홈 / Romance / Craved By My Husband's Best Friend / 챕터 111 - 챕터 120

Craved By My Husband's Best Friend 의 모든 챕터: 챕터 111 - 챕터 120

137 챕터

111. Rooftop At Eight?

Xavier POV My father chose my own office for the ambush.It was Thursday morning, eight o'clock, and Arthur Sterling was sitting in my chair behind my desk with his cane across his lap and a leather folder squared perfectly in front of him. He did not look up when I walked in. Julian, a pace behind me, stopped in the doorway like a man who had walked into a lion's den by mistake."Close the door," my father said.Julian looked at me. I nodded. The door clicked shut."You are in my seat," I said."I am in a seat that I paid for." He opened the folder and turned it toward me. "Sit."I remained standing. Inside the folder lay a stack of glossy photographs. The first showed me at a corner table in the Obsidian, with Belladonna Ferreira across from me. The second showed her sliding an envelope across the marble. The third showed me staring at that envelope with an expression of such naked anguish that I barely recognized my own face."Dennis Hollis," my father said, "is an enterprising ma

112. Mr Hollis

Marissa POV The cafe where I had first met Belladonna had not changed. The same wooden chairs, the same chalkboard menu, the same barista with a purple streak in her hair. I took the corner table where I had once slammed my palms down in fury and ordered two caramel macchiatos.Bella arrived at noon wearing a camel coat and sunglasses, as if she had expected to be recognized. She sat across from me, slid her glasses into her bag and looked at the second macchiato."Is that for me?""You said I was treating you.""I did say that." A small, tired smile touched her mouth. "I did not think you would remember.""I remember everything." I pushed the cup toward her. "Which is why I am here."She wrapped both hands around the cup and did not drink. Under the soft cafe light, I noticed the faint shadows beneath her eyes, the careful way she held her shoulders. She looked like a woman who had been expecting an execution for days and was almost relieved that it had arrived."You want to know wh

113. Shaky Legs

Marissa POV Ethan was waiting on the pavement outside my building.It was nearly eight on Thursday evening, and a thin rain was falling, silvering the street lamps. I had walked back from the office with my umbrella tucked under my arm, my mind full of drafting corrections and my heart full of tomorrow. When I rounded the corner and saw the figure standing under the awning, hunched in a dark overcoat with water dripping from his hair, I stopped."Marissa," he said.He looked terrible. His collar was crooked, his eyes were bloodshot and a gray stubble shadowed his jaw. He held a thick manila envelope in both hands like a man carrying a bomb."I have a restraining order application with your name on it," I said calmly. "I can file it in the morning. I would rather not.""I am not here to hurt you." His voice cracked. "Please. Five minutes. After this I will leave you alone for good. I swear on my mother's life.""Your mother is alive.""Then she can vouch for me." He tried to laugh a

114. Best I Can Do

Marissa POV"I want it on record," Hailey said at ten o'clock the next morning, "that I told you he was either innocent or the best liar I had ever met. And I want it on record that I am furious about being right.""You were not right," I said. "You hedged.""I hedged brilliantly."We were sitting on Hailey's sofa in her tiny, chaotic apartment, surrounded by a battlefield of croissant crumbs and wine glasses and the ghost of last night's takeout. Alina was curled up in an armchair with a blanket over her knees, red eyed, clutching a mug of tea as if it were a life raft. The folder lay open on the coffee table between us, its photographs fanned out like an accusation.I had told them everything. Ethan, the envelope, Belle at the cafe, Arthur's tea. I told them about the glove and the cufflink and the napkin sketch that Eleanor had mentioned. By the time I finished, Hailey had stopped eating."Okay," she said slowly. "Okay. This is a lot.""Yes.""So let me summarize." She counted on h

115. Say It

Xavier POV I heard her footsteps before I turned. They were steady and unhurried, the click of low heels on stone. I had memorized that rhythm over fourteen days the way a sailor memorizes the sound of a coast. I wanted to turn around. I wanted to say her name. Instead I stood at the railing like a man at the edge of a cliff, my hands clenched so tightly that my nails cut half moons into my palms, and I waited. She stopped three feet behind me. "Xavier." I turned. She stood in the soft light of the strings overhead, wearing a navy blouse and tailored trousers and the little silver brooch I had given her. Her hair was loose. Her face was composed and pale. She did not smile and she did not frown. She simply looked at me with those clear, level eyes, and I felt every lie I had ever told her peel away from me like old paint. "Marissa," I said. My voice came out rough. "Thank you for coming." "I said I would." "I know. I did not believe you would." I gestured to the chairs. "Pleas

116. I Would Never

Marissa POV "I am Xav." The words did not echo. They did not thunder or shake the city lights. They simply landed between us, small and plain, in the cold October air above the rooftop, and I stood very still and let them settle into the place where I had been keeping my suspicion for weeks. I had expected to feel something large. Rage, maybe. Or the dizzy lurch of a floor dropping away. Instead I felt something strangely quiet, like the moment after a long exam when you finally put down your pen and realize you already knew every answer. "Say it again," I said. Xavier's throat moved. "I am Xav. I am the man in the mask. I am the man you called Zaika on the beach and the man who typed to you at two in the morning and the man who knocked on your car window at the club." His voice shook on the last word. "I am all of them, Marissa. There is no one else." I picked up the mask from the table. It was lighter than I remembered, cool and smooth, the silver worn pale at the edges where a

117. If I May

Xavier POVI did not sleep.I sat on the edge of my bed at five in the morning with a cup of black coffee going cold between my hands and watched the sky over the city turn from ink to pewter. Across the hall, behind two doors and a stretch of quiet carpet, the woman I loved was sleeping off the longest night of her life. She had not forgiven me. She had said so plainly. But she had stayed. She had fallen asleep against my shoulder and I had carried her, very carefully, to her own door.And I had lied to her.Not a large lie. Not the kind that makes a man sick in the street. A small, quiet omission, tucked inside a truth like a splinter inside a glove. That is everything. I had heard myself say it, and the words had tasted like metal.The doorbell rang at six.Julian stood in the corridor in a pressed charcoal suit with a tablet tucked under his arm and two paper cups of coffee, one of which he held out without a word. I took it and let him in."You look terrible, sir.""Thank you, Ju

118. Another Confession?

Marissa POVI was not supposed to be in the boardroom.Xavier had asked me, very politely and then not very politely, to wait in the lobby with a book. Alina, of course, had other ideas. At a quarter to nine on Monday morning she looped her arm through mine, marched me past two security guards and a bewildered receptionist, and declared, "She is my plus one, she is a lead architect and she is a shareholder's best friend. Try to stop me."Nobody tried.The boardroom on the fortieth floor was a long hall of dark glass and pale wood with a table large enough to host a small war. Eleven chairs, nine already filled. Frederick Vance sat at the far end, a tall silver haired man in an immaculate suit with a smile like a letter opener. Beside him, perfectly styled in dove grey, sat Cassandra, who raised one eyebrow at me and mouthed, how brave.I took a seat along the wall with Alina and James. My stomach was a tight little knot.Xavier entered at nine sharp. He looked like a man carved out o

119. I Did Not

Marissa POVThe next three weeks were the happiest of my adult life.I know how that sounds. I know it sounds like the sort of sentence that comes right before a disaster, and in a novel it would be. But I did not know that then. All I knew was that Xavier Sterling had somehow become a man who woke me with a text at five in the morning that said, run?I love running. I have always loved it, the thump of feet on cold pavement and the burn in the lungs and the way the whole city looks borrowed at dawn. Ethan used to say it was a waste of time. Xavier met me at the river path in grey sweatpants and a faded university hoodie, with a thermos of coffee and the grim expression of a man who had not exercised since his twenties."You do not have to do this," I said."I wish to.""You are going to die at the second bridge.""I will die at the second bridge," he said calmly, "but I will die beside you."He nearly did die at the second bridge. He wheezed and swore and bent over with his hands on

120. Then Make it

Xavier POVAt half past five on Friday, with two and a half hours until the most important dinner of my life, Julian walked into my office without knocking and closed the door behind him with a click that sounded like a verdict."Sir," he said. "We have a problem."I was standing at the window fixing my cufflinks, rehearsing for the fortieth time. Marissa, I have something to tell you. Marissa, you asked me on the roof if there was anything else. I stopped halfway through a cuff."What kind of problem?""A person named Maddy Brennan."It took me a moment. Then a thin, grey memory surfaced. A pleasant young woman in a lavender cardigan who had brought me coffee every morning for two years, always exactly forty degrees, always with a paper napkin folded into a little triangle. I had said good morning to her perhaps four hundred times and never once asked her last name."The coffee girl," I said."Assistant to the executive floor. She was reassigned to the archive department on the first

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