Todos os capítulos de The Substitute Bride Of The Blackwood : Capítulo 41 - Capítulo 50

POV: CharlotteI didn’t plan to feel anything.That was the honest way of how the evening started, with me in a black dress I’d chosen because it required no thought, beside Damien in a car that smelled like his cologne and the quiet of a man who had already reviewed his evening’s agenda and kept it somewhere efficient in his mind. A business dinner for one of Blackwood Empire’s longstanding partners, the kind of event that existed primarily to maintain relationships rather than build new ones, nothing that required genuine attention from either of us.I had a book I was planning to think about the entire time.The venue was a private dining room above a restaurant in midtown, twelve people around a table long enough that conversations naturally fragmented into smaller clusters, which meant Damien and I spent most of dinner at opposite ends of the same table, close enough to exchange a look occasionally but too far apart for anything more than that.I didn’

POV: CharlotteI heard him before I saw him.A sound from the corridor outside my room, not loud, not a crash, just something wrong in the quality of it, a single heavy contact with the wall that didn’t sound like someone walking past. I was out of bed before I’d finished deciding to move, my feet on the floor, the door open, and then I saw him.He was braced against the wall with one forearm, his other hand pressed flat to the surface beside him, his head dropped forward. Still standing. But only barely, and only because the wall was there.“Damien.”He didn’t answer right away. His shoulders were rising and falling too fast, his breathing audible in the quiet of the corridor, and the sound of it sent something cold rushing through me because I had never once heard him breathe like that, not in all the months of watching him carefully manage every sign that something was wrong.“I’m fine,” he said, to the wall.“You’re not,” I said.I crossed

‎POV: Charlotte‎He was already in the lounge when I came downstairs.‎Not working. That was the first thing I noticed, no laptop, no phone, no folder open on the low table. Just him, sitting in the chair nearest the window with a glass of water he hadn’t touched, looking at the dark garden outside like it owed him an explanation for something.‎I’d been planning to get tea and go back upstairs. I changed my mind without fully deciding to and sat down on the sofa across from him instead.‎He looked over.‎”I thought you were asleep,” he said.‎”I thought you were too,” I said.‎Neither of us moved to explain ourselves further, and after a moment the silence settled into something that didn’t require filling, the particular quiet of two people who had stopped needing noise to feel comfortable in the same space.‎I looked at him in the low light of the room, the lamp in the corner casting everything warm and slightly soft, and I thought ab

POV: Damien I didn’t sleep. Not because of the kiss specifically, but because of what I did with it afterward, which was try to examine it the way I examined everything else, methodically, pulling it apart to find the clean line of cause and effect that usually made any situation manageable, and failing completely, which was not something I was accustomed to. I sat at my desk for an hour after I’d come upstairs, the same desk where I’d reviewed contracts that afternoon and I ran through what had happened in the corridor with the same discipline I applied to board decisions. It should have been simple. I had kissed Charlotte. An uncomplicated sentence, a statement of fact, and it should have remained one. Instead, by the following morning, it had become the single most difficult thing I’d tried to understand in years. I had spent thirty years operating on the principle that every action was a product of a choice, that impulse was something

POV: CharlotteI was still smiling when I picked up the phone.That was the thing I kept coming back to afterward. The notebook open in front of me, the story moving faster than it had in weeks, the memory of his hand finding mine at the breakfast table still warm somewhere in my chest, and I was smiling, genuinely, the kind of smile that lives on your face without you putting it there, and then my mother’s name appeared on the screen and I answered without thinking twice.“Charlotte.”Something in the way she said my name made the smile start to fade before she’d said anything else. Not the word itself. The weight behind it. The careful weight of someone who has been rehearsing how to say something and still hasn’t found the right way.“Mom,” I said. “What is it?”A pause.Too long for nothing. Too deliberate for something small.“Victoria’s back,” she said.The library went very still around me.I sat there with the phone against m