All Chapters of Cursed To Love You: Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

Reid gave her the moment.After he said the name — Dorian — he didn't keep talking. He didn't try to fill the silence with explanations or justifications. He just stood up from the small table and walked to the window, putting his back to her, giving her the space to process this without his eyes on her face while she did it.He knew her well enough to know she needed that.She sat with the information.Four years. Four years of believing he'd simply chosen to leave, chosen distance, chosen a clean break over honesty. Four years of building a life around his absence, of learning how to exist without him, of teaching herself not to wonder what had actually happened.Four years of being careful not to want him.All of it based on a lie someone had told him specifically to manipulate both of them.She turned the information over slowly, looking at it from different angles, the way she looked at financial documents when something didn't quite add up.When she finally spoke her voice was c

She read it a third time, just to be sure.The letter said that her father's death — the fishing accident off the Clare coast when she was seventeen — wasn't actually an accident. It said a company operating in the area at the time had been running illegal dumping operations, that something about those operations had compromised the structural integrity of the boat. That the company had covered it up afterward, made it look clean, made it disappear into the category of bad weather and bad luck.And that the company was a subsidiary of a holding group Dorian was connected to.She set the letter back down.Zachary was watching her, hadn't said anything yet, just standing there with his own copy of it still in his hand, his eyes moving between the page and her face."It could be a lie," he said finally."Yes," she said."It could be him trying to hurt you because everything else has failed. The patent, the trial, the board meeting — he's losing everywhere else, so he's reaching for the

Maeve fed them aggressively for two days, which Isla had explained on the first morning was simply how Irish mothers expressed approval."She's not trying to fatten you up," Isla said, watching Zachary eye the third helping of brown bread being pushed toward him. "Well, she is. But it means she likes you.""I've never eaten this much in my life," he said."Eat it anyway. Refusing is an insult."He ate it.They walked the coast road together on the second day, Maeve pointing out landmarks that meant nothing to most people and everything to her — the spot where Isla learned to swim, the rock formation where her husband used to take her fishing as a child, the particular bend in the road where you could see the lighthouse if the weather was clear enough.Zachary understood Isla differently here.He saw where the warmth came from — this place that wrapped itself around you, this mother who fed strangers like family, this coastline that demanded you slow down and pay attention to it. He sa

The thirty-first floor installation was finished on a Wednesday afternoon.Isla stood in the middle of the completed space, her team having packed up and left an hour earlier, and looked at what she'd built. The column that had started as a structural problem now stood as the centerpiece, the way the panels curved around it like the space had been designed with it in mind from the very beginning. The walls told a story without explaining it, the way good design always did. The light came through the windows and did exactly what she'd planned and then something slightly more — an unexpected warmth in the late afternoon that hadn't been in any of her sketches.That slightly more was the best part.Zachary stood beside her. The building was quiet around them, the particular emptiness of a workspace after everyone else has gone home, just the two of them and the installation and the city visible through the floor-to-ceiling windows."What does it feel like?" he asked. "Finishing somet

She woke up before he did, which almost never happened.For a long moment she just lay there looking at him — at the particular stillness of his face in sleep, the one expression he couldn't manage or control, the one that made him look closer to the age he actually was instead of the age his responsibilities made him carry. His hand was loose on the pillow between them. Last night's yes still sitting in the room somewhere, undisturbed, like a piece of furniture they hadn't decided where to put yet.She got up carefully. Went to the kitchen. Started the coffee.She heard him wake up by the particular quiet of it — no alarm, no movement for a long moment, just the change in the air that meant a person had stopped being asleep. Then his footsteps.He stood in the doorway of the kitchen in just his sweatpants, hair completely wrecked, watching her."Morning," she said, not turning around.He didn't answer.She poured the coffee. Reached for the milk. Felt him still there, still watching,