All Chapters of After Divorce; I Married My Husband’s Brother : Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

Gwen’s pov My body remembered before my mind did. I had that deep settled ache that started in my shoulders and ran all the way down. The kind that wasn't unpleasant exactly but was impossible to ignore. It pulled me into consciousness before I was ready for it and for a few seconds I just lay there with my eyes closed feeling my existence without attaching meaning to it. Then I opened my eyes and saw the ceiling and the ceiling was wrong because it was not my ceiling. I sat up slowly and the sheets pooled at my waist and the room arranged itself around me in the early morning light. It was all dark furniture and high ceilings and the particular quality of silence that belonged to a space that was larger than it needed to be. Everything from the night before came back in pieces, not all at once but in the way memories returned when your body had already processed them and was simply waiting for your mind to catch up. I pressed the heel of my hand against my forehead. I had sl

Gwen’s POV They had been at it since late afternoon and the sunroom had transformed over the hours into something that looked like a war room. There were laptops open and mood boards spread across the table with empty cups pushed to the edges to make space for whatever needed space next. My team worked the way they always had which was with a focused and slightly chaotic energy that looked disorganized from the outside and produced exceptional results anyway. Dare had the vendor list color coded and was calling in favors from people she had been saving for exactly this kind of emergency. Micah had pulled three different lighting concepts and was arguing quietly but passionately for the second one. Lena and Pru had divided the catering logistics between them without being asked and were moving through it with the efficiency of people who genuinely enjoyed this kind of pressure.I had forgotten how much I loved this. The building of something from scattered pieces, the satisfaction

Xavier’s povThe press room was exactly the kind of environment I had learned to move through without effort even with the lights and cameras and the stillness of a room full of people waiting to write something down. I had done enough of these to know how they moved, where the difficult questions lived and how to answer them in ways that gave journalists enough to fill their columns without giving them anything that actually mattered.Jessica Sterling stood beside me at the podium and she was good at this, genuinely good because it didn’t look like she was performing, she possessed an elite level of competence.When the conference started it was magnificent and it held the efficiency of two prepared people who had done their homework and respected each other's time.We covered the expansion first then I spoke about Holt Holdings' trajectory in real estate and the natural progression toward integrated travel services.I spoke about offering clients not just the properties but the eas

Xavier's pov Punching him had not been enough.That was the truth of it, and it sat in me on the drive back from the press room with my knuckles still aching and the noise of the room still somewhere in my ears. The reporter was going to have a story now that was considerably more interesting than anything he had walked into that building to write, and I knew that and had done it anyway and would do it again, and none of that changed the fact that it had not been enough because the word was already out there.It was spoken into cameras and recorders, and the permanence of things that had been said in public and a punch couldn't reach any of that.I went back to meetings and then my office like nothing happened. That was what you did when you were the alpha of a pack, the head of a company, and the man that a room full of people needed to believe was in control of everything.The board had questions about the press conference, but these questions were not for the merger, as they wer

Xavier’s pov I should have pulled back.I knew it the moment the air in the kitchen shifted and her eyes met mine and the space between us stopped being the space between two people being careful and became something else entirely. I knew it, I looked at her and she looked at me and I kissed her anyway because there are things a man can only resist for so long before the resistance itself becomes its own kind of lie.She kissed me back and that was the end of any argument I had left in me.I kissed her like I had been keeping myself from it all day, through the press conference, the meetings, the boxing ring and everything else.All of it was collapsing into this kitchen at one in the morning with my bruised hands finding her face and her fingers curling into my shirt and neither of us pretending at this moment.My body ached from the gym and I didn't care. I lifted her and set her on the kitchen counter then she made a sound against my mouth that undid something in me which made m