Tous les chapitres de : Chapitre 11 - Chapitre 20

If I had to describe the vibe in the villa right now, I wouldn’t use the word "tense." Tense is what you feel when you’re waiting for a root canal. This was more like being trapped in a pressurized cabin at thirty thousand feet while the pilot decides whether or not he feels like crashing. The doctor had barely cleared the driveway before the "New Management" protocols kicked in. "Get up," Dominic said. He didn't look at me. He was staring at the doorway of the master suite like he wanted to murder the wood. He had been standing like a statue for ten minutes since the doctor left, his hands shoved into the pockets of his trousers, his shoulders so tight I was surprised his seams hadn't popped. "I’m resting, Dominic. Remember? Your orders? I’m glass? I’m a delicate little Thorne-vessel?" I propped myself up on my elbows, trying to inject as much sass into my voice as possible to hide the fact that my heart was currently doing a frantic tap-dance against my ribs. Julian Sterling’s n

If I’ve learned anything in the last twenty-four hours, it’s that being a "Thorne investment" has one very specific, very ridiculous perk: I have effectively become the CEO of Dominic’s sanity. After the fever broke and the "Shoot to Kill" orders were downgraded to "Please Just Glare Intimidatingly at the Gate," the vibe in the villa shifted from Gothic Horror to something bordering on a chaotic sitcom. Dominic was hovering. And not just the usual "I’m an alpha billionaire who owns the air you breathe" hovering. This was new. This was a man who had seen a flickering heartbeat on a screen and suddenly realized that his primary job description was no longer "World Dominator" but "Chief Snack Officer." I was currently lounging on the oversized velvet sofa in the sunroom, watching a bee bump fruitlessly against the glass, when the Great Hunger struck. It wasn't just a rumbly tummy. It was a biological mandate. My body suddenly decided that if I didn't consume a bowl of specific, neon-co

I never thought I’d say this, but there is such a thing as too much silence. After three days of staring at the same olive trees and listening to Dominic debate the safety ratings of organic cotton diapers, I was starting to feel like a very well-fed, very bored ghost. "I miss the city," I’d grumbled over a lunch of caprese salad that afternoon. "I miss the smell of roasted nuts on a street corner, the sound of taxis honking at three in the morning, and the lights. Everything here is so... green. It’s aggressively green, Dominic." He hadn't said much at the time, just hummed into his espresso while scrolling through a spreadsheet. I figured he’d just add "Buy a candle that smells like New York exhaust" to his to-do list and call it a day. I was wrong. At 6:00 PM, a box arrived in my room. It wasn't more bubble wrap. It was a garment bag from a designer in Milan. Inside was a floor-length gown in a deep, midnight-blue silk that felt like liquid moonlight. Along with it was a note i

Walking away from a ten billion dollar betrayal sounds incredibly cinematic in your head. You imagine yourself head high and shoulders back while you march into the sunset like a girl who doesn’t need a man or his sinister fertility tracking software. The reality however involves a lot more swearing and a very specific type of pain that comes from a ripped designer dress catching on every single briar in the Italian countryside. By the time the sun started to peek over the hills in shades of bruised orange and gold I was no longer an empowered woman on a mission. I was a barefoot disaster. My midnight blue silk gown was missing a sleeve and the hem looked like it had been through a paper shredder. My feet were covered in a layer of Tuscan dust that no amount of expensive spa treatments would ever truly erase. I had been walking for hours. My only company was the occasional confused goat and a very judgmental owl that had followed me for a mile. Every time I heard a distant engine I

Watching Dominic Thorne try to fit his six foot three frame into a house built for a woman who was four foot ten was the best television I had ever seen. Better than any soap opera. Better than the high stakes gallery openings in Manhattan. It was the physical comedy I didn't know I needed to heal my soul.The cottage was beautiful in a rustic way but it was not designed for a man who spent his life in glass towers. Dominic kept hitting his head on the low hanging beams of the kitchen ceiling. Every time he did he would let out a low muffled swear word and then look at Nonna as if expecting her to apologize for the architecture of the eighteenth century. Nonna just ignored him and kept scrubbing her copper pots with a vigor that suggested she was imagining his face on the metal."You look like a giraffe in a dollhouse," I said. I was perched on the edge of the kitchen table swinging my feet in my fluffy cloud slippers. I was currently peeling an orange with a small silver knife feelin