All Chapters of The Deal in a Wedding Dress: Chapter 21 - Chapter 24

CelesteThe drive to the mansion was suffocating silence broken only by the engine's growl and my ragged breathing. Killian's hands gripped the steering wheel so tight I thought it might crack. Every muscle in his body radiated tension, coiled violence barely contained beneath expensive fabric.I stared out the window, my reflection ghostly in the glass, and tried to process what had just happened. The punch. The blood on Derek's mouth. The way people had stared and whispered and filmed everything with their phones raised like weapons.Tomorrow morning, we'd be everywhere. Every gossip site, every business page. "Hart Industries CEO Loses Control." "Billionaire's Marriage Already Crumbling." The headlines wrote themselves in my mind, each one more damaging than the last.The car screeched into the driveway. He was out before the engine fully stopped, slamming his door hard enough to make me flinch. I climbed out slowly, my legs unsteady, watching him stride toward the house with that

CelesteI woke up slowly, my body aching in ways I'd never felt before. Every muscle protested as I shifted, the soreness a vivid reminder of last night's intensity. For a moment, I kept my eyes closed, savoring the warmth of the bed, the expensive sheets against my skin, the lingering scent of him on the pillow beside me.Then I reached out.My hand met cold, empty sheets.My eyes snapped open. The space beside me was vacant, the pillow still dented from his head but long since abandoned. Morning light streamed through the floor-to-ceiling windows, bathing everything in harsh, unforgiving clarity.He was gone.I sat up slowly, clutching the navy sheet to my chest, and took in the evidence of what we'd done. My dress lay crumpled on the floor where he'd dropped it last night. Papers still littered the floor near the desk. The chair was overturned. My shoes lay in opposite corners of the room like they'd been flung there in desperation.Everything looked so stark in the morning light.