All Chapters of The Bookstore Temptation: Chapter 21

The night was heavy with rain, the kind that blurred city lights and turned the streets into mirrors. Julian stood by the wide windows of his penthouse, scotch in hand, the ice untouched and sweating into the glass. His reflection stared back at him, jagged, ghostly, fractured by the rain trickling down the glass.He hadn’t planned to see her today.He hadn’t planned anything at all, and that was what bothered him most.Julian Blackwood didn’t deviate. He didn’t second-guess. His days were mapped down to the hour, his nights... well, they used to be filled with distraction and empty pleasure. Now they were filled with her.Lena.Soft-spoken. Eyes like weathered poetry. That faint cinnamon smell that clung to her clothes and made his chest ache with something that felt dangerously like nostalgia.She wasn’t supposed to get to him.She wasn’t supposed to make him feel anything at all.He swallowed the scotch in a long, slow gulp, letting the burn remind him he was still in control—still