All Chapters of Bride by Default: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

(Sienna)The clip was forty-seven seconds long.Celeste sat in what I recognized as the drawing room of my parents' Kensington house, wearing no jewelry, minimal makeup, her hair down. She looked like someone had caught her in a private moment rather than a staged one.That was the first thing I noticed.The second was that she'd called a stylist first."I don't want to talk about blame," she said, her voice steady and a little tired in a way that read as authentic to anyone who didn't know her. "I just want people to understand that I was the last to know. About all of it."The interviewer's voice, off-camera: "When you say all of it—""The connection they had before the wedding." A small pause. "The history."She didn't elaborate. She didn't need to. The pause did it for her."I trusted both of them," she continued. "That's all I want to say about that."The clip ended.I sat with my phone in my hand and the car moving quietly through London and said nothing for a long moment.She ha

(Sienna)The morning briefing was in the fourth-floor boardroom.Twelve people around a glossy table, a presentation on the Pacific route integration, and the quiet, collective assessment of a room full of people deciding what to make of me.I felt it the moment I walked in. Not hostile. Worse. Politely curious, the way rooms of important people were when they hadn't yet decided whether you were relevant.I had walked into hundreds of boardrooms. This one looked back differently.I took the seat Adrian indicated, two down from his right, and opened the briefing document in front of me. I kept my expression neutral. Focused on the slide deck loading on the screen at the far end of the room.A silver-haired board member across the table, Calder according to the name card, looked at me with careful, focused attention. He looked like the kind of man who chose his words like investments, and right now he was deciding what to make of me."Ms. Hartwell," he said, during a pause in the present

(Sienna)The bar noise continued around us, indifferent and steady, and I sat with his words settling over me like something I couldn't quite shake off.Take your time.The problem was time felt like the one thing I didn't have. Everything else in my life was moving fast and loud and without my permission, and Adrian Swift sitting across a small table in a dim Soho bar, watching me with that patient, knowing expression, was the only thing that felt dangerously, inconveniently still.His fingers were still brushing the back of my hand.I hadn't moved.He hadn't either.I was aware of every millimetre of the distance between his fingers and my hand. Which was not a useful thing to be aware of.The space between almost and not yet had a gravity of its own, and I was becoming uncomfortably familiar with it. Because Adrian in full seduction mode was not something I had the willpower to resist.It was funny, really. The consent clause said he couldn't push. It said nothing about making himse

(Sienna)The villa sat above the coastline like something out of a fever dream.White stone. Terracotta. An infinity pool that dissolved into an impossibly blue sea. Bougainvillea climbing every surface in colors that had no business existing outside of a painting.It was perfect.Which was exactly the problem.The kind of perfect that didn't happen by accident. The kind that required advance calls and specific instructions and someone deciding precisely how this should look and feel and land. Jolene was behind this, almost certainly, with her tablet and her quiet, efficient ruthlessness.A honeymoon curated for an audience that wasn't here yet.The staff met us at the gate. They knew our names. They called me Mrs Swift with the ease of people who had been briefed, showed us through a courtyard scattered with lemon trees and the smell of something flowering that I couldn't identify, and handed us two glasses of something cold and pale without being asked.I noted all of it. The car

(Sienna)The sight of him fully exposed made my brain pause.Good Lord.He was exactly as I remembered. "Fuck," I whispered, wrapping my fingers around the base, velvet skin over steel hardness pulsing under my grip. Pre-come slicked my palm as I stroked once, slow and deliberate.He sucked in a sharp breath and his hand closed over my wrist, halting the stroke, eyes black with lust. "Not yet. I want to taste you first."He backed me toward the bed until my calves hit the mattress. His hands hooked under my thighs, lifting me effortlessly onto the edge, spreading my legs wide. Cool air hit between them.I was already embarrassingly wet.His gaze dropped.And the low sound that escaped him was almost reverent.He sank to his knees between my legs, broad shoulders forcing them wider as his hands gripped my thighs. His breath drifted over my skin first. Warm, teasing puffs that made me twitch.Then his mouth followed.His tongue flicked out, flat and broad, lapping up through my slit in