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Home / Romance / Anna and Jonathan: The Arranged Marriage / Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

All Chapters of Anna and Jonathan: The Arranged Marriage : Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

126 Chapters

CHAPTER 81

JONATHAN'S POV "Where did I hear it doesn't matter right now," I said, watching Anna across the kitchen table, her eyes fixed on me as intently as they'd been fixed on the screen minutes earlier. "I need to know why her name is connected to a private investigator who's been circling this family for years." My father's voice, when it came again, had lost the easy warmth he usually managed even at this hour. "What investigator." "Diane," I said. "The woman who worked with Rose. Her name is on a retainer agreement tied to Isabela Marchetti, dated six months before any of this started with Rose at all. I want to know what you know about it." The silence on the line stretched long enough that I checked the screen to make sure the call hadn't dropped. "Isabela's family and ours go back a long way," he said finally, careful in a way I recognized from a lifetime of watching him navigate difficult negotiations. "Her father and I have done business together. Socially, our families crossed

CHAPTER 82

ANNA'S POV "I need a day," Jonathan's father said, before he could finish whatever he'd started to say a moment earlier, some of the composure sliding back over his face like a door quietly closing. "There are people I need to speak with, documents I need in front of me before I explain this properly. I don't want to give you half a story and let you build the wrong conclusions out of it." Jonathan's jaw tightened, and I could see how badly he wanted to press further, to demand the whole truth right there in that office rather than wait another twenty four hours for a version his father had time to shape into something more manageable. But he nodded, tightly, and I understood, watching him, that some part of this restraint was for my benefit as much as his own, a promise he was actively practicing now instead of merely making. We didn't speak much on the drive home. I could feel Jonathan running through a hundred possibilities, none of them good, and I let him have the silence for

CHAPTER 83

JONATHAN'S POV "Jonathan," my father said, before I'd even gotten a word out, "I need you and Anna to come to the house tonight. Now, if you can manage it. I'd rather explain this in person than let you sit with half a story until morning." Something in his voice had changed since the office that afternoon, the careful composure worn thin enough that I could hear the strain underneath it clearly for the first time in longer than I could remember. "We're already on our way," I said, and meant it, keys already in hand. Anna sat beside me on the drive over, quiet, watching the streets pass in the dark, and I was grateful, not for the first time this week, that she'd refused to be left behind for this. Whatever waited at my parents' house, I didn't want to face it without her. My father was waiting in the study when we arrived, alone, a decanter of scotch on the table beside him that looked considerably lower than it should have been for this early in the evening. My mother's absence

CHAPTER 84

JONATHAN'S POVMy father poured himself another measure of scotch before he spoke again, and I understood, watching his hand tremble slightly around the glass, that he needed the small ritual of it more than he needed the drink itself."Eighteen months ago, when Whitmore's firm extended that loan, there were conditions attached beyond the interest rate," he said. "I told myself at the time they were minor. Standard protections a lender builds into an agreement of that size. I didn't examine them as closely as I should have, because I was desperate, and desperate men read contracts the way they want to read them rather than the way they're actually written.""What conditions," I said, my voice flat, giving him nothing to soften against."A proxy agreement," he said. "Buried in the fine print, structured to activate only under specific circumstances. If the company ever faced what the document called a material governance crisis, and Jonathan, a murder investigation touching the family,

CHAPTER 85

ANNA'S POV Jonathan didn't say much on the drive home, and I didn't push him to. I had learned, over the past several months, the difference between a silence that needed filling and a silence that simply needed company, and this one, I could tell, was the second kind. He went straight to the study when we got in, not to work, I realized when I followed him a few minutes later, but simply to sit, staring at nothing in particular, a man trying to hold the pieces of his own history in some kind of order that made sense. A year ago, I might have given him the space I assumed he wanted. I would have gone upstairs, told myself I was respecting his need to process alone, and quietly resented, underneath that respect, how far apart it always seemed to leave us. I thought, standing in the doorway watching him, of the night after Lucas's funeral, when I had done exactly that, retreated to our bedroom and left him alone downstairs for hours, both of us convinced at the time that we were simp

CHAPTER 86

ANNA'S POV "I appreciate you thinking of him," I said carefully, "but Jonathan has people handling the board situation already. Lawyers, advisors, people who've known the company for decades." "Of course, of course," my father said, quick to agree in the particular way that always meant he had no intention of actually letting the subject go. "I'm not suggesting he needs rescuing, Anna. I simply thought, given everything I went through with my own company, the lawsuits, the board revolt, all of it, that I might have a perspective worth ten minutes of his time. Sometimes an outside voice sees things the people too close to it can't." I gripped the phone a little tighter, remembering the version of this conversation I'd had with him a dozen times before, always dressed up in language about family and generosity, always somehow ending with him closer to something he wanted than he'd started. I told myself this time might be different. I didn't fully believe it, but I told myself anyway

CHAPTER 87

ANNA'S POV We brought him into the living room rather than the study, some instinct in me wanting to keep whatever this turned into away from the one room in the house that already carried too much weight from the past few days. My father settled into the armchair by the window with the easy confidence of a man who had never once doubted his welcome anywhere, setting his suitcase down beside him as though the matter of how long he intended to stay had already been decided. I watched him take in the room, the way he always did in any space he entered, cataloguing details, the quality of the furniture, the view from the window, the particular kind of quiet wealth this house had always projected without trying. He had done the same thing at every house we'd ever visited when I was a girl, and I remembered, watching him now, how long it had taken me to understand that this habit wasn't curiosity. It was appraisal. "I'll get straight to it," he said, once Jonathan had taken a seat besid

CHAPTER 88

ANNA'S POV Neither of us slept well that night, my father's parting words circling in my head long after Jonathan had finally drifted off beside me. I lay awake trying to decide whether he'd actually meant something specific by it, some genuine piece of leverage he was holding back, or whether it was simply the reflexive cruelty of a man who couldn't stand losing an audience, throwing out a threat with nothing behind it purely to leave the room having the last word. I thought, staring at the ceiling, about all the other times in my life he'd done something similar, a sharp remark aimed at keeping me off balance whenever I got too close to actually walking away from him. I used to spend days afterward turning his words over, searching for the hidden meaning he wanted me to search for, and I recognized, lying there beside Jonathan, how exhausting that particular habit had always been, how much of my life I'd spent orbiting his moods instead of simply living my own. By morning, I'd de

CHAPTER 89

JONATHAN'S POV Nine days became a number I measured everything against, the way a countdown clock changes the shape of every hour beneath it. Harold arrived at the house the morning after the call, laptop already open before he'd even taken off his coat, and Anna set a pot of coffee brewing without either of us having to ask, the three of us settling into the kind of grim, focused rhythm I remembered from the earliest, leanest years of building the company from nothing. "Let's start with the numbers as they stand," Harold said, pulling up a spreadsheet on the screen. "Nine board members total. Whitmore has secured four firm votes, Elaine Cho, Robert Diaz, Peter Langley, and your father's proxy, which counts as a fifth regardless of what your father himself would prefer if the clause weren't binding. That's five out of nine. He wins outright." "What about the other four," Anna asked, leaning forward, her legal pad already out. "Two are solidly with us," Harold said. "Myself and Dia

CHAPTER 90

JONATHAN'S POV "She's not undecided," Harold said, his voice grim. "She's fully aligned with Whitmore now. That puts him at six votes out of nine, Jonathan. Even if Sarah and Thomas both come our way, we lose. He doesn't need them anymore." I set my phone down on the counter and sat there for a moment, letting the number settle into something I could actually process. Six votes. An outright majority regardless of anything Anna and I found in the next eight days, unless we could somehow flip a vote that had already been cast in Whitmore's favor, not simply win over the ones still sitting on the fence. "Why did she switch," I asked. "Diane's known this family longer than I've been alive. What could Whitmore possibly have on her?" "I made some calls," Harold said. "It's not pretty. Her son's company took a significant loan from one of Whitmore's subsidiary funds two years ago, structured through a shell entity that made the connection almost impossible to trace unless you already kne

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