Semua Bab The Playboy's Forced Bride: Bab 1 - Bab 10

The dinner went better than I expected, but worse than I needed. Dominic was exactly what my three years of research had warned me about. He watched me across the table the whole night with eyes that didn’t match his polite smile. I smiled back, chose every word carefully, and gave him nothing he could use. Yet, he studied me as he had already decided he would figure me out. On the ride back to the estate, I kept telling myself it went well, and I handled it. The city lights blurred past the window while I tried not to think about the way Dominic had paused before answering my second question, or how Adrian had observed the way his father was watching me. The Tao estate sat at the end of a long private driveway lined with old trees. The house was three floors of pale stone and dark glass, surrounded by gardens that were neatly trimmed. I stepped out with two suitcases and my laptop bag. Before I unpacked my things, I walked around the space and mapped it in my head. Both the exis

I heard the sound of footsteps approaching quietly in the west wing, a door opened, and the steps headed toward the stairs. I finally made my choice and deleted the message, cleared it completely, set my phone face down, and I sat at my desk with my laptop open by the time Adrian reached the bottom of the stairs. My laptop screen was blank. Someone in this building knew exactly who I was. And they had chosen to warn me privately instead of exposing me. That meant they wanted something. “We have an invitation from Dominic at ten.” Adrian passed the message to me briefly, without an explanation. His father wanted to see us on the 40th floor right away. I had never been above the 38th floor in three years. The executive level felt different. Some minutes later, I was done and ready. Dominic stood up when we walked in, smiling as if we had done him a great favor. The photo from last night had exploded online, and the press was running the exact story he wanted: The Tao heir was fina

I didn’t sleep after that email. Someone up there had sent me a warning. Stop looking. Leave now. Though, it didn’t feel like a threat. It felt like someone who knew what was coming and didn’t want me in the middle of it. The next day at seven in the evening, Adrian left the estate for dinner in the city. He had mentioned it briefly earlier that day at breakfast, he didn’t give details, I nodded and we left it there. Ten minutes after he drove out, I sat at my desk weighing whether what I was about to do was smart. But I needed to know the full layout of the estate, every room and corner. That was part of the job, I wasn’t just curious. Then, I crossed into the west wing, It was calmer than the rest of the house. I checked a sitting room, then a study room with its door half open. Nothing useful on the desk. At the end of the corridor, I found a door I had missed earlier. I opened it and stopped. The room was long and narrow, lit by soft fixtures that pushed the lights upward al

By the third week, the story had started spreading across the media. That single photo from the charity dinner had given the press everything they needed. The playboy who had finally settled down. The unknown woman who had somehow caught him. A romance that felt real because sixty thousand people had decided it was. The city wanted a love story. Dominic’s team gave them one. We were booked into events almost every night. Charity auctions, board dinners. At the long reception, I sat beside Adrian, and people who had known him for decades watched us closely, searching for any weakness. I didn’t slip. But the constant performance was starting to wear on me, sustaining two versions of myself in the same room, night after night, was getting harder to handle. The careful wife on the surface. The investigator underneath. The space between them took more focus than I wanted to admit. The magazine interview was Dominic’s idea. His team set it up without asking us. Silverton Social wanted