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Home / MM Romance / Accidentally Became His / Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

All Chapters of Accidentally Became His : Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

70 Chapters

Chapter 21

Tim came back at six.Daniel heard it before he saw anything. The gate, the engine, the particular sound of a car stopping at the front of the house. He didn’t get up from the sitting room where he had been reading. He stayed where he was with the book open in his lap and listened to the sounds of Tim moving through the house below. The front door. Low voices. Footsteps in the hallway.Then quiet.Daniel went back to his page.He read the same paragraph three times before he acknowledged to himself that he wasn’t reading anymore and closed the book.He went downstairs.Tim was in the study with the door half open, which Daniel had learned meant he was between things rather than in the middle of something. He knocked once on the frame.Tim looked up from the desk.“You’re back,” Daniel said.“I am,” Tim said.Daniel came into the room and sat in the chair directly opposite the desk, the one Rafe used when they were working. Tim watched him sit without commenting on the choice.“How was

Chapter 22

His phone buzzed just after ten.Nina. A message this time, not a call.I’ve been thinking. Call me when you can.Daniel set the phone down and picked it back up and set it down again. He had been in the middle of nothing important, just sitting at the desk with his notepad open and the pen in his hand and the particular restlessness that had been with him since the kitchen last night, since Tim’s hand over his and the quiet that had followed it.He called her.She answered on the first ring.“I wasn’t going to push,” she said, skipping hello the way she always did when something had been sitting with her long enough that preamble felt wasteful. “I told myself after the last call that I was going to stop pushing and just let you tell me things in your own time.”“But?” Daniel said.“But I’ve been thinking about what you said,” she said. “That it started as no and now it’s more complicated than no.” A pause. “I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it actually.”Daniel leaned back i

Chapter 23

The call came at half past eight.Rafe took it first, as he always did, filtered it, assessed it, and brought it to Tim in three sentences. That was how Rafe worked. Nothing wasted. Nothing was added that didn’t need to be there.Tim listened to the three sentences.Then he stood up, put on his jacket, and told Rafe to have the car ready in five minutes.He didn’t tell Daniel he was leaving. He didn’t tell anyone except Rafe and Leo, and Leo only because Leo was driving. The rest of the house would notice his absence the way the house always noticed things, quietly and without being told.He didn’t look at the staircase on his way out.The east side of Red City was a different city from the one Tim operated in publicly.The restaurants and the hotels and the private dining rooms where men in expensive suits discussed things that would never appear in any legal document, that was the surface of Tim’s world, the part that people saw and mistook for the whole of it. The east side was und

Chapter 24

The house went quiet somewhere around two in the morning.Daniel knew because he had been lying awake long enough to notice the change. The low hum of voices from the study below had stopped. Footsteps moved through the hallway. A door closed. Then nothing, just the particular silence of a house that had finally finished its night and settled into itself.He had heard Tim come home hours earlier.He hadn’t gone down then, he had lain in bed and listened to the sounds of the debrief, the muffled back and forth between Tim and Rafe that he couldn’t make out through the floor but could feel as a presence, purposeful and serious, the kind of conversation that had weight even from a distance.He had waited.He wasn’t sure what he was waiting for exactly. Sleep hadn’t come and the notepad on the pillow beside him had stayed unopened and the lamp had stayed on and he had just lain there in the quiet of his room turning Nina’s words over the way he had been turning them over all day.Larg

Chapter 25

Daniel heard them before he saw them.He had come downstairs late that morning, later than usual, having finally fallen into the kind of deep sleep that came from two consecutive nights of being awake past midnight. He had showered and dressed and was heading toward the kitchen when the study door, which was pulled almost completely shut but not latched, let out a sliver of conversation that stopped him in the hallway.He didn’t mean to listen.He took one step past the door and then the words caught him and his feet stopped moving before he made the conscious decision to stop.“…three locations in the last week.” Rafe’s voice was measured and precise the way it always was. “He’s not watching anymore. He’s positioning.”“I know.” Tim’s voice. Flat and certain.“The east side contact gave us the timing of his next move but not the target.” A pause. “It’s either the port operation or it’s something closer.”A silence that lasted long enough to mean something.“It’s not the port,” Tim sa

Chapter 26

The house was different that evening.Daniel felt it from the moment he came downstairs for dinner. Not loudly. Not in any way he could point to specifically. Just a tightness in the atmosphere, the particular quality of a place where everyone knew something was coming and nobody was saying it out loud.Leo had been in and out all day, moving faster than usual, his easy manner replaced by something more focused and contained. Mrs Alves had served lunch without her usual quiet efficiency, moving slightly too quickly, her expression slightly more closed than normal. Two men Daniel hadn’t seen before had been posted at the far end of the hallway since midmorning and were still there when he came down for dinner.The house was preparing for something.Daniel sat at the small dining room table and waited.Tim came in at seven exactly.He looked at Daniel when he entered the room and something passed between them that didn’t need words—an acknowledgement of the morning, of the conversation

Chapter 27

Daniel woke up to light he didn’t recognise.Not the light from his own room, which came through curtains that faced east and arrived at a particular angle he had gotten used to over weeks of waking up to it. This light was different. Fuller somehow.Coming from a different direction, falling across unfamiliar ceilings and unfamiliar walls and the particular stillness of a room that wasn’t his.Then he remembered.He didn’t sit up immediately the way he had in the hotel room all those weeks ago, that panicked scramble toward the edge of the bed, that desperate reaching for clothes and exits and the quickest possible distance between himself and what had happened. He just lay still and let the remembering settle over him and noticed that it felt nothing like that morning.Nothing at all like that morning.He turned his head.Tim was already awake.He was lying on his back with one arm behind his head, looking at the ceiling with the particular quality of stillness that meant he had bee

Chapter 28

They sat on the edge of the bed until the house made it impossible to stay there.It wasn’t one specific sound that did it. More the gradual accumulation of the morning asserting itself, Mrs Alves moving through the hallway below, the particular shift in light through the curtains that meant the day had committed to itself, the distant sound of the gate opening and closing as the first of Tim’s men rotated in for the morning shift.The world outside the room had started without them.Tim was the first to move.He stood and buttoned his shirt and picked up his jacket from the chair where it had been since the night before and put it on with the same complete ease he did everything, like the jacket was simply the next thing and the next thing was simply what came after this one without any weight between them.Daniel watched him from the edge of the bed.Tim looked at him when he was done. Something passed between them in that look that neither of them reached for words to describe. The

Chapter 29

The afternoon had moved into evening without Daniel noticing exactly when.He had been in the sitting room for a long time after Rafe left, long enough for the light through the window to change from the clear brightness of the afternoon into the softer grey of early evening, the garden below shifting with it, losing its sharpness as the day wound down.He had not opened his laptop again.He had sat with the notepad in his lap and the one line he had written sitting in him with a weight that was neither comfortable nor uncomfortable but simply present and true and too large to put down.At some point, Leo appeared in the doorway and said quietly that he would be outside Daniel’s room tonight and that Daniel should try to get some rest.The way he said it, practical and without drama, told Daniel everything about the shape of what the evening was going to hold without telling him anything specific.Daniel nodded and went upstairs.He lay in bed fully dressed for a while, the lamp on, th

Chapter 30

The morning came in quietly.No gates. No cars. No voices in the hallway below.Just light finding its way through the curtains slowly and the particular stillness of a house that had been through something the night before and was still settling back into itself.Daniel woke up aware of Tim before he was aware of anything else.Not with the disorientation of the hotel or even the gentle recalibration of the first morning in this room.Just an immediate and simple awareness of warmth beside him and the sound of steady breathing and the fact that Tim was still there, which had stopped being surprising and had become instead something he reached toward without thinking about reaching.He didn’t open his eyes immediately.He lay still and listened to the house and let himself have the particular luxury of a morning that wasn’t asking anything of him yet.Tim’s breathing was even. Not the breathing of someone asleep. The breathing of someone lying still and thinking, which was its own kin

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