All Chapters of THE HEIR'S UNWANTED BRIDE: Chapter 71 - Chapter 75

DAMIEN'S POV"How long was she standing there.""Since the coffee," Adrian said. He was already shrugging into his jacket, the way a man does at the end of an ordinary Tuesday. "Give or take."I looked at the glass. The clear half showed me the corridor and a wall clock and nothing else, but a second earlier there had been the shape of her above the frost, a box on one hip and a hand on the door, and then there hadn't."You knew she was there.""From the second I opened my mouth.""You said all of that to a pane of glass.""I said it to you. The glass just happened to be where she was standing.""That wasn't yours to do.""No," Adrian said. "It was yours. And you'd have got around to it in about eleven months, probably on page nine of a document I helped you draft, standing at a window in a very good coat."I opened my mouth and there was nothing in it."What did she hear.""Enough." He picked his folder up off the table and tucked it under his arm. "Probably a few things you didn't m

CELESTE'S POV"You don't have to say anything.""I know.""You can just sit there. I'll take the silence as information too."I didn't move. The pen was still in my hand, capped now, because somewhere in the last minute I had stopped believing I needed it for anything. Page nine sat between us on the desk with its three yellow tabs, and neither of us had touched it since he said the sentence that undid the whole document."Damien—""You don't owe me tonight. I know what tonight is." He said it evenly, the way he says things in boardrooms he's already lost, a flatness that costs him more than shouting would. "I'll go if you want me to go.""I don't want you to go."That earned me something — his eyes came up off the desk and found mine, and for once in seven months of watching that man arrange his face for whatever room he's in, he didn't arrange it fast enough.***We ended up on the floor. Not because it was romantic. Because the chair by the window was too far from him and the desk

HOWARD'S POV"There was something," I said. "Two nights ago. I wasn't supposed to hear it.""What," Vivienne said. "What did you hear."I reached for the envelope first. I want to say I hesitated, that there was a version of this where my hand stayed on the table and some old, buried piece of me won out over the new one that's been losing every round for months — but there wasn't. There hasn't been, not since the bank started calling before nine in the morning. I pulled it toward me and didn't look at her while I did it, because I've found that's the only way to do certain things cleanly, not looking at the person you're doing them to."Celeste's lawyer was here," I said. "Not Damien's. Hers. Separate counsel, which nobody in that house has bothered to explain to me, and I didn't ask, because asking gets you noticed and I have worked very hard this year to not be noticed.""Go on.""They were in the study with the door shut, which means nothing, except Margaret's name came up twice be