All Chapters of The Substitute Bride's Bargain: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

His name was Dominic Reyes, and he had the particular confidence of a man who had never needed to develop subtlety.Elena encountered him near the bar in the gala's upper level, in the thirty minutes Alexander had promised before they could leave. She was getting water, because she'd been holding glasses of champagne all evening without drinking from them and she was genuinely thirsty, which felt like the most honest thing her body had communicated all night.He appeared beside her the way attractive men appeared beside women at events like this, as if it had just happened, as if proximity was accidental, as if the specific angle of his body toward hers was simply where he'd ended up."Victoria Blackwell," he said.Not a greeting exactly. More like an identification.Elena turned. Took him in quickly, the way she'd trained herself over four weeks to assess people before they finished their first sentence. Tall. Dark. The kind of handsome that came from good genetics and the knowledge

Carmen Martinez arrived with flowers.This was the detail Elena registered first, standing at the elevator when her parents stepped out at six-fifteen on Saturday evening. Her mother had brought an enormous arrangement of white peonies wrapped in brown paper, the kind of flowers you brought to someone's home when you were nervous and wanted to demonstrate that you understood the occasion was significant and had prepared accordingly.Her mother had never brought flowers to a family dinner in her life.Elena took them and kissed her mother's cheek and felt Carmen's hands grip her arms with a pressure that communicated in the compressed language of women who had spent years understanding each other across distances that couldn't be spoken in front of other people.Are you all right. Tell me quickly. He isn't watching.Elena squeezed back.I'm fine. Behave normally. He's always watching.Her father came through the elevator behind her mother with the careful movements of a man who had dre

The dream began the way bad dreams always began.Ordinarily.She was at the gala, in the emerald dress, and the room was full of the right people saying the right things, and she was managing it the way she'd learned to manage it, moving through the social architecture of the evening with the particular fluency she'd built over five weeks of careful accumulation.Then Portia turned to her and said, very pleasantly, "But you're not Victoria."Not as an accusation. As a simple fact. The way you noted the weather.And then Camille turned, and said it too. But you're not Victoria. And the man from the board, Natasha Voss with her silver hair and her assessing eyes, and then her father, who was there suddenly, who shouldn't have been there, in his best suit with his hands pressed together in front of him. You're not Victoria. His voice is the worn, diminished voice of the past months. You were never Victoria.And Alexander.He stood at the center of the room in his black tuxedo and he look

The restaurant was nothing like she'd expected.She had been to three restaurants with Alexander in five weeks. They were the kind of rooms that treated dinner as a statement of position, enormous and perfect and full of people conducting the business of being seen. She had worn the right things to all of them and said the right things and come home exhausted in the specific way of performances that had gone technically well.This was a room with twelve tables.Downtown, in a neighborhood that didn't announce itself the way the neighborhoods she'd been moving through did. The kind of block that had a restaurant like this because someone who knew what mattered had found a space and done something real in it. The lighting was the amber kind that came from actual candles rather than their approximations. The tables were close enough together that conversations required lowered voices, which meant they would require privacy, which meant this was a room for actual talking rather than the k

Marcus Chen arrived at twelve-thirty with a leather portfolio under one arm and the particular energy of a man who treated Tuesday lunch the same way he treated everything else, as an opportunity to be thoroughly prepared for outcomes he hadn't yet identified.Elena had known he was coming since the morning. Alexander had mentioned it at breakfast, briefly, in the way he mentioned the logistical facts of their shared days, Marcus at noon, working lunch, he'll stay two hours at most, and she had taken the information and built the morning around it. She had reviewed what she knew about Marcus Chen, which was considerable at this point: thirty-eight, Columbia MBA, Alexander's closest professional confidant for eleven years, the man who finished Alexander's sentences in board rooms and whose opinion Alexander weighted differently from everyone else's. She had been in rooms with him four times. She had managed all four competently.She had also noticed, across those four occasions, that M