Bound By Forbidden Desire의 모든 챕터: 챕터 11 - 챕터 20

The chairman signed at eleven fifty-three.I watched his pen move across the final page and felt something loosen in my chest.Nikos shook hands around the table. Closing deals of this size was something his body did automatically while his mind was somewhere else entirely.When his eyes found mine across the room, his expression shifted. I looked away first.Outside the compound, the Mykonos afternoon hit us with white stone, blue water, and light so sharp it made everything look like it had been cut out and placed deliberately against the sky. We walked to the car without touching his arm, but his arm brushed mine twice on the path.“You held the position perfectly,” he said.“I told you fifteen,” I replied.“Four times,” he said.“And I was right all four times,” I said.“Yes,” he said simply. “You were.”The driver opened the door. I got in while he settled beside me, and the car moved away from the compound, and I looked out at the water and told myself that winning this negoti

Nikos POVShe came back in fifty-three minutes.I know because I watched the clock the entire time she was gone, sitting at my desk with that document in front of me and the city outside my window and the silence of an office pretending nothing had happened. When my door finally opened, I didn’t look up immediately. I let her cross the floor and stop in front of my desk before I lifted my eyes to hers.She’d rebuilt herself on that walk. But I knew her face well enough now to see past the composure to the question she hadn’t finished asking herself yet.“Close the door,” I said.She closed it.“Sit down,” I said.“I’d rather stand,” she said.“Elena,” I said her name the way I said it when I wasn’t asking.“Sit down.” She sat.I came around the desk slowly and leaned against the front of it, arms crossed, looking down at her. I wanted her to feel the shift, the way things were going to move differently from here.“You read it,” I said.“I read it,” she said. “And I want to hear it fro

He opened the door before I knocked.That meant he’d been watching for me, standing somewhere near the window of his apartment with his phone in his hand and his jaw set, waiting. Jamie did that when he was past the point of knowing what to do with himself.He looked at me for a moment without saying anything. Then he stepped back and let me in.His apartment was a mess in the specific way of someone who hadn’t been sleeping. Takeout containers on the coffee table, a laptop open on the sofa with too many tabs, and three coffee cups at various stages of abandonment. I’d seen this before. The last time was when the debt had first landed on him and he hadn’t known how to tell me.I sat on the sofa. He remained standing.“Talk,” I said.“You first,” he said.“Jamie”“How long?” he said. His voice was controlled but barely. “How long have you known about what he did? About what his family did to Dad’s company?”“I found out recently,” I said. “A few weeks ago.”“And you stayed,” he said.

Dinner was good. Although not the main focus, the food was good too for a small place Nikos knew. We sat across from each other at a corner table and shared nothing important for two hours, and I realized somewhere between the main course and the wine that this was the first time since I’d arrived in this city that I felt completely present without any part of my mind running calculations about what it meant or what came next.I just sat there with him, and it was easy in a way I hadn’t expected to feel easy with anyone in a long time.He walked me to my car afterward, stood with his hands in his pockets while I found my keys, and didn’t fill the silence with anything unnecessary.“Tomorrow,” he said.“Tomorrow,” I agreed.He kissed me once, briefly and certainly, and stepped back. I drove home with the radio off and something warm sitting in my chest, and I was done arguing with it.I slept well for the first time in weeks.My phone rang while I was still on my first coffee, standin

My father took us to dinner. A small place he found near the hotel, the three of us at a round table with good food and wine, and my father doing what he did best when he’d already made up his mind about something, which was to act as if he’d never been uncertain at all.He asked Nikos about the company. Nikos asked him about the merger that had brought him to Athens two months ago.I sat between them and contributed where I could and watched two men who had every reason to be difficult with each other choose not to be, and I felt something loosen in my chest that had been tight for longer than I could remember.At one point my father caught me watching him and smiled.I looked at my plate and blinked once and told myself I was not going to cry at dinner.We said goodbye outside the restaurant. My father hugged me for a long time, shook Nikos’s hand again, told us both he expected to see us at the wedding in three weeks, and walked back toward his hotel without looking back.Nikos and