected jealousy, or the old hot humiliation of the gala, and instead there came a stillness so complete that I could hear the refrigerator humming in the next room. Eliana’s slip arrived the next afternoon, tossed out in the middle of a quarrel about the cost of a christening gown. She had said tha
The CEO’s Ruined Bride: My Ex Wants Me Back Chapter Eighty One
KarinaI learned of the child in a hotel bathroom, from a woman who was supposed to be incapable of surprising me.Desire had telephoned at six in the morning, and she had spoken in the clipped monotone of someone reading a casualty list. She told me that the Chairman’s people had stripped a clinic on Wimpole Street during the night, that the wife was nine weeks gone and thriving, and that the husband had been told at midnight in a library in Kensington. I sat on the edge of the marble bath with the telephone against my ear and the taps running to cover my breathing, and I felt two opposite things arrive in me so close together that I could not separate them.The first was horror, because I knew what a child meant to a man like the Chairman. The second was a cold bright thread of calculation that I despised myself for recognising, and I followed it as a sleepwalker follows a corridor.A child complicated everything, and complications were the only s
The CEO’s Ruined Bride: My Ex Wants Me Back Chapter Eighty
IsabellaI wept into Scott’s jumper until the wool was damp from collar to cuff, and he never once told me that he had warned me.He did not warn me, and he did not say a word of comfort that sounded rehearsed. He sat beside me on the library sofa with one arm around my shoulders and the other resting on the cushion beside my knee, and he let me shake until the storm in me wore itself thin. The fire burned down to a bed of red coals, and the clock in the hall chimed two and then three, and the light of the single lamp made a warm island in the vast dark room.Travis had been gone for nearly an hour, and I had not moved from the place where he left me. I had heard the front door close and the car engine fail to start, and then I had heard nothing at all, and the silence afterward had pressed against my ears like water. A part of me had listened for his footsteps returning along the terrace, and another part had prayed that they would not, and I had hated bo
The CEO’s Ruined Bride: My Ex Wants Me Back Chapter Seventy Eight
IsabellaI had imagined this moment in a hundred different rooms, and in every one of them I had been wearing something more dignified than a borrowed dressing gown.I had been woken by the sound of a fist on the front door, and I had lain rigid beneath the coverlet while the old house carried the murmur of two men’s voices up through its floors. Scott had come to my door a minute later with his jumper rumpled and his face grave, and he had told me in a quiet voice that my husband was downstairs and had been drinking. He had asked whether I wished to see him, and I had said yes before I had thought, because some stubborn instinct told me that whatever was waiting in that library had been coming for me since the night of the hotel.Now I stood in the doorway with my hand against the frame and watched Travis hold my child’s first photograph against his chest like a man holding a wound closed. His face was grey beneath the stubble, and his eyes were red
The CEO’s Ruined Bride: My Ex Wants Me Back Chapter Seventy Nine
TravisThe words left my mouth before I understood that I had spoken them, and I watched them strike her like stones.I never wanted this. I had not meant to say it, and I could not call it back, and the sentence hung in the warm air of that library with a terrible permanence. Isabella flinched as though I had struck her across the face, and her hand flew to her stomach in a gesture so instinctive and so fierce that it cut me far deeper than any accusation could have done. She did not weep and she did not shout, and the stillness of her face was the worst thing that I had ever seen.“I did not mean it as it sounded,” I said, and the words came out thick and clumsy. “I only meant that I never allowed myself to imagine it, because I have spent my whole life arranging things so that this could not happen.”“I see that you succeeded splendidly in the arranging.” She spoke very quietly, and the courtesy in her voice was a bl
You May Also Like
Trading My Ex for His Uncle
Hello Spring660.0K viewsCEO's Tears Over Pregnancy Test Discovery
Faith Shaw747.1K viewsOn Her Master’s Bed!
Xee write688.6K viewsChasing My Pregnant Wife
Night Revelations984.0K viewsTHE BILLIONAIRES 31-DAY CHRISTMAS CONTRACT
Steven star64 viewsALL YOURS 2
Hazeel143.5K viewsPlaying The Billionaire: The CEO Contract Game
Mario139 viewsHIS REGRET MY NEW BEGINNING
Ijaywrites66 views
