All Chapters of THE FAT BRIDE HE NEVER WANTED : Chapter 11 - Chapter 17

Naomi's POV.I woke up thinking Eleanor's smile at the door last night, small and specific and slightly wicked.Be ready.I got up. I washed my face. I looked at myself in the mirror with more than four seconds this time because today apparently required a fuller assessment. Lily had brought more clothes the previous evening, a quiet knock and a folded stack left on the chair without ceremony, and I had gone through them with the same careful attention I had given the first set.Someone with access to significant resources and a good eye had selected these. They fit. Not approximately. Precisely.I chose a deep green dress today. Structured. The kind that said I dressed with intention this morning and the intention was that you should take me seriously. I put my hair up. I put on the shoes that had come with yesterday's delivery because they were the best shoes I had ever worn and I was not going to pretend otherwise.I looked at myself.Grace's daughter, Eleanor had said.Right. I t

Adrian's POVI sat with it for forty-seven minutes before I told Naomi.She was across the desk from me in the study, having followed me from the hallway without asking questions, which I was beginning to understand was characteristic. She did not demand information before it was ready to be given. She waited with the patience of someone who understood that rushing a thing rarely improved it.I appreciated that more than I intended to.I had the file open in front of me. Darius had sent everything through in the twelve minutes between the phone call and us reaching the study. Bank records. Payment histories. Dates. Amounts. The particular paper trail of someone who had been careful but not careful enough, which was the only kind of trail that eventually got found.The payments were consistent. Monthly. Eighteen months of them. Not large enough to attract immediate attention. Large enough, over time, to constitute a significant arrangement.All of them to a single account.Celeste Va

Naomi's POVI got in the car.I cannot fully explain why. There was no good reason to get in the car. There were several excellent reasons not to get in the car, starting with the fact that the man inside it had orchestrated the situation that had put me at an altar in a dead woman's dress and ending with the fact that Adrian had specifically said stay inside the manor and this was considerably outside the manor.I told myself it was because I needed information.That was partially true. I did need information. But it was not the whole truth and I was honest enough with myself to know it. The whole truth was that this man had said the words I am your father and something ancient and stubborn in me needed to look at him. Needed to sit across from him in an enclosed space and take a proper inventory of what sixty years of living had made of the man who had walked away from my mother before I was old enough to remember his absence.The driver did not look at me. The car pulled into tra

Naomi's POVThe PA's name was Caroline.She was twenty-eight, efficient in the way of someone who had organised the life of a very demanding person for long enough that efficiency had become her natural state, and she delivered information with the pleasant precision of a woman who had learned that clarity prevented problems.She came to find me in the Foundation office I had been using on the second floor of the manor on Thursday morning. She knocked. She entered. She said that the Holt Foundation Annual Gala was in fourteen days, that attendance was expected, that a car had been arranged for the seamstress appointment at eleven and that she had taken the liberty of pulling Naomi's measurements from the clothes that had been sourced earlier in the week.She said all of this without looking at me in the specific way some people did not look at me. She was simply efficient.I said thank you.She said of course and left.I sat with the words seamstress appointment for a moment.I had b