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หน้าหลัก / Romance / The Substitute Bride Of The Blackwood / Chapter 16: Behind Closed Doors

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Chapter 16: Behind Closed Doors

ผู้เขียน: Ivy Rose
last update วันที่เผยแพร่: 2026-07-05 21:00:01

Damien’s POV

It started as a small thing, the kind of small thing I would have dismissed completely a year ago.

I was at my desk past midnight, going through the Morrison contract one more time before sending it back to legal, and the numbers on the page blurred for a second. I blinked, rubbed my eyes, told myself it was the light, or the hour, or just a long day catching up with me the way long days do.

Then the room tilted.

Not dramatically. Just enough tha

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  • The Substitute Bride Of The Blackwood    Chapter 68 Reading the room

    POV: VictoriaDamien Blackwood had a tell.Most powerful men did, once you knew what to look for, some small thing that existed underneath the polished surface that told you more than the surface intended to. With some men it was the way they sat forward when something interested them. With others it was their silence when they disagreed. You learned to read them the way you learned to read anything, by paying attention long enough that the pattern became visible.With Damien it was the pause.When I said something that landed, something that was actually good, he didn’t respond immediately. He sat with it for a moment, just a breath, just long enough to be noticeable if you were watching for it, and then he responded in a way that told me he’d understood not just what I’d said but what I’d meant underneath it.He didn't do that with everyone.I’d watched him in the third meeting with the Morrison representatives on a conference call, efficient and thor

  • The Substitute Bride Of The Blackwood    Chapter 67: Said Out Loud

    POV: CharlotteHe was still in my doorway.I hated that my eyes had filled. I’d spent most of my life being very good at not crying in front of people and I was currently failing at it in real time, which was infuriating, and I looked away for one second to get it back under control.When I looked back he was watching me with that expression that had no performance in it whatsoever.“You don’t have to explain,” I said. “I know it was professional.”“I know you know,” he said. “That’s not why I’m here.”He came inside and closed the door and stood close, closer than explaining required, and I looked up at him and waited.“Whatever I think of Victoria’s work,” he said, “is completely separate from what I feel about you. I should have been paying enough attention tonight to know that saying one thing while sitting across from you was going to feel like the other. I wasn’t paying attention. That’s my fault.”“Damien—”“I’m not finished,” he s

  • The Substitute Bride Of The Blackwood    Chapter 66: Why It Landed

    POV: DamienShe didn’t answer.She just looked at me from the edge of the bed, and I stood there for a moment and then made myself leave, because standing in her room while she looked at me like that wasn’t going to produce anything useful for either of us.I went back downstairs.The two cups were still on the counter where we’d left them. I stood at the kitchen window and looked out at the dark garden and replayed the evening, not all of it, just the part that mattered, which was somewhere between her asking me how the meeting went and her picking up her cup with both hands and saying goodnight in that tone.I’d come home talking.That was it. That was the thing. I’d walked through the door with the day still on me and sat down and talked about the Morrison meeting the way I always talked about work, directly, reporting what had happened, and somewhere in the middle of it I’d said she’s sharp without once looking at Charlotte’s face while I said it.

  • The Substitute Bride Of The Blackwood    Chapter 65: Second Place Again

    POV: CharlotteI excused myself before he finished his second cup.Not dramatically. Not in a way that announced itself as anything other than a woman who was tired and going to bed at a reasonable hour. I said I was going up, I said goodnight, I picked up my cup and took it to the sink and walked out of the kitchen without once letting my face do anything it wasn’t supposed to do.I made it to the second floor landing before I stopped.I stood there in the corridor outside the library with my hand on the banister and the quiet of the house around me and let myself feel it properly for the first time since he'd started talking, the full weight of it, the thing I'd been holding at arm’s length for the past twenty minutes while I performed listening.She’s sharp. Sharper than I remembered.I knew what that feeling was. I’d been feeling some version of it my entire life, growing up in a house where Victoria’s accomplishments were discussed at dinner and m

  • The Substitute Bride Of The Blackwood    Chapter 64: Too Close

    POV: CharlotteThursday came the way difficult things always came, quietly, without announcing itself as anything more than another day until it was already happening.I was in the library when Victoria arrived.I heard the car on the drive, heard Helen’s voice in the entrance hall, heard footsteps crossing toward the main sitting room where Damien held most of his business meetings, and I sat in my reading chair with my notebook open and my pen still and told myself I was not going to spend the next two hours tracking sounds through the ceiling.I tracked sounds through the ceiling for the next two hours.Not deliberately. It was just that the house had a particular quality of quiet when something significant was happening in it, a held-breath feeling that I’d learned to read in the months since I’d moved in, and that quality was present now in a way that made concentrating on the page in front of me essentially impossible.I heard nothing useful. Muff

  • The Substitute Bride Of The Blackwood    Chapter 63: The Apology

    POV: CharlotteHe knocked at half past ten.Not the tentative knock of someone hoping I’d already fallen asleep and they could tell themselves they’d tried. Three quiet, deliberate knocks, the kind that said I’m here and I’m not leaving until you answer, and I’m not going to pretend I wasn’t standing on the other side of this door waiting for exactly this.I’d been sitting on the edge of the bed since I came upstairs, the room dark except for the lamp on the bedside table, the hollow feeling from the corridor settling slowly into something more complicated than anger, something that had more grief in it than I’d expected.I got up and unlocked the door.He was still dressed, which meant he hadn’t been to bed, which meant he’d been somewhere in the house since I came upstairs sitting with whatever the corridor had left him with, and something about knowing that, about the fact that he hadn’t simply moved on to the next thing the way he sometimes moved on to t

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