THE CONTRACT BRIDE’S REVENGE 의 모든 챕터: 챕터 71 - 챕터 80

OLIVIA’S POV The house Jaden had arranged for my father was nothing like our old apartment.I had expected something comfortable. Something functional. A decent space with enough room for a man recovering from surgery to move around without difficulty.I had not expected this.Three bedrooms. A proper sitting room with furniture that had been chosen rather than acquired. A kitchen that was fully stocked before my father had even arrived. Two maids who introduced themselves at the door with the same quiet professionalism as the staff at Jaden’s house.I stood in the entrance and looked around and thought about the man who had arranged all of this without telling me he was doing it.My father was going to be comfortable here.More than comfortable.I understood the other part of it too. The practical calculation underneath the generosity. If I was visiting my father in a house that Jaden had arranged in a neighborhood appropriate to his public image, the story remained clean. No photog

OLIVIA’S POVThe visit had gone better than I expected.Better than I had quietly been dreading on the drive over that morning. I had sat in the passenger seat watching the city move past the window and running through versions of how it might go. My father asking Jaden direct questions that required careful answers. Jaden retreating into the controlled professional version of himself that did not leave much room for the kind of conversation my father preferred.I had underestimated both of them.My father had been himself entirely. Warm and unhurried and asking the kind of questions that seemed simple until you noticed they were not. How long had Jaden been in construction. What had drawn him to it. Whether he preferred the building or the business of it.Jaden had answered each one with more than I expected him to give. Not performing openness. Actually opening. Something about my father’s particular quality of attention invited that. He had always been able to do it. Make people fe

OLIVIA’S POVI found out about the complaint from Ethan.Not because Jaden told me. He had not mentioned it at breakfast or dinner the previous day and I had not known anything was happening until Ethan arrived. On Thursday morning I passed the study door and heard the particular quality of a conversation that was not routine.I did not listen at the door.But I noticed.The energy of the house was different again. Not the focused surgical intensity of the Eastbridge response. Something quieter than that. More contained. Like a man who had received news and decided exactly what to do with it before anyone else in the room had finished reading the headline.I went to the library, read some books that interest me. I stayed there for two hours.Then I went to the study.Ethan was gone by then. The house had returned to its surface quiet. I knocked and heard Jaden’s voice and came in and sat down.He looked up from the desk.I looked at him for a moment.“Adrian filed a regulatory compl

OLIVIA’S POVThe restaurant was nothing like anything he had taken me to before.No doorman. No photographer positioned at a discreet distance. No table of industry names arranged across the room like a strategic map of who mattered to whom this season.Just a rooftop.Small and warm and lit with the particular quality of places that understood atmosphere without overexplaining it. Eight tables. Maybe ten. Each one with enough space between it and the next to feel private without being isolated. The city spread out below and around us in every direction. All of it visible. All of it at the exact right distance.The kind of place that did not appear in any publication because it did not need to.I stood at the entrance for a moment and looked at it.Jaden was already speaking to someone near the host stand. A brief exchange. Familiar but not formal. The ease of a person who had been here before and been known here before.He came back and led me to a table near the far edge.The view f

OLIVIA’S POVI did not sleep for a long time.I lay on my back in the dark with the ceiling above me and the house quiet around me and my mind doing the thing it had been doing for weeks. The thing I had been managing carefully and measuring precisely and trying to keep inside appropriate boundaries.It was not staying inside appropriate boundaries anymore.I had known that for a while.I had been knowing it for weeks the way you knew things you were not ready to say out loud. Carrying the knowledge carefully. Setting it down in one place and picking it up and moving it somewhere more manageable and finding it had moved back on its own while you were not looking.I was falling in love with Jaden Parker.I lay in the dark and said it clearly inside my own head for the first time without immediately following it with a qualification or a redirect or a reminder about clause one.I was falling in love with Jaden Parker.There it was.Sitting in the middle of my consciousness like somethin