Todos los capítulos de His Tamed Wife, The Wild Heiress: Capítulo 221 - Capítulo 230

Chapter 222KIERAN "Good," he said. "Wouldn't want anything to slow you down. Busy man these days. Fatherhood, business, and whatever else keeps landing you in headlines.""Darren," Adria said, quiet, a warning in it that he ignored entirely.Penny's grip on the pram handle had tightened. I could feel her watching the exchange with the specific attentiveness of someone who didn't understand the full shape of what was happening but understood, with total clarity, that something was happening — that the air between the four of us had gone thick with a history none of us were saying out loud."I'd like to talk to Adria," I said. Directly. I didn't look at Darren when I said it. I looked at her. "For a minute. If that's alright."Something moved across her face — permission, almost, the beginning of a step forward, her weight shifting like she meant to close the distance between us on her own terms.Darren moved first.

Chapter 224DARREN I moved before he finished the sentence. Old reflex, trained deep, the specific economy of a body that had learned a long time ago how to occupy space before someone else could claim it."I don't think that's a good idea," I said."I wasn't asking you," Kieran said."No," I agreed. "But I'm answering anyway."We went back and forth — I don't remember all of it, the specific words blurring together the way words do when you're performing a scene you've half-written in advance, some cruel little engine in me running the conversation while the rest of me stood somewhere else entirely, watching a woman I used to know stand three feet away wearing another man's love for her like she'd earned it honestly."You want to talk to a married woman on a street corner while her husband's missing," I said, "and her family's dealing with a council situation you don't have clearance to understand. I think I'm doing eve

Chapter 226KIERANThe impact traveled up my arm and into my shoulder, sharp and immediate, and for one suspended half-second the world snapped back into focus around it — the street corner, the sunlight, Darren's head turned to the side where my fist had landed, and the specific, disorienting silence of a man who had not moved to block it.He'd let it land.I registered that even through the haze, even through whatever was still roaring in my ears from the memory that hadn't finished unspooling itself. He'd seen it coming — I was certain of that, certain in the way you're certain of things your body knows before your mind catches up — and he hadn't lifted a hand to stop it. He'd simply stood there and taken it, his head snapping sideways with the force of the blow, and something in his expression, in the half-second before he recovered, looked almost like relief.I didn't understand it. I didn't have room to understand it. I was al

Chapter 228ADRIAI felt sick with it. Genuinely, physically sick, my stomach twisting around the specific powerlessness of watching a good man's reputation get dismantled in real time and understanding, with total clarity, that I could not fix it without breaking something larger — my family's cover, the operation, whatever fragile architecture still stood between us and total exposure.I opened my messages instead.I found Kieran's contact — still saved under his own name, no code, no alias, the one honest thread I'd let exist in a phone otherwise full of careful fictions — and I typed before I could talk myself into something more measured, more strategic.*I'm so sorry. What happened out there wasn't your fault. None of what they're saying is true and I hate that I can't fix it right now. I will find a way. Please know that.*I read it over once. It wasn't enough. Nothing I could type into a phone was going to be

Chapter 230DARRENI heard the words leave my mouth before I'd fully decided to say them, some old, careless reflex reaching for the joke because the joke was safer than sitting inside what I'd actually just understood about her. "This fire. I get why he fell for it."I watched it happen in real time.I watched the heat drain out of her face — not slowly, not gradually, but almost instantly, like a switch thrown somewhere behind her eyes, the fury folding in on itself and retreating into something smaller, quieter, apologetic in a way that made my own stomach turn the moment I registered what I was actually seeing."I'm sorry," she said. Her voice had changed completely. Gone was the conviction, the volume, the specific unmanaged heat that had filled the car thirty seconds earlier. What replaced it was soft. Careful. The version of her I'd first met in that sitting room, folding herself down into something that took up less space, apologized for