《Too Late To Beg》全部章節：第 101 章 - 第 110 章

JAMES I opened my eyes to white ceilings and the sharp, antiseptic smell of a hospital room. For a single, disorienting second, I thought I was waking from a nightmare. Then I tried to lift my head, felt the deep, splitting throb at the back of my skull, and remembered everything. The corridor. The wooden weapon. The fall. Mary. I tried to sit up too fast. The room spun. "Mr. Whitmore. Easy. Easy. You need to lie down." My assistant was at my side immediately, his hand pressed gently against my chest, pushing me back toward the pillows. "Andre." "Yes, sir." "What happened? Where is she?" He poured water from a pitcher into a small plastic cup and held it to my lips. I drank because my mouth was dry enough to crack. The water tasted like metal. "We arrived at the house some minutes after you went inside. I had been pushing the driver hard. When we entered the foyer, you were on the floor. They were attempting to move you. We subdued the entire household within

TAMSIN I moved away from Leo. I took one step back, then another, until there was enough space between us that I could breathe without breathing him in. "I cannot marry you, Leo." "Why?" "Because I cannot let you raise James's child. It would not be fair to you. It would not be fair to the child. It would not be fair to anyone. You would spend the rest of your life looking at this baby and seeing the face of the man who married me. I cannot ask that of you. I will not." He was quiet for a moment. Then he said something I had not expected. "Is it really James's baby?" I stared at him. "What do you mean?" "You and I were intimate, Tam. More than once. You know that as well as I do. So I am asking you. Honestly. "Is it really James's baby?" The question landed in the cool night air between us and refused to move. I could not answer it. Because the truth was that I did not know. The truth was that I had spent the entire drive from the hospital turning the timeline over in m

WHITNEY I had not stopped smiling all day. It was a strange thing, to spend an entire morning and afternoon with a woman who was my own twin. Stranger still that I could already feel the bond between us settling into place like something that had always belonged there and had only been waiting for me to notice it. Tamsin had arrived at my parents' house just after breakfast. Her colour had been better than the day before. The shadows under her eyes had not gone, but they had retreated. She had laughed at something my mother said within the first ten minutes of her visit, and the sound of her laughter had made my father set down his newspaper and stare at her with the soft, wondering expression of a man who had been given an unexpected gift. We had spent hours together. We had looked through old photographs. She had told me stories about our parents, the parents I could not remember, the parents whose faces I had only ever seen in the single small photograph she carried in he

TAMSIN I had been in my new apartment for less than twenty four hours, and I had already decided that I was not going to leave the city after all. It was strange, the way the decision had quietly settled inside me. I had spent days telling myself that I was going to pack everything I owned and move somewhere far away where nobody knew my name. I had told Leo. I had told Poppy. I had told Whitney. I had been so certain. And yet, the moment I had walked through the door of this small, sunlit apartment, with its pale grey sofa and its quiet kitchen and its little balcony overlooking a row of jacaranda trees, I had felt something inside me sit down for the first time in months. I was tired of running. I was tired of beginning again in places that did not know me. I had a sister now. A real one. I had a best friend who would have driven across the country for me if I had asked her to. I had a baby on the way who deserved a stable home and a settled mother. And I had a man, howe

TAMSIN I followed Evelyn. I told myself, the entire way there, that I was being a fool. I told myself that this woman had broken my life apart once already and that there was no reason on earth to believe she would not do it again. When we arrived, and I saw the pale stone manor rising up behind its iron gates, I felt my stomach drop. The memories rushed back. Years ago, in the worst week of my young life, when Leo had vanished without a single word and I had felt as though the ground had been pulled out from beneath my feet. I had come here looking for answers. Frantic, grief stricken, certain that there had been some terrible mistake. His father had received me in a sitting room that smelled of expensive cigars. He had towered over me. He had looked down at me the way a man looks down at something that has been tracked into his home on the bottom of a shoe. He had called me a gold digger. He had told me I would never amount to anything in life. He had told me that Leo was be