All Chapters of THE FAT BRIDE HE NEVER WANTED : Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

Adrian's POV I have sat across negotiating tables from some of the most strategically capable people in British business. I have watched men with forty years of experience attempt to dismantle deals I had spent months constructing. I have been in rooms where every person present was working against my position and I was required to hold it anyway. I have read people professionally and personally for thirty years and I am, without false modesty, exceptionally good at it. I had never watched anything quite like what Naomi did at that breakfast table. ★★★ I had known within four minutes of Diana and Rosalind's arrival what they were. My mother had not told me about this. She had sent a message the previous evening about a formal breakfast and dress accordingly and I had assumed it was one of her periodic attempts to impose structure on a household that had become considerably less structured since Saturday. I had not assumed it was an ambush. I had underestimated her. That was m

Naomi's POVThe agreement was simple.Celeste continued. We continued. Nothing changed visibly. Darius tracked every communication, every contact, every digital footprint she left while she was in or near the manor. We fed her the information we had selected for her to have and we watched where it went.Simple in theory.Considerably less simple when the person you were performing normalcy around was sitting across from you at eleven in the morning with a coffee cup and a smile and the specific sharpness of someone who had been very good at reading rooms for a very long time.★★★Celeste stayed for two hours that first evening.She was charming throughout. She asked questions that were reasonable and warm and designed with the precision of someone who understood exactly which questions produced the most useful answers without appearing to be useful questions at all.How was I finding London. Did I have friends in the city or was I rather isolated. Had I had a chance to explore the Fou

Adrian's POVShe was where she said she was.Standing against the wall of a narrow street off Knightsbridge with her phone in her hand and her shoulders back and the specific posture of someone who had decided to hold themselves together and was succeeding through considerable effort. I had covered the distance from the manor in eleven minutes and forty seconds because I had not driven within the speed limit for a single one of them and Darius, who was in the passenger seat, had said nothing about this, which was the correct decision.I got out of the car.She looked at me.I looked at her.Her hands had stopped shaking by the time I reached her, or she had stopped letting them shake, and I did not ask which because the answer did not change what needed to happen next.I said, "Are you hurt?""No," she said."Did he touch you?""No.""Did he threaten you directly?""Not directly," she said. "He is too careful for direct."I nodded. I said, "There is a cafe on the next street. Come."

Naomi's POVShe wanted to meet alone.I had argued with Adrian about this for twenty minutes the previous evening. He wanted Darius present, visible or otherwise. I had said that a girl frightened enough to call a stranger from an unknown number was not going to walk into a coffee shop and see a security detail and stay for the conversation. We had compromised. Darius would be nearby. Not visible. Close enough to respond, far enough that nothing about the meeting would announce itself as anything other than two women having coffee.The coffee shop was in Bermondsey, small and unremarkable, the kind of place that existed to serve people who lived nearby rather than people who were making a destination of it. I arrived first, as instructed. I sat at a corner table with a view of the door.She arrived eleven minutes late.I knew it was her before she said anything. She came through the door scanning the room with the specific quick movement of someone checking for danger before checking

Adrian's POVI pulled the car onto the verge.I did not plan this. My hands made the decision before the rest of me had caught up with it, indicator on, wheel turning, the car slowing onto the narrow grass border of a B-road somewhere between Bermondsey and Richmond with the engine still running and the headlights cutting two pale columns into the dark hedgerow ahead of us.I sat there for a moment.Naomi did not say anything. She had the file closed in her lap now, her hand resting flat on the cover, and she was watching me with the particular patience I had come to associate with her, the willingness to let a silence run its course rather than filling it."I need to think out loud," I said. "If that's acceptable.""It is," she said.I looked at the hedgerow in the headlights."My mother's maiden name is Pemberton-Reece," I said. "She grew up in Surrey, the same social world Reginald Cole grew up in. Their families knew each other. Adjacent circles, the kind that overlap at hunt ball