Se connecter"I am simply saying," Chloe announced, slapping her cards face down on the coffee table with considerably more force than the moment required, "that nobody who works in corporate security should be allowed to play poker competitively. It's basically cheating.""It's called being observant," Nathan said, not looking up from his own hand. "You have a tell.""I do not have a tell.""You bite the inside of your cheek when you're bluffing. You've done it four times tonight."Chloe's mouth fell open in outrage, which, Zara noted from across the table, was itself doing very little to disprove Nathan's point."Sebastian, back me up," Chloe said. "Tell him that's an invasion of privacy."Sebastian, arranging his own cards with the same precise focus he brought to board meetings, didn't even glance up. "He's not wrong. You also tuck your hair behind your ear when you've got a strong hand.""Betrayed. By all of you. In my own game night.""Your game night that you insisted on hosting at our flat
The drive out of London took just under two hours, the city thinning into motorway and then into narrow hedgerowed lanes, the kind of English countryside that looked like it belonged on the front of a biscuit tin rather than somewhere real people actually lived.Zara hadn't asked where they were going. Sebastian had simply told her to pack for the weekend and trust him, which was, she reflected, a significantly larger ask than he seemed to realise, given everything the past year had taught her about surprises."You're doing the thing," Sebastian said, glancing over from the driver's seat."What thing?""The thing where you're quietly cataloguing every possible danger a simple road trip could contain.""I'm allowed a healthy sense of vigilance.""You're allowed to also just enjoy a Saturday."She managed a small smile at that, and made a genuine effort to let her shoulders unknot as the fields rolled past the window, until the car finally turned down a long gravel drive lined with old
Three months had passed since the dinner at the penthouse, and Hawthorne Co. had, in that time, quietly rearranged itself around a fact nobody on the executive floor bothered pretending not to notice anymore. Zara Hawthorne, though she hadn't taken the name officially yet, was not simply the woman Sebastian happened to be dating.She had a title now. Director of Client Relations, a role Sebastian had resisted creating for exactly as long as it had taken Zara to point out, quite reasonably, that she had spent months quietly doing the job already without the salary or the office to go with it."You built half of the Ferrington account from nothing," she'd said, arms crossed, standing in his office the day the promotion had finally gone through. "I'm simply asking to be paid for work I'm already doing.""You're asking me to give my girlfriend a formal position of authority within my own company.""I'm asking my boyfriend to stop being ridiculous about optics."He'd relented within the ho
Sebastian's penthouse had never really been designed for dinner parties. The kitchen was built for someone who ordered in more often than he cooked, the dining table large enough for board meetings rather than intimate evenings, every surface sleek and cold in the particular way expensive things sometimes were.It didn't feel that way tonight.Zara had spent the afternoon dragging Chloe around the local market, arguing over which cheese was worth the price and which was simply expensive for the sake of being expensive, and the kitchen now smelled like garlic and roasting chicken and the particular chaos of two people who had never quite agreed on how much salt was too much salt."You're doing it again," Chloe said, swatting Zara's hand away from the pan."Doing what?""Seasoning with your feelings instead of a spoon.""That's not a real criticism.""It's a very real criticism. Ask Sebastian how the eggs went that one morning.""Don't bring the eggs into this."Sebastian, setting the t
Nathan had never particularly enjoyed date nights, not the way other people seemed to, all that pressure loaded onto one evening, a restaurant table lit for maximum vulnerability, two people expected to perform intimacy on command.Chloe had solved that problem within the first month of whatever this was between them by simply refusing to call it a date at all."It's not a date," she said, handing him a paint roller. "It's furniture assembly with snacks.""That's a date with extra steps.""It's a date with fewer steps, actually, since we're skipping the part where you pretend to be interested in my opinions about wine.""I am interested in your opinions about wine.""You once told me a Malbec tasted like regret.""It did."Chloe laughed, and Nathan found, not for the first time, that he'd happily spend an entire evening doing nothing more than finding new ways to make that particular sound happen again.They were in her new flat, the one she'd finally moved into after months of half h
Hawthorne Co. had a rhythm Zara had almost forgotten during the weeks of chaos, the hum of the espresso machine on the executive floor, the particular click of heels on marble at nine each morning, the low murmur of a hundred conversations happening at once behind glass walls.She'd asked to come back properly, not just to visit, and Sebastian had agreed on exactly one condition."You work from my floor," he'd said. "Where I can see you.""That sounds less like a workplace accommodation and more like surveillance.""Call it whatever helps you say yes."She'd said yes.Her new desk sat just outside his office, close enough that she could hear him through the door most of the time, close enough that he leaned out at least four times that first morning with questions that very clearly did not require leaning out of his office to ask."Zara."She didn't look up from her screen. "Yes?""Did you move my pen.""I didn't touch your pen.""There were two pens on my desk this morning. Now there
The crowd wasn’t on Zara’s side not even for a second. Hands held her down while Tessa stood free in front of her, breathing hard, eyes burning with something ugly. “Hold her properly,” Tessa snapped, fixing her dress like nothing had happened. “If she doesn’t know her place, I’ll remind her.” Z
The reception area felt quieter than it should have.Or maybe it was just Zara.She sat with her back straight, hands resting neatly in her lap, her fingers loosely intertwined, but the calm was a performance. Beneath it, her thoughts moved too fast, slipping over each other, refusing to settle int
“Zara, if you miss this interview, I will personally disown you.”Zara groaned, dragging the blanket over her head as if that could block out Chloe Bennett’s voice and the reality that came with it.“Five minutes,” she mumbled.“You said that twenty minutes ago,” Chloe replied, already moving aroun
The door clicked shut behind Zara as she stepped into the flat, the familiar warmth wrapping around her in a way that should have felt comforting.It didn’t.Her mind was still back in that café.“Finally,” Chloe Bennett’s voice rang out from the living room. “I was starting to think you ran off an







