Todos os capítulos de BOUGHT BY THE COLD BILLIONAIRE : Capítulo 11 - Capítulo 20

The Kestrel Foundation dinner was held on the third Saturday of October every year. Everybody who mattered in the city went to it, and everybody who did not matter tried very hard to.Mark had not planned on going at all.He went because Daniel put the seating plan on his desk at four o'clock that afternoon and said one sentence to him. "She is sitting at table two, sir, under your father's name."The hall was gold and extremely loud. There were four hundred people inside it, and the waiters moved between the tables the way water moves around rocks. Mark came in late and alone in a black suit, and the room noticed him the way a field notices weather coming.They had been talking about him for eleven days. The story that had gone up and come down again in twelve hours had not gone away at all. It had simply gone quiet, which is a great deal worse, because quiet gets into everything.He walked the whole length of that room and did not stop at a single table on the way.Sophia was wearing

They came into the clinic on a Wednesday at twenty past eleven in the morning.There were two of them, and they were wearing suits that were slightly too good for a town like Ashgrove. The taller one held the door open for the shorter one, which was the sort of manners that cost money to teach, and both of them looked at the waiting room before they looked at the desk.Olivia was not behind the desk when they came in, and that was the only piece of luck she had that week.She had gone out to the back yard four minutes earlier to bring in the mail crate. She heard the bell over the door go and she heard the wrong kind of footsteps come across the floor, two sets of hard shoes on a morning when the whole list was two elderly women and a boy with a wrist, and she stopped where she was standing with the crate against her hip.Ethan came out of the consulting room and put himself between them and the desk."Good morning to you both, though I am afraid we do not take walk-ins," he said. "Yo

The board met on Tuesday morning at ten o'clock in a room on the twenty second floor.Mark was there before any of them, which nobody expected. He sat down at the far end of the table with a cup of coffee he did not drink and watched eleven people come in and try to work out where to put their eyes.Two of them had known him since he was a boy. One of them had given him his first summer job in the warehouse at Tilbury when he was seventeen, and that man could not look at him at all.Victor came in last, as he always did.The resolution was the fourth item on the agenda, which was a small piece of cruelty in itself, because it meant that eleven adults had to sit through forty minutes about a distribution contract in Peterhead while the thing waited at the bottom of the page.When they reached it, the company secretary read it out in the flat voice such things are always read out in."Is there any discussion on the resolution?" Victor said.There was no discussion at all around that tab

She waited another nine days before she telephoned her mother.The telephone box outside the Ashgrove post office stood between a bench and a litter bin, and it smelled of wet coins and old cigarettes, and the door did not close properly. Olivia went there on a Tuesday morning at eight o'clock because the street was empty at eight o'clock and because Ethan did not need her until nine.She had four dollars in change in her coat pocket, and she had been carrying it for two days.She dialed the number of the house on Fairlee Road, and then she pressed the receiver down before it could ring, and she stood there with her forehead against the cold glass for about a minute. Then she dialed it again and let it go through.It rang four times, which was three more than usual, and her mother's voice came onto the line sounding thin and much older than it had in September."Hello, this is the Hart house."Olivia could not make one sound come out of her mouth."Hello, is somebody there?" Margaret

The room above the shop was eleven feet by nine feet, and Mark Sinclair stood in the middle of it and did not know what to do with his hands.There was a bed with a grey blanket folded at the end of it. There was a chair, a chest of drawers with three handles and one missing, and a shelf with a kettle and two cups and a small blue tin on it. There was a sink in the corner and a gas ring beside the sink, and a window over the lane with the curtain still drawn across it.Everything in that room was clean, and everything in it was arranged, and there was not one single object anywhere that was not necessary."You can sit down on the chair, because the bed is the only other thing," Olivia said.He sat down on the chair.She filled the kettle at the sink with her back to him, and he watched her do it, and neither of them said anything until it had boiled and she had made two cups of tea and handed him one.There was only one chair, so she sat on the end of the bed with her cup held in both