All Chapters of I Bought Her Freedom, She Stole My Heart: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

I've bought companies worth billions without blinking.I've signed deals that made grown men weep and walked away from negotiations that would have broken anyone else — and I've never, not once, lost sleep over any of it.But I had never bought a person before.Not officially, anyway."She'll be ready by Friday," Gerald Reeves said from across the mahogany desk, his voice carrying the practiced smoothness of a man who had spent his whole life selling things. The only difference today was that what he was selling had a heartbeat.I didn't respond immediately. I let the silence stretch — a technique that had served me well in every boardroom I'd ever walked into. Silence made desperate men nervous.And Gerald Reeves was nothing if not desperate.Three million dollars in debt. Bad investments, worse gambling habits, and a family name that used to mean something in this city. Now it meant nothing. Now it meant this — him sitting across from me with sweaty palms and hollow eyes, trading th

She came back the next morning at eight o'clock sharp.I knew before Daniel buzzed me that it would be her. No one else in my orbit showed up unannounced two days in a row. No one else would have dared.I told him to send her up.She walked in carrying the contract — all forty-two pages of it — with small yellow sticky notes marking specific sections. She had used a red pen to underline passages. Three of them, from what I could see as she placed it on my desk without waiting for an invitation."You said it was straightforward," she said, without preamble."I said no such thing.""You implied it.""Miss Reeves—""Page eleven." She flipped to the marked page and turned it to face me. Her finger landed on paragraph four, subsection B. "Cohabitation clause. I move into your residence within seven days of signing." She looked up. "You didn't mention that.""It's in the contract.""I know it's in the contract. I read the contract." She flipped to the second marked page. "Page twenty-three.

I had lived alone for eleven years.I knew the particular silence of this apartment the way you know a language you were raised in — not by thinking about it, but by the way the wrongness registers immediately when something changes.At five fifty-three in the morning, something changed.I heard it before I reached the kitchen. The low, careful sound of cabinet doors being opened and closed. The specific click of the coffee machine — my coffee machine — being operated by someone who didn't know it required a full thirty seconds of preheating before the grind cycle, and who would therefore end up with a lukewarm first cup.I almost turned around.Instead I kept walking.She was standing at the kitchen island in a grey oversized sweater and dark leggings, hair loose and slightly tangled, reading what appeared to be a worn paperback novel propped open against the fruit bowl. She hadn't heard me yet. She was frowning at a page with the focused concentration of someone having a private arg

She wore navy blue.Not a gown — a dress, simple and well-cut, the kind of thing that said I made an effort without saying I'm trying to impress you. She had done something with her hair. It was still dark, still a little impractical, but pinned up at the back with a few strands loose around her face.She was waiting in the living room when I came out at six.She looked at me. I looked at her."You look—" I stopped. Started again. "That works.""High praise," she said drily. But she smoothed the front of her dress once — a small, nervous gesture she probably didn't realize she'd made. I catalogued it and said nothing.In the car, she sat with her hands folded in her lap, looking out the window at the city sliding past. I could feel the tension in the space between us — careful, controlled, the tension of two people who had done their homework and were about to be tested on material they couldn't fully prepare for."M

Daniel came to my office at two-seventeen on Monday afternoon.He didn't knock — which meant it was either urgent or bad, and in eleven years of working together he had never once managed to distinguish between the two."Marcus Cole was seen on Carver Street this morning," he said. "Around ten."I set down my pen. "That's where Sophia works.""Yes sir."I was already reaching for my jacket.---Aldwick Books occupied a narrow storefront between a dry cleaner and a café that had been failing gracefully for years. The kind of place that smelled like old paper and good intentions, with handwritten staff recommendations taped to the shelves and a cat asleep on the front counter whose job appeared to be purely decorative.I had pulled her file. I knew she worked here. I had simply never — until now — considered what that actually looked like.Through the window I stopped.She was at the back of the store, reshelving fr