All Chapters of Bride by Default: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

(Sienna)I felt him hard against me through his trousers, already thick with need, and a shiver ran straight down my spine. My nipples tightened beneath my silk blouse, brushing against his chest.“God, this is so not me,” I whispered.The words slipped out before my brain could intercept them.Wonderful. Now I sounded like a character in a badly written romance novel.Except he shuddered when I said it. Actually shuddered.A sharp inhale through his teeth as if the words hit somewhere deeper than I’d intended.That reaction did absolutely nothing to help my self-control.I nipped his lower lip and he hissed softly.My hands fumbled with his belt, the metallic clink loud in the quiet room. At the same time he dragged my blouse free, buttons popping like tiny fireworks.His hands found my breasts instantly. His thumbs circled my nipples through the thin lace and I gasped, heat flooding through me.His hand slid down beneath my skirt.The moment his fingers brushed the damp fabric of my

(Sienna)I was late.Singapore to London with a four-hour delay out of Changi, a connection I'd nearly missed, and a dress I'd changed into in an airport bathroom because there hadn't been time for anything else. I slipped into the front pew beside my mother with forty seconds to spare, smoothed my skirt, and looked up.The world stopped.My body knew him before my mind did.That was the worst part — the order of it. The way recognition moved through me from the ground up, like a current finding its path. The set of his shoulders. The line of his jaw. The stillness that had unsettled me across an airport lounge and was doing something considerably more destructive to me now, across forty feet of cathedral aisle, in a morning suit, in my sister's wedding.No.The word arrived with perfect clarity and absolutely no power to change anything.Adrian Swift. His eyes found mine at the exact same moment.Neither of us moved.The organ was playing something I couldn't hear. My mother was sayi

(Sienna)The wedding guests were being offered champagne and careful reassurances while four lawyers rearranged my life in a vestry office.I sat across from Adrian Swift, my sister's former fiancé, my accidental one-night stand, and apparently my imminent husband, and watched two legal teams work with the focused efficiency of people billing by the minute.My father sat beside me, grey and diminished, signing things when directed. I had stopped expecting him to object to anything approximately twenty minutes ago.The terms were Adrian's first.Public appearances as required. Shared residence at his Mayfair townhouse. One year minimum (though the covenant stipulated five, and everyone in the room understood which number actually governed). No infidelity, which was stated with the brisk neutrality of a parking restriction.I listened. I took notes on my phone. I did not let my eyes drift to his face, because his face was doing something to my concentration that I couldn't afford right

(Sienna)Swift Aviation's headquarters occupied four floors of a glass tower in the City, and Roland Kessler's office sat directly adjacent to Adrian's with a connecting door that was, I noted, almost always open.While we arrived together after an awkward elevator ride from his penthouse at the top of the building, Adrian swiftly excused himself to his office and left me with his right-hand man. Roland was waiting for me with coffee, a printed schedule, and the easy warmth of someone who had decided to like me before I'd said a word."Sienna." He stood, extended his hand, smiled with his whole face. "I feel like I already know you. Adrian talks about the Hartwell operation constantly, especially the Singapore expansion. Genuinely impressive work."I shook his hand and smiled back and noted, somewhere underneath the pleasantness of it, that he had opened with a compliment that was also an assessment.He walked me through the onboarding — office access, PA introduction, board calendar

(Sienna)I hope it was worth it.I read it twice in the grey morning light, put the phone face-down on the nightstand, and got up to make coffee in Adrian's kitchen that, apart from the coffee machine, remained unused. We got takeout after Roland left and he ate it in his home office.I hope it was worth it.Five words. No accusation that could be argued with, no specifics that could be refuted. Just a sentence designed to find the crack and sit in it.Celeste had always been quite good at that.I didn't reply.There was nothing to say that wouldn't sound like justification, and I refused to justify myself for a decision I'd made in a vestry with a debt covenant and my father's grey face and the specific, terrible clarity of being the only person in the room who could fix it.I hadn't taken her life.I'd saved her from a marriage to a man who had stopped the ceremony to look at me across a cathedral aisle with come-fuck-me-eyes.I told myself that until it almost felt true.I called h