HIS SECRET ADDICTION のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 61 - チャプター 70

Alex's POVI woke up to the sound of rain.Not the soft kind. The kind that meant the city was getting something out of its system.Damien was already awake. I could tell by the stillness. The particular quality of someone who wasn't sleeping anymore but hadn't moved yet, and I'd learned the difference."How long have you been up," I said."An hour.""Thinking about Richard.""Thinking about you."I turned my head on the pillow. He was looking at the ceiling. Profile sharp in the grey morning light. Something almost unguarded about him in the early hours, like the armor took a few minutes to fully assemble after sleep.I never told him how much I looked forward to those few minutes."Anything specific," I said."Last night in the car." He turned to look at me. "What you said.""Which part.""Present. Mine."I held his eyes. The words had come out easier than I'd expected. That was still something I was getting used to, how saying true things to him had stopped feeling dangerous somewh

Alex's POVMaya found me at eleven-fifteen.She didn't knock. She never knocked. She just appeared in my doorway with two coffees and the expression she wore when she'd already decided what she was going to say and was giving me the option to make it easier."Sit," I said."I'm already sitting.""You're leaning.""It's a casual lean." She set one coffee on my desk and took the chair across from me. Seven months pregnant and she still moved like she was winning an argument. "Sophie called me."I looked up from the documentation I'd been compiling."Routine," Maya said. "Don't make that face. She just wanted context on Jordan's work history here. I gave her what I could.""And.""And Jordan didn't write that complaint alone." She wrapped both hands around her cup. "The structure of it. The specific language around resource allocation. That's not a twenty-six year old who's annoyed about a promotion. That's someone who knows exactly which words trigger a board-level review.""I know."Sh

Alex's POVThe NDA was twelve pages long. I read it four times. Each time I found something new to be angry about. The language was careful in the way that expensive lawyers made things careful, built to protect one party completely while making the other feel like they'd been given something.My mother had signed it twenty years ago for sixty thousand dollars and her silence.Richard Sterling's name wasn't in it. It never would be. That was the point.I closed my laptop and sat in the dark of my apartment and tried to figure out what I was supposed to do with this.My phone buzzed.“Damien: Still at the office. You went quiet.”I stared at the message.The problem was simple and impossible at the same time. The man I was falling for ran the company that had buried what happened to my mother. He hadn't done it. He'd been in his twenties when it happened, probably not even fully in leadership yet. But his name was on the building. His family's lawyers had written the document sitting o

Alex's POVMilan was louder than I expected.Not unpleasantly. Just alive in a way that New York wasn't, different rhythm, different frequency. New York demanded things from you the moment you stepped outside. Milan just went about its business and let you find your place in it.We checked into the hotel at seven in the morning local time. Small, expensive, the kind of place that didn't need to announce itself. Our rooms were on the same floor, separate, which was the professional arrangement and also completely irrelevant.The meetings didn't start until two."Sleep," Damien said in the corridor outside our rooms."I slept on the plane.""Two hours.""I'm fine. I want to walk."He looked at me. Still in his travel clothes, slightly unpolished in the way that only happened when he'd been on a plane for eight hours, which was the only version of disheveled he ever permitted himself. It was deeply unfair how good he looked doing it."Give me twenty minutes," he said.We walked without a

Alex's POVThe Rossi meeting ran long. Just the particular length of a room full of people who were genuinely interested in each other's ideas and kept finding new threads to pull. Damien was different there than he was in New York meetings. Still precise, still authoritative, but there was less armor. Like being on someone else's ground gave him permission to be slightly more human about it.I watched him across the table and tried to focus on my notes.Carlo Rossi was seventy and looked sixty and had opinions about everything that he delivered with the cheerful certainty of someone who'd been right often enough to stop qualifying. He'd taken to Damien immediately, the way older self-made men sometimes recognized each other across a table.He'd taken to me too, which I hadn't expected."Your marketing man," he said to Damien at one point, gesturing at me. "He asked the right question.""He usually does," Damien said. He didn't look at me when he said it. Just stated it like weather.