His Unchosen bride 의 모든 챕터: 챕터 1 - 챕터 8

The ballroom of the Hart Estate glittered like something built for a coronation—crystal chandeliers throwing prisms of light across three hundred of the country’s most powerful people, waiters gliding between tables with champagne the color of morning sun. Arabella stood near the edge of it all, the way she always did, close enough to belong and far enough to be forgotten. She’d changed her dress twice before the gala. The first, a fitted emerald sheath her mother had chosen, made her feel like she was on display for judgment rather than a party. The second, a deep burgundy with sleeves and structure, felt like armor instead. She’d worn the burgundy. She was learning, slowly, that comfort didn’t have to be an apology. Vivian stood at the center of the room, of course. Radiant in ivory silk, laughing at something one of the board members had said, her hand resting just slightly too long on Adrian Blackwood’s arm. Arabella didn’t resent her sister for it. She’d stopped resenting thin

“Get out,” Vivian said. Her voice shook, but not from sorrow—from something sharper, colder. “Everyone. Except her.” Arthur exchanged a glance with Edward. Adrian didn’t move. “Vivian—” her father started. “I said get out.” She hadn’t taken her eyes off Arabella. “This is between me and my sister.” Adrian’s gaze flicked to Arabella, a silent question. Do you want me to stay. It startled her, the fact that he’d asked it at all, even wordlessly—no one had checked whether she wanted to be alone with Vivian in eleven years of watching her sister’s moods rearrange every room they shared. “It’s fine,” Arabella said. “I’ll be fine.” He held her eyes a moment longer, then inclined his head, once, and walked out. Arthur followed, and after a long look that said this conversation wasn’t over either, so did her father. The door clicked shut. Vivian crossed the study in three furious strides. “How long.” “How long, what?” “How long have you been planning this. Whatever you did to make a

By morning, the story was everywhere.Arabella saw it first on her sister’s face at breakfast — not Vivian’s, but the housekeeper’s daughter, who worked part-time at the estate and slid a folded newspaper across the counter with an apologetic look before disappearing back into the kitchen. Arabella almost didn’t open it. She unfolded it anyway.THE OTHER HART SISTER: Blackwood’s Surprise Bride RevealedBeneath the headline, a photograph from the gala — unflattering, taken at an angle that made her look heavier than she was, captioned with a line about “an unconventional choice” that managed to say everything cruel without saying anything at all. She set the paper down carefully, the way she’d learned to set down things that wanted to be thrown.She was still standing in the kitchen when her phone buzzed. A number she didn’t recognize."This is Adrian. I’ve sent a car. Ten minutes."She almost asked why. She didn’t. Some instinct told her the answer would matter more if she saw it than

“Talk to me,” she said finally, when the silence had stretched too taut to bear.“There’s nothing to say yet. We don’t know anything.”“That’s not what I meant.” She turned toward him, watching the muscle working faintly at his jaw, the only visible crack in a composure that otherwise hadn’t moved since he’d hung up the phone. “I meant you. You’ve barely blinked in ten minutes.”Something flickered across his face—surprise, maybe, that she’d noticed, or that she’d said so plainly. “My father built an empire out of never being afraid of anything in front of other people,” he said slowly. “I learned that lesson before I learned to read.”“This isn’t a boardroom, Adrian.”“No,” he agreed. “It’s worse. In a boardroom I know the rules.”It was the most honest thing he’d said to her since the gala, and she recognized, with a small ache, what it had cost him to say it. She reached over without deciding to and put her hand over his on the seat between them. He didn’t pull away. He looked down