All Chapters of Bound by Fortune :A Scandalous Heir Billionaire Romance : Chapter 11 - Chapter 15

Victor Brandt moved through the crowd with the practiced ease of a shark gliding through familiar waters. His smile was a fixed, polished thing, but his eyes, the color of flint, missed nothing. He zeroed in on their little group with unnerving precision.“Joe! Always a pleasure to see you command a room,” Brandt said, his voice a smooth, oily baritone. He clapped a hand on Brian’s shoulder in a gesture that pretended to be camaraderie but felt like a territorial claim. “And you must be the famous Davidson Ekon.”He turned his attention to Davidson, extending a hand. His grip was firm, overly so, meant to intimidate. “Victor Brandt. I’ve been hearing quite a lot about you. Quite the meteoric rise.” The insinuation hung in the air, fragrant and poisonous.“Mr. Brandt,” Davidson said, extracting his hand. He kept his tone neutral, his posture relaxed but alert, as Brian had instructed. “I’ve heard a great deal about you as well. Your work in the North Sea is… ambitious.” It was a carefu

The pre-dawn sky over Dubai was a bruised purple and neon orange wash, a tacky painting that seemed utterly artificial. Davidson watched from the back of the Range Rover, his body humming with a toxic combination of exhaustion and hyper-awareness. He'd consumed the updated Saudi briefing, cross-referencing the production forecasts against political expectations until the figures whirled behind his eyes. He was a gun, ready to fire.Joe Brian sat beside him, sipping black coffee from a thermos, his eyes regarding the waking city. He had said nothing of the night before, of his awful philosophy of cost and legacy. The lesson had been learned; its digestion was assumed."The minister's a creature of habit," Brian stated, his voice cutting through the soft whine of the engine. "He's got his 'informal' meetings at the same souk café every time. He thinks it shows accessibility. It shows predictability.""And Brandt will be there at seven-thirty," Davidson stated.Brandt will have bribed th

The space between them vanished.It was not a dramatic, film-worthy pull. It was a gravitational collapse. Two bodies, orbiting each other for weeks in a tense, electric orbit, finally succumbing to the inevitable pull.One moment, Davidson's hand was on Brian's, a steady, anchoring pressure. The next, Brian's other hand came up, fingers brushing along Davidson's jaw, a touch so tentative it hardly existed. It was a question.Davidson's breath caught in his throat. All the teachings, all the admonitions, all the slogans about weakness and cost screamed in his mind. This was the final vulnerability. The point of no return.He gazed into Joe Brian's eyes. The icy blue was gone, and instead, a maelstrom of raw, un-contained feeling swirled there—grief, fear, a hope so fragile it could shatter. The king wasn't there. The billionaire wasn't there. There was just a man, stripped naked by his own history, standing on the brink of a terrifying possibility.Davidson answered the question.He l