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Home / MM Romance / His Forbidden Guard / Chapter 141 - Chapter 147

All Chapters of His Forbidden Guard : Chapter 141 - Chapter 147

147 Chapters

Chapter 141: The happiness I want

The errand was ordinary.That was the thing about it afterward, the thing Daveson kept returning to in the specific way you returned to things that had almost ended you, looking for the signal you had missed, the moment where the ordinary had started becoming something else and you had not seen it in time. He had run dozens of errands in the weeks since moving into the estate. Dry cleaning, documents, the occasional package from suppliers that Leonard's assistant coordinated through him because it was easier than arranging separate couriers. Ordinary work. The background texture of the job.This one was a document collection from a law firm in midtown. Leonard's assistant had called it through at eleven, standard request, the firm's address in the message, pick up by one. Daveson had logged the errand in the security system the way he logged everything, destination and estimated return time, and had taken the car and gone.He had been careful since Ivanna's visit.More careful than us

Chapter 142: Just Us

He drove his heel into the lobby man's instep and felt the grip loosen by a degree and tried to use the degree and did not have enough of it, and the SUV's rear door was open and the corner man had his other arm and he was running out of the kind of time that mattered.Then he heard Leonard's voice.Not from far away. Close, from the direction of the parking structure, with the specific carrying quality of a voice that was not raised and did not need to be raised because the authority in it was not dependent on volume."Let him go."Two words.The grip on Daveson's arms did not immediately release. But it hesitated, which was its own specific information, and in the hesitation Daveson heard movement, multiple sets of footsteps, and he understood that Leonard had not come alone.What followed was brief and efficient and not clean.Leonard's men, four of them, came in with the coordinated quality of people who had been briefed and positioned and were executing rather than improvising, a

Chapter 143: What Ivanna Wanted

The car brought them home in silence, and the silence did not break when they reached the estate.Leonard's hand had not moved from the edge of Daveson's for the entire drive. It did not move now, either, as the car slowed through the gate, and Daveson understood without being told that whatever had happened on that sidewalk had rearranged something in Leonard that was not going to quietly rearrange itself back.He should have known the day was not finished with them.He thought about it afterward, in the specific unproductive way you thought about things you could not have changed, and he decided that the mistake, if there was one, was in believing that the danger belonged to midtown, belonged to daylight and a public sidewalk and three professionals who had already failed once. He had catalogued the attack, filed it, begun the necessary work of understanding what it meant. He had not accounted for a second attempt arriving the same night, arriving here, arriving with a different arc

Chapter 144: Just Two of us

What happened in the half second after that shot went out did not, for a long time afterward, arrange itself in Daveson's memory as a sequence with a clean beginning and end. He knew that Leonard moved. He knew that one of Leonard's men, positioned behind Ivanna and closer than she had accounted for, returned fire in the same instant her shot went wide into the dark past Daveson's shoulder. He knew that Ivanna went down, and that she did not get back up, and that the quality of the night changed in the specific absolute way it changed when something that had been alive stopped being alive.The gunfire tapered. Then stopped.Leonard's men were securing the last of Ivanna's people, and the eastern treeline had gone quiet, and somewhere in the house lights were coming on, staff waking to a night that had broken open around them, and none of it mattered to Daveson nearly as much as the fact that Leonard had turned from where Ivanna's body lay and was crossing back to him with an expressio

Chapter 145: The man who did not die

Six weeks before Ivanna ever set foot in this house through a side entrance, in a hospital that existed on no directory a person could consult if they went looking for it, Roarke John opened his eyes and understood, before he understood anything else, that he was supposed to be dead.The last clear memory he had was the parking structure outside the prison. Release papers folded in his coat pocket. Eleven years reduced on appeal, then reduced again to time served on a technicality his lawyer had fought so long for that Roarke had stopped believing in it, and then, astonishingly, the gate had opened and he had walked out into cold October air a free man for the first time in nearly a decade.He had gotten as far as the second level of the structure.He remembered a shape stepping out from between two parked cars. A second shape behind it. He remembered thinking, with the strange clarity that arrives in the half second before violence, she couldn't even wait one night, and then the memo

Chapter 146: The thing he came here to do

Daveson did not sleep.Leonard did, eventually, sometime past three, exhaustion finally winning out over the adrenaline that had kept him rigid and watchful for hours after the last of Ivanna's men had been zipped into bags and driven away from the east lawn in vehicles that did not officially exist. He slept with one hand still fisted loosely in the fabric of Daveson's shirt, as though some unconscious part of him intended to notice immediately if Daveson tried to leave the bed, and Daveson lay very still beside him and looked at the ceiling and did the thing he had been avoiding since one in the morning.He let himself actually think about it.The notebook was still in his desk drawer down the hall. The flagged transactions were still there, his father's name still attached to a ledger that Lissa Heyden had built her rise on the back of, still waiting for the moment Daveson had spent eighteen months preparing to deliver, the moment where the careful architecture of his presence in t

Chapter 147: Just to be with you

"I came into your home to expose your mother for what she actually did. I never wanted to hurt you. I did not know, when I started, that there would be a you to want anything about at all.""Do you understand what you're describing." Leonard's hands had curled at his sides, and he had pulled back, put distance between them on the bed that felt, to Daveson, like the widest distance that had ever existed between two people occupying the same six feet of space. "Every conversation. Every moment on that roof. The coffee, the drive home from the gala, last night in that room with the antiseptic when I told you I loved you. You're telling me all of that happened alongside a plan to burn my family to the ground.""Yes.""Just yes.""I won't lie to you about it, not after everything, not after last night. Yes. All of that happened alongside the plan. And somewhere in the middle of it, the plan stopped being the only true thing, and you became true too, and I did not know how to tell you that w

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