All Chapters of He Chose My Sister, So I Married His Enemy: Chapter 341 - Chapter 350

The three weeks went the way ordinary weeks do. He worked his Wednesdays and Thursdays on site and came home with stories about kettles and fire exits, and I spent my days at New Ground and my evenings arguing with him over the washing up. Somewhere in the second week, a yellow sticky note appeared on the damp towel rail that said Effortless, in his handwriting, and I left it there. By the Friday of the event, it had curled at the corners from the steam.I dressed that morning in plum trousers and an ivory silk blouse with a row of tiny buttons down each cuff. They were beautiful buttons and completely impractical, and I held out my left wrist to him, because I couldn't fasten the cuff one-handed. He frowned at it with great seriousness."These are for people with tweezers," he said."They're for people with husbands.""I'm not sure I'm qualified." He got the first button through on the third attempt, then looked up and stayed there, his fingers still on my wrist. His eyes travelled s

"He framed a terrible portrait we made one evening," I said."It is not terrible," Damien said at once."It's terrible.""It has character."The interviewer's eyebrows rose, and she looked delighted. "A portrait?" she said. "I think you'd better explain.""We had a sketchbook and a pencil each, and a kitchen," I said. "It was a silly evening. We drew something, and it came out wrong in every possible way, and he put it in a frame. It's in his study now, where he can see it when he's on calls."A warm ripple of laughter went through the audience. Damien made a small, pained sound and rubbed the back of his neck. "I'd like it noted," he said, "that it's a very honest likeness.""Of what?""I'm not saying. It's mine.""It's ours.""It's in my study, so it's mine." He glanced at the interviewer, then at the room, then back at me with something wry and wounded in his face. "I don't apologise for it. It's a fine frame.""The frame is lovely," I agreed. "It's the contents I'm concerned about

On Saturday afternoon we went shopping for dinner together, which felt faintly ridiculous and entirely wonderful. We had agreed over breakfast that we would cook that evening, and the grocer's was bright and half empty, with a crate of lemons by the door. Damien took the basket and I took the list, and we moved through the aisles side by side, bumping elbows.At the till, the queue was long enough that I leaned back against him, and he rested his chin on top of my head. His arms came loosely round my waist, and I felt him breathe in the smell of my hair. Nobody looked at us, and I liked that more than I could have said.It wasn't until I started unpacking the bags on the kitchen counter that I noticed what he had bought. There were two fillets of white fish, a bunch of dill, a jar of capers, and a bag of small potatoes. There was no chicken and no rice."Where's the chicken?" I asked."What chicken?""The chicken and rice. The one-pot thing we talked about on Thursday."He stopped wit

We reached the bookshop at half past ten exactly, and the door was already propped open with a stack of paperbacks. Damien gave me a look of great satisfaction, as if arriving on time were something he had arranged personally. Inside, the shop smelled of old paper and warm radiators, and the shelves were so narrow that we had to turn sideways to pass each other.Handwritten cards were tucked between the books, with recommendations in several different hands. One said, Read this on a train, and another just said, Trust me. A table by the window held a heap of second-hand paperbacks with cracked spines, and an older man sat behind the counter with his own book open, not looking up.I drifted toward the back, where a slim volume of essays about walking caught my eye. The cover was a pale watercolour of a road, and I liked it at once. Damien, by contrast, came back from the secondhand table holding a battered detective story from the fifties, with a woman on the cover screaming at a shado

"You stopped," Damien said. He turned from the window and looked at me properly. "You were halfway through something about the olives.""I was going to say they were a good choice.""You were not.""I was going to say that eventually."He laughed and squeezed my knee, and I let myself finish the thought I'd been in the middle of. I told him I had liked seeing him relaxed with Marcus and Raj. He had laughed properly when Raj told his story about the broken lift, with his head tipped back and his shoulders loose, and I hadn't seen that very often at a table full of people from his working life."I liked watching you and Helen," he said. "You looked like you enjoyed losing.""I wasn't losing.""You weren't winning either.""Her pupils built a bridge out of sugar lumps. You can't win against that."He grinned, and the streetlights slid over his loosened tie. I reached up and took hold of the knot, intending to tidy it, and found myself tugging him nearer instead. He came willingly, his fa