All Chapters of Claimed By My Best Friend’s Daddy: Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

Alicia’s POVThe phone buzzed against the nightstand like a loudly.Rhys grabbed it before the second vibration finished. I was still half-asleep, tangled in the sheets, his body warm against my back, the taste of him still ghosting on my tongue from hours earlier. One look at his face and every soft, sleepy feeling vanished.“Mirabel,” he said, voice already shifting into something careful. “She’s twenty minutes out. Maybe less, because the traffic’s light.”I sat up so fast the room tilted. The suite that had felt safe and hidden an hour ago suddenly looked like a crime scene. My dress was draped over a chair. My shoes were by the door. A half-drunk glass of wine still sat on the coffee table with the clear print of my lipstick on the rim. A paperback I’d been flipping through earlier—one of the romance novels I always carried—lay open on the couch. My hair tie was on the bathroom counter next to his cologne. A mug I’d used for tea sat in the sink.Every single thing screamed that

Alicia’s POVThe car dropped me off just after midnight.The private entrance was quiet, the kind of hush that only existed in buildings designed to keep the world out. I used the code Rhys had given me weeks ago and rode the elevator up alone, my bag hanging from one shoulder, the day’s residual tension still sitting between my shoulder blades. Mirabel had gone to bed early for once. I had waited until her breathing evened out before slipping from the dorm like a thief. The guilt was still there, familiar and sharp, but underneath it was something warmer, the pull that always brought me back to him no matter how carefully I tried to stay away.When the elevator doors opened, Rhys was already waiting in the living room.He had changed out of the clothes he’d worn earlier. He was now wearing a black sweater, dark pants, with sleeves pushed up to his elbows. The lamp on the side table cast a low golden light across the space, leaving the corners of the room in gentle shadow. He looked

Alicia’s POVI said yes on a Tuesday afternoon, sitting on the edge of my dorm bed with my phone pressed to my ear and Mirabel’s laughter floating in from the hallway.The word left my mouth before I had fully decided I meant it. Rhys had been quiet on the other end of the line after asking the question for the second time. Not pressuring, just waiting. That was somehow worse than if he had tried to convince me. The silence left room for every fear I had been carrying since the night he first mentioned the gala—cameras, questions, the possibility of someone recognizing me as more than a polite guest on the arm of a man who was never supposed to look at me the way he did.“Yes,” I said again, softer this time, as if repeating it would make the decision feel less like stepping off a ledge. “I’ll go.”His breath shifted on the other end of the line. Relief, maybe. Or something closer to gratitude.“Thank you,” he said. I spent the next two days trying not to think about it. Moving from

Alicia’s POVI saw the change in him before anyone else did.One moment Rhys was steady beside me in the soft gold light of the ballroom, the composed version of himself that belonged to rooms like this, with his shoulders set, voice even, the quiet authority that made people adjust their posture when he looked at them. The next moment something in his face locked, it was small, almost nothing. A stillness that settled behind his eyes and stayed there even as he continued answering the woman who had spoken to him.I didn’t know what she had said. I only knew the way the air around him shifted, the way his hand at the small of my back went briefly heavier before it relaxed again into the careful public touch he had maintained all evening. Whatever the words had been, they had reached a place he usually kept sealed.I did not ask in front of the room.We finished the necessary conversations. We smiled where smiling was required. We moved through the last orbit of investors and polite i

Alicia’s POVI ran into Alex near the student union on a Thursday afternoon that felt deceptively ordinary.The sun was warm against the brick of the buildings, and the quad was busy with the usual mid-semester energy, of students cutting across the grass with coffee cups, someone laughing too loudly near the steps, a group arguing good-naturedly about a group project deadline. I had just left the library after two hours of pretending to revise notes while my mind kept drifting back to the gala, to the unfinished sentence in the lounge, to the way Rhys had kissed my knuckles in the car and said soon like the word carried more weight than he was ready to explain.I wasn’t paying full attention to where I was walking. That was how I nearly collided with him.“Whoa—easy.” Alex stepped back just in time, one hand lifting in a quick, reflexive gesture. Then recognition settled across his face and he smiled. “Alicia. Hey. Almost took me out.”“Sorry.” I adjusted the strap of my bag and offe