Todos os capítulos de CRAVING THE WRONG BLACKTHORNE BROTHER: Capítulo 81 - Capítulo 90

I told him at dinner.It was the first dinner we had eaten in the same room since the east wing arrangement. Nate had appeared in the doorway at seven with his jacket off and his sleeves rolled up, and I had set a second place without being asked, and that was how we ended up sitting across from each other with food neither of us was particularly focused on.It was not comfortable. It was not easy. But it was something.I missed him. “I want to go to the site tomorrow,” I said. “The orphanage.”He looked up from his plate.“The construction is behind schedule,” I said. “Marcus sent a report last week and I haven’t responded. The children are supposed to be moving in by spring and if I don’t go down there and—” I stopped. “It’s my project. It’s the one thing I was given that nobody else touched, and I’ve been so consumed with everything here that I’ve let it sit for weeks. I need to go.”Nate studied me for a moment. “I’ll arrange security.”“It’s a construction site.”“Ella.”“Fine.

A small square of paper, folded once, with my name on the front in handwriting I recognized immediately. I stood at the breakfast table in my robe and looked at it for a moment before picking it up, because Nate had left before dawn for the northern territories and the house had the particular quality it always had when he was away, that slightly held-breath feeling of too many rooms and not enough people in them.I unfolded it.Back quarters. Tonight. Eight o'clock. Wear something worth taking off.I read it twice.Then I sat down.Nate had never done anything like this. In the months of our marriage there had been grand gestures, certainly — the kind that came with planning and expense and the confidence of a man who knew how to make an impression. But this was different. This was small and handwritten and slipped under a glass of orange juice on a Thursday morning while he was three hundred miles away, which meant he had arranged it before he left, had thought about it before he le

He kissed me back like he had been waiting the whole evening to stop being sensible about it.His hands found my face first, tilting it up, and then they moved into my hair and the jacket he had been holding landed somewhere on the floor and neither of us paid it any attention. I pressed closer and felt his arms come around me properly, the full weight of his attention shifting from the argument to this, and the room changed around us the way rooms do when two people stop pretending they are going to do anything except exactly this."Ella." My name against my mouth. Half warning, half something else entirely."I know," I said."We just—""I know." I kissed him again to stop him finishing the sentence, because the sentence was true and I did not want true right now. I wanted this. His hands and the candlelight and the roses he had carried in here one by one, and the specific reality of him after weeks of absence that no amount of thinking about him had quite managed to substitute for.

The light from the corridor cut across the room like something surgical.Levi moved first, sitting up, and I pulled the sheet and we both turned toward the door with the particular stillness of two people who have just run out of places to hide.Celeste stood in the doorway.She was exactly as I remembered her from the two times our paths had crossed at pack functions. Tall, composed, the kind of beautiful that came with knowing exactly what it was worth. She was wearing a dark green wrap dress and her hair was up and she had a glass of something in her hand, which meant she had been somewhere in this wing already tonight and had found her way here by following the roses, the same way I had.She looked at me.She looked at Levi.She looked at the rose petals distributed across the bed and the candles burning on the table and the jacket on the floor and the cold dinner neither of us had touched.Then she took a slow sip of her drink."Well," she said. Not loudly. Almost to herself. "Th

He came home on a Tuesday.I heard the car on the gravel before I saw him, that particular sound of the estate gates and then the crunch of the drive, and I was in the kitchen when it happened and I stayed there. Let him come to me. Not as a strategy, not as a calculation. Just because I was making tea and my hands were occupied and I wanted the first moment of him being home to be ordinary.It was.He came through the kitchen door in his travel jacket with his bag still on his shoulder and his hair slightly disordered from the journey and he looked at me standing at the counter and he said "hi" in the tone of someone who has been away and is relieved to be back, and I said "hi" back, and he dropped his bag by the door and kissed me in the uncomplicated way of someone who had decided to stop making kissing complicated."How are you feeling?" he asked against my hair."Fine. Better today.""Eating?""Reasonably.""Good." He pulled back and looked at me properly, the inventory he always