All Chapters of Forbidden Desires Daddy's Favorite Sin : Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

SCARLETTThe mansion felt different after Monaco.Same marble floors, same high ceilings, same cold beautiful rooms that reflected the man who owned them. But something had shifted in me that made all of it feel smaller and more suffocating than it had before. Like returning to a jar after briefly understanding what open air felt like.We arrived back late afternoon, the cars pulling through the iron gates with the quiet efficiency of Simon's world. Mom went straight to unpacking with the focused energy of someone already planning the next trip. Ethan carried my bag to the door, hugged mom warmly, and gave me a quiet look at the threshold that said several things he wasn't going to say out loud."Call me," he said simply."I will," I said.He left and I watched his car clear the gate and felt the particular guilt of someone who had taken more than they gave from a decent person.Simon disappeared into his study before the luggage was fully sorted. The study door closed with a soft pre

DAVIDI had known Simon Laurent for twenty years.I had watched him build Laurent Industries from a mid-sized firm into something that made governments nervous. I had watched him negotiate across tables from men twice his age with twice his resources and walk away with everything he came for. I had watched him lose his first wife to illness and rebuild himself afterward with the particular discipline of someone who understood that grief was not an excuse to stop functioning.In twenty years I had never seen him make a decision he couldn't justify strategically.Until Scarlett.I sat in my car outside the Laurent estate on a Thursday morning and thought about that for a while before going inside.Simon had called me the night before. Brief conversation, the kind we had when something needed to be said without being fully said. He wanted my read on the board situation. Whether Hargreaves was moving yet. Whether the three journalists Marcus had contacted had started filing anything.I ha

SCARLETT The two days passed the way time passed when you were dreading something specific. Too fast in the moments you weren't thinking about it and unbearably slow in the ones you were. I spent the first day doing ordinary things with extraordinary deliberateness. I helped mom rearrange the sitting room flowers she'd been complaining about. I called Tessa and talked about nothing important for an hour. I ate dinner at the table and listened to mom talk about the Paris invitation and watched Simon across from me being exactly what he always was in front of her, composed and attentive and completely unreadable. He didn't look at me differently. Didn't give anything away. Just sat there being Simon Laurent while I sat across from him knowing what was coming and feeling the weight of it pressing down through every ordinary moment. The second day I went to see Tessa properly. I sat in her apartment on her small comfortable couch and told her what Simon was planning and watched her f

SCARLETT The house was ours for the first time.Not stolen hours or locked study doors or two minutes in a kitchen counting footsteps from upstairs. Not Monaco with its borrowed privacy and borrowed time. The house itself, all of it, the long hallways and cold beautiful rooms and the garden and the fountain and the enormous kitchen where everything had started, all of it ours without performance or management or anyone to hide from.It felt strange.I came downstairs the first morning after mom left and found Simon already in the kitchen, coffee made, reading glasses on, newspaper open. Completely ordinary. Except there was no performance layered over it, no careful distance maintained for an audience that wasn't there.He looked up when I came in."Morning," he said."Morning," I said.I poured coffee and sat across from him at the counter and we existed in the same space in the uncomplicated way we never had before. No tension in it. Just two people in a kitchen in the morning.It

SCARLETTTessa arrived at the mansion within the hour.She pulled up in her small secondhand car which looked spectacularly out of place in the Laurent driveway and she didn't seem to notice or care, which was entirely Tessa. She came in with two coffees from the place near her apartment and sat across from me at the kitchen counter and listened to the full version of everything with the focused attention of someone filing information carefully.When I finished she was quiet for a moment."Forty-eight hours," she said."Approximately," I said."And then your name is in a news article connected to your mother's husband.""Separated husband," I said."That distinction will not matter to the internet," Tessa said flatly."I know."She looked at her coffee. "Are you prepared for what that looks like? Not abstractly. Concretely. People you know seeing it. People from before the mansion, from school, from everywhere.""No," I said honestly. "I don't think anyone can be fully prepared for th