All Chapters of THE RAKE WHO CHASED ONLY ME: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

70 Chapters

Chapter 21: Resolve

DAISY♡I sat on the bathroom floor until the decision was solid.That was how I made decisions, not quickly, not emotionally, but by sitting with them until the shape of them was clear enough to hold. Ivy sat beside me and did not rush it and that was why she was my best friend. She understood that some things needed to be arrived at rather than reached for.I looked at the bracelet on the tiles between us.To Lily, always. DA woman who had loved Dexter Hart for seven months and been offered everything except what she actually needed and then been left to find out she had been replaced through someone else’s casual conversation. A woman who had spent eight months not recovering from it. A woman who had sat in my studio today with a borrowed name and a warm smile and left something behind that she knew I would find and turn over and read.She wanted me to know she existed. She wanted me to understand what I was dealing with, that was what I told myself. I understood.And sitting on t

Chapter 22: somewhere solid

DAISY ♡Casper’s message came through at half past five.“Still at work. I’ll pick you up at seven. I'm looking forward to it.”Short and warm and without any of the performance that some men attached to simple messages. I read it and felt something settle, not the electric unsettling kind of feeling, the other kind. The kind that came from someone being exactly who they said they were.Ivy was sitting across from me when it came through and she read my face before I said anything.“Tonight?” she said.“Seven o’clock,” I said.She put down her magazine and looked at me with the particular Ivy expression, the one that had warmth in it and also something careful underneath. Then she stood up. “Come on then. Let’s get you ready.”She pulled the flower outfit from my wardrobe herself, a soft printed dress in cream and dusty rose that I had bought three months ago and worn exactly once. She held it up against me and tilted her head.“The restaurant has that natural aesthetic,” she said

Chapter 23: To, good evenings

CASPER ♡I had been thinking about Daisy Brown for three weeks.Not in the complicated way, but in the straightforward way of a man who had met someone interesting and wanted to know her better. She was warm and funny and talented and she had a way of asking questions that suggested she actually wanted the answers rather than just the performance of asking. Those people were rarer than they should have been and I appreciated them when I found them.I left the hospital at five. Home by five thirty. Ready by six fifteen because I was the kind of person who was always early and had made peace with that. I drove to her building and texted Daisy that I was outside and waited.When I stepped out of the car I looked up at the building and saw him.Dexter Hart. Standing at the living room window with his arms crossed and an expression I recognised immediately, not from personal acquaintance but from professional pattern recognition. I had spent ten years reading faces in high-pressure momen

Chapter 24: Complicated. Genuineness

DAISY The restaurant had quieted down around us.Most of the other tables had turned over, couples leaving, new ones arriving, the particular rhythm of a Saturday evening in New York that kept moving regardless of what was happening at any individual table. Our waiter had refilled the water twice without being asked. The candle between us had burned down to something low and warm.Casper had not pressed me after the silence.That was the thing about him, he asked the question and then he gave me the room that the question required. He did not fill the space with reassurance or backtracking or the particular male anxiety of someone who needed an answer immediately to manage his own discomfort. He picked up his wine and looked at the room and let me sit with what he had asked for as long as I needed.I appreciated that more than I could say.I turned my wine glass slowly in my fingers. Looked at the table. Looked at him.“I’m not going to lie to you,” I said.He looked at me directly

Chapter 26: Something was different

Dexter’s POVI had not been waiting.I want to be clear about that, I had not positioned myself in the kitchen at eleven fifteen on a Saturday evening specifically to be present when she came home. I had come for water. I had stayed because my legs had apparently made a separate decision from my brain and declined to take me back to my room.I was at the counter with a glass I had filled twenty minutes ago and not touched when I heard the key in the lock.I heard her put her keys on the hook. The small pause in the hallway, she always did that, a moment of stillness before she committed to whatever room she was going to. Then footsteps. Then she was in the kitchen doorway.I looked at her.Something was different.Not the easy lightness of the first date, the loose smile and the warmth of someone who had been reminded they were wanted. This was something else. Something quieter and more internal. Settled, was the word. Like a person who had made a decision or arrived at something th

Chapter 26: I want you

Daisy’s POVI had not been asleep.I had been sitting on my bed with my back against the headboard and my knees pulled up and my phone face down on the nightstand and I had been doing the quiet internal work of the end of an evening, turning it over, placing it, deciding what it meant and what came next.Casper had been gracious. That was the word I kept returning to, gracious, in the old sense of it, the sense that meant generous with dignity. He had asked and I had answered honestly and he had received it without flinching and said what he said at the door and walked back to his car and I had stood on the pavement and felt the quiet closing of something that had been genuinely lovely.And I had come upstairs and walked into the kitchen and looked at Dexter and seen something in his face that I did not have clean language for and said goodnight and came to my room and sat on my bed and thought.I had been thinking for forty minutes when the knock came.One knock. Firm. Not the soft

Chapter 27: The wound from the past

Ivy’s POVI heard the knock at midnight.I had not been fully asleep, that particular light hovering that happened when the apartment had too much tension in it to allow for proper rest. I had been lying on my back with my eyes at the ceiling listening to the city outside and the quiet inside and thinking about two people who kept arriving at the same door and then not walking through it.The knock was firm. Not uncertain like the one three weeks ago, this one had made up its mind. I heard her door open. Low voices in the corridor, not argument, not warmth exactly, something in between. The particular register of a serious conversation being had at midnight between two people who were both too stubborn and too careful for their own good.I lay there and listened to the shape of it without the words.Her voice. His voice. Hers again. A silence. Then the sound of his footsteps going back down the corridor and his door closing and the apartment going quiet again.I stared at the ceilin

Chapter 28: Being Honest

Dexter’s POVIvy asked me what I wanted and I sat with it.Not in the polite way, not the two-second pause before a prepared answer. I actually sat with it. I put my coffee down and I looked at my sister across the kitchen table and I let the question do what it was designed to do which was go somewhere I had been managing it away from for a very long time.What do you want.Not what are you offering. Not what is manageable. What do you want.I thought about my parents.I had not chosen to think about them, the thought arrived the way it always did when something pressed against the decision I made at twelve years old, uninvited and precise and carrying the particular weight of a hallway I had stood in on a Thursday evening while my mother cried behind a closed door. My father’s bag by the front entrance. The specific sound of wheels on floorboards.I had been twelve. I had stood in that hallway and decided something that I had kept without examination for sixteen years. That love wa

Chapter 29: The law shoot

Daisy’s POVI had a full day shoot booked and I was glad of it.That was the honest truth of Thursday morning, I was glad to have somewhere to be that was not the apartment, glad to have a purpose that was concrete and external and required my full attention rather than the portion of it I had been giving to the slow-motion situation of my living arrangements.I woke up early. Showered. And left for the studio. Forty minutes later I got to the studio and made coffee from my in house kitchen in my studio. The studio had a small kitchen attached, one of the things I had loved about it when I signed the lease, the way it made long shoot days feel less institutional. I packed my kit bag with the particular focused efficiency that came over me on shoot days, every lens accounted for, batteries charged, cards formatted and labeled.I was good at this. That was the thing about my work. It is the one place where I was always completely certain of who I was and what I was doing. Behind the ca

Chapter 30: Through her lens

Dexter’s POVI watched her work for four hours.That was the duration of it, four hours of standing or sitting where she put me, watching her move around the studio with the quiet certainty of someone entirely at home in what they were doing, and understanding something about Daisy Brown that I had not understood before.I had seen her in my kitchen. In my living room. In my shirt on a Tuesday morning with her arms crossed and her chin up saying it was a mistake with her eyes saying something else entirely. I had seen her in the corridor and at the kitchen table and on the balcony with the city below her. I had seen her in the particular softness of late night conversations and the particular composure of difficult mornings.I had not seen her like this.Behind the camera she was a different version of herself, not a hidden version, not a performance, just a version I had not had access to before. Focused in the way of someone who was not trying to be focused, who simply was. She mo

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