Semua Bab His Tamed Wife, The Wild Heiress: Bab 51 - Bab 60

Chapter 51: Uneasy TensionDAMIENThe car smelled like cake.Not in a pleasant, celebratory way—in the way of something ruined, something that had gone spectacularly wrong in public and refused to let you forget it. Amber was sitting to my right, her red dress a catastrophe of white frosting and dark ganache, chocolate smeared through her hair in streaks that no amount of paper towels from the venue's powder room had been able to fix. She'd managed to wipe most of it from her face, but the damage was done. To her dress, to her composure, and to whatever dignity she'd hoped to reclaim on her first night back in the city.To my left, Adriana was crying.Not loudly—she never did anything loudly. Just soft, trembling, barely-there sobs that she was doing her best to suppress, her hands clasped in her lap, her shoulders curved inward, her face turned slightly toward the window so I couldn't see the full extent of the damage. The streetlights passed over her in rhythmic flashes, catching th

Chapter 53: Worried About The UnknownDAMIENThe house was quiet when I came in. No sound from upstairs—not from the guest room, not from the master. Just the hum of the climate system and the faint tick of the kitchen clock.I poured a drink and didn't drink it. Just stood at the counter holding the glass, looking at nothing.The board wanted a united front. Richardson had called three times today to emphasize the importance of optics, of demonstrating stability, of putting the Adina scandal firmly in the rearview. Arriving at the gala with my wife on my arm had been the right move. The photos from the entrance were already circulating—Adriana in the emerald dress, my hand on her waist, both of us looking like exactly what the board wanted to see.And then Amber had ended up in a cake and Adriana had ended up with half of society twitter calling her the most sympathetic figure at the event.I thought about Kieran, the way he'd watched Adriana cross the room earlier in the evening. Th

Chapter 55: Public Is On Her SideADRIAHe'd seen the video. Had seen it multiple times, I suspected—I'd watched him on his phone during the car ride without appearing to watch him, which was a skill I had spent considerable energy developing, and he'd had that particular stillness people got when they were watching something on a loop. The grocery store video. I knew because his jaw did a specific thing when he was disturbed and couldn't admit it—a slight tightening on the left side, barely perceptible, the kind of thing a stranger would never catch.I'd catalogued it in month four of our marriage.He was disturbed by what he'd seen in that footage. Had been disturbed by it since the parking lot, if I was honest with myself—which I tried to be, in private, in locked bathrooms at midnight, in the small hours when the performance could rest and the real accounting could begin. He'd asked me about self-defense classes in the car that day. Had studied me in the garage with an expression

Chapter 57: Damien Is Acting OddADRIAThe way he said my name—the fake one, the constructed one, the one that was mine and not mine—stopped me."You're apologizing for cuddling your husband."I opened my mouth."In your own bed," he added.I closed it.He sat up slowly, the covers falling back, and ran a hand through his hair with the unhurried ease of someone who had slept well. He looked—and I noticed this despite every instinct telling me not to notice it—like a man who had gotten a full night's sleep for the first time in a while. The tension that lived around his jaw and behind his eyes when he was managing the company, managing Amber, managing the performance of his own life—it wasn't entirely gone, but it was reduced. Like he'd spent the last few hours somewhere where he didn't have to manage anything."If I'd known you were a cuddler," he said, "I would have been here more often."The sentence landed in a very strange place inside my chest.I sat up too, pulling the covers ar

Chapter 59: Observing ThingsADRIAThe first thing I understood, within approximately forty minutes of being on the executive floor, was that Castellan Enterprises had a problem that Damien was not seeing clearly because he was too close to it.The second thing I understood was that I absolutely could not say so.I sat in the corner of the glass-walled conference room where the board call was happening, in a chair that had been placed there specifically for me—not at the table, slightly back, the position of an observer rather than a participant—and listened to forty-five minutes of boardroom dynamics with the focused attention of someone who had spent years learning to read power structures and was now doing so professionally under the cover of being a CEO's visiting wife.The Meridian acquisition was the main issue. I'd known about it in general terms—it was public, covered in the financial press, the kind of deal that got written about in terms of scale and audacity. What I hadn't