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Chapter Thirty-Three
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2026-10-22 08:01:40Isabella
I did not open the envelope in the car, because I knew that if I looked at those photographs while Tomas watched me in the mirror, I would lose the last of my composure.
I told the driver to take me to Southwark instead, and I sat in the back seat with the manila packet pressed flat against my stomach like a compress against a wound. The city slid past in grey ribbons of rain and brick. Twice I felt my fingers drift toward the metal clasp, and twice I drew them back, be
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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
The CEO’s Ruined Bride: My Ex Wants Me Back Chapter Seventy Seven
TravisThe burgundy had sat untouched on the sideboard for an hour after Karina left, and I did not stop looking at it until I had drunk myself past the point where looking mattered.She had refused to say more. She set down her glass, laid two fingers against my sleeve, and told me that a woman who had lived five years in a house with no windows had learned to ration her truths like water in a desert. The body in my mother’s coffin had never been viewed by anyone who loved her, she said, and the person who might still explain why was not yet safe to name. Then she had walked out and left the lift doors sighing shut behind her, and I had poured the first whisky without noticing that my hand was shaking.By eleven o’clock the study smelled of peat and cold ashes, and I sat on the floor with my back against the desk and Isabella’s emerald ring clenched in my fist until its setting bit into my palm. I had told myself that the performance was neces
The CEO’s Ruined Bride: My Ex Wants Me Back Chapter Seventy Six
The ShowerElianaThe invitations had gone out on cream card embossed with silver storks, and Mrs. Moore had personally written every address in her spidery copperplate hand.The shower was to be held at the Hampstead house on a grey Sunday afternoon, and she had spent four days preparing it with the grim intensity of a woman rallying a failing army. Thirty-five guests had accepted, which she considered a triumph, and which I considered evidence that London’s matrons had missed the drama of a Moore scandal more than they feared its contagion. The drawing room had been transformed with swags of pale yellow tulle and bowls of white freesia, and a table along the window groaned beneath a pyramid of boxes wrapped in pastel paper.I sat in a high-backed chair at the head of the room like a queen receiving tribute, wearing a flowing lemon silk dress that hid the extra weight of the pad at my waist. I had redesigned the apparatus three times since the hosp
The CEO’s Ruined Bride: My Ex Wants Me Back Chapter Seventy Five
IsabellaThe house in Kensington was so quiet that I could hear the sound of my own blood.It stood at the end of a pale terrace behind a high wall of wisteria, five storeys of cream stucco and tall windows that looked onto a private garden. Scott’s family had owned it since the Regency, and every room bore the faint polish of centuries of care, the soft glow of old wood and the dull gleam of silver that no one had ever needed to display. A housekeeper in a grey cardigan, who introduced herself as Mrs. Pargeter’s niece, had received me at the door with a hot water bottle and a warm and wordless smile, and she had shown me to a bedroom on the second floor where a fire already burned.I had expected to feel safe, and I had expected the safety to be a relief. Instead I stood in the middle of the blue carpet with my case at my feet and a strange hollow ache beneath my ribs, and I realised after several minutes that it was the stillness itself that fright
The CEO’s Ruined Bride: My Ex Wants Me Back Chapter Seventy Four
TravisThe emerald had not stopped glittering since she left it, and I had not stopped looking at it.I sat at the console table in the dim foyer with my elbows on my knees and the ring in the centre of my palm, turning it so that the facets caught the light and threw small green shards across the ceiling. It was still faintly warm, and I told myself that this was the heat of the lamp, because the alternative was a kind of weakness that I could not afford. The penthouse had never been so silent, and the sound of the lift descending with her inside it had lodged in my ears like a note from a cracked bell.I had done the only thing that I could do, and I had done it with all the grace of a man amputating his own arm. The seal on the cream envelope that Hale carried to a courier an hour earlier bore my father’s falcon, and the message inside it was a lie addressed to the Baron. I had written that I was a broken man with a failing marriage and a traitor in my
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