All Chapters of The Playboy's Forced Bride: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

It was still dark when we left the house at 5:45 a.m. The estate was still calm at that hour, before the staff started moving around and the day got noisy with its own routine. Adrian carried the bags to the car. I waited by the front steps with my travel cup of coffee, my second phone, and a thick stack of notes I had already worked through for two weeks straight. I got into the passenger seat. He drove while I balanced my laptop on my knees typing with full focus as we moved through the empty streets. We did not talk much. Over the past two months, a comfortable silence had grown between us. We no longer felt the need to fill every quiet moment with conversations. It felt easy now. I had been preparing for this trip since the itinerary arrived in my email. Adrian was meeting with five key members from a financial partnership. Three of them showed up in Tao Industries records. But one name stood out in the Vela Holdings files. It was not a small connection, a prominent personality

I never realized the most difficult part of a private flight was having nowhere to go. On the ground, I could always step away into another room, a task to do, or the view outside from a car window. Up here there was only the cabin, two seats, and the steady hum of the engines. I kept my laptop open and worked on the Hargreave notes. I organized everything from the dinner and matched it against the documentary evidence. The connections fit perfectly. The work was solid. But, I couldn't explain why it felt so heavy. About forty minutes in, Adrian set his book down. “What did you think of Hargreave?” I finished typing my sentence first. “Competent,” I said. “He knows how to handle people.” He looked at me. I kept my face calm and showed him nothing. He turned toward the window. “He’s a parasite,” Adrian said. His voice was flat, like he was stating a simple fact that had stopped bothering him years ago. “He has been attached to my father for twenty years. I have never unders

The Millbrook cafe was still the same after six years. I lived three blocks away from there when I was twenty-two. Back then, I used to come here almost every morning and sit in this booth. I felt more like myself than anywhere I had ever been. Sitting here again made me realize how time flies. I ordered a cup of coffee and waited. Iris was nine minutes late, for her she was basically on time. She came through the door adjusting her scarf, saw me, and went straight to my table. She didn’t say hello at first. She just looked at me. I had known that look all my life, for a split second, she observed me thoroughly, quiet and steady, seeing more than I wanted her to. Only Iris could do that. She’d known me too long to be fooled by whatever version of myself I was trying to be here. She finished her observation. “You’re in trouble,” she said. Not the whole investigation I had been working on for three years or anything linked to it, that wasn't what she meant. She was talking

The note arrived Tuesday morning on thick cream paper. A handwritten invitation, delivered through Vivienne’s personal assistant, requesting the pleasure of my company for tea on Thursday at 3 p.m. I read it standing at the kitchen counter with my coffee. Then I read it again. The formality was deliberate. Vivienne is the kind of woman who has spent thirty years understanding that how you do something often says more than the words themselves. She could have sent a text. She could have brought it up at a family dinner and made it casual and given me time to prepare. Instead, she chose a handwritten note, a personal assistant, and seventy-two hours’ notice. She wanted me to arrive on Thursday already wondering what the invitation was all about. I accepted the same way, then spent the next two days preparing like I always do before an important meeting. Her sitting room at Dominic’s residence felt different from the grand spaces I had seen before. The tea was already poured when

I needed a break from work, so I went to the library. My bedroom had turned into an investigation room. The laptop on the desk was a constant reminder of the documents, the hidden second phone, the encrypted notes. Everything stayed in that room with me. Even when I lay in bed, I could feel the laptop there, as if it were watching and judging how I used my time. The library felt different, I had never used it for work. There were no scattered papers, no late-night calls, no decisions made in the glow of a screen, just books everywhere, and that was all I needed tonight. I pulled a book from the shelf without looking at the title. It was fiction. I had not read a story for fun in over a year. I slipped into the big armchair by the window, opened it, and read the first paragraph, nothing sank in. I read it again. Something in me finally stopped resisting. I let myself focus on the book, and the room was quiet around me. This time, the words began to draw me in. I wasn’t just tired