Lahat ng Kabanata ng Her Father’s Billionaire Best Friend : Kabanata 161 - Kabanata 170

It was like being given a map with a hidden doorway marked in ink. “So Kells didn’t order it?” I asked, fingers trembling.“Not necessarily,” Elias said carefully. “He may not have known. Or he may have been told a half-truth. The important thing is someone wanted the memo to have the smell of Kells. Someone wanted to stitch a public narrative that would distract while the real hands did what they wanted.” He looked up at me then, sharp as flint. “Roderick left me a key as well. He said, ‘If the town needs the truth, trust small people with big hearts.’ He marked a name on this list — an account in the county that can unmask a payment trail if you know where to look.”My head felt full in that particular way truth is: too much to contain, too necessary to ignore. “What do you want me to do?” I asked, which felt oddly like asking a river what it planned to do with the next storm.Elias’s eyes softened. “Guard the inn. Keep the ledger loud. Meanwhile, let the lawyers follow the paper. I

Marcus’s hand found my back immediately. He didn’t have to say anything. His touch was like a pole planted in shifting sand. “They’ll use anything,” he said quietly. “They’ll use your love if it helps them sell a story.”“That’s the point,” I snapped, anger and grief flaring into each other. “They’re trying to go small—make me small—so they can make him smaller.”He pulled me into the car without debate and drove us with hands that didn’t tremble. We went home in a silence thick with the kind that’s not absence but a plan rearranging itself. When we stepped through the inn’s door, the house smelled like lemon and patchouli and the small magic of things baked lately. Nora came forward with an armful of folders and a face that said she’d been ready to fight all morning.“We’ll write a response,” she said. “Not for the headline. For the people who matter. And we’ll speak to counsel — they can make a motion to protect you from targeted public smears.”We did produce that response: a short

Marcus’s face was thunder. “Frame job,” he said. “They’re trying to make it look like a delivery. Or they wanted someone to see it and assume an outsider came in. But the emblem — look closer.”The tech ran its machine through filters until the patch revealed its line: a willow leaf cradled by a looping R. The hair on my arms prickled like needles.“He used our crest,” I said. “He used Roderick’s symbol.”The room folded around the sentence. It was almost too savvy: someone had staged the scene to make it look like Roderick’s guardians had been compromised — or that his protections were up for grabs. Or they wanted us to think the guardianship itself was porous.“Either someone’s mocking us with our own iconography,” Marcus said, jaw tight enough to hurt, “or someone’s trying to send a signal — that they can reach our past and our protectors.” His hand was a fist at his side. “Who would think to do that? Who would want to rattle us in that specific way?”My head filled with names and

I felt something break and rearrange in my chest at the admission. “I don’t want to be wrapped and hidden,” I said softly. “I want to be a person who fights, who is seen, who gets pissed and tells the truth. I don’t want to be a secret in your pocket.”“You are never my secret,” he said, and when he said it the world narrowed to the plane of his mouth. He kissed me like he wanted to prove the words. The kiss was immediate and claiming, then slow and intimate. His hands found the places on my back and on the sides of my ribs that always loosen tension the fastest. He moved like someone learning a new religion of tenderness.We let the kiss become something larger. Clothes were shed across the blanket as if the sky asked us to remember we were flesh first and strategy second. He worshipped me the way men do when they finally understand how small gestures carry sacred weight: with patience, with attention, with an insistence that what he was doing was not only pleasurable but precise. He

We made love slow and deliberate, each movement like a stitch closing a wound. It wasn’t an escape from the day’s work; it was an insistence that we retained a territory no headline could enter. He was careful where the week had been cruel, checking every motion with a breath that asked for consent. There were gasps and soft laughs and one ridiculous moment when the twins kicked hard enough that we both froze and giggled like idiots. The sound was a bright bell in the night.After — while we lay tangled under the tarp of the sky — he grew quiet. “There’s something else,” he said finally, voice low. He reached for his phone and slid it across to me. The screen showed an email — a forwarded note from someone in Kells’ network to a consultant contact. It had a single, clipped sentence at the top: We need to move quickly — the judge is sympathetic. Pryce wants a clean deniability route; Reed wants plausible distance. Pull the boutique in deeper and divert attention to local theatrics. Eye