All Chapters of Forbidden Desires Daddy's Favorite Sin : Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

SCARLETTThe noise lasted exactly nine days.That was how long the story stayed active enough that opening my phone felt like walking into something. Nine days of commentary and think pieces and opinion columns about age gaps and power dynamics and the ethics of stepfamily relationships, all of it written by people who knew the outline and none of the interior.I read very little of it.Tessa monitored it for me and gave daily briefings with the detached efficiency of someone who had decided that information management was the most useful thing she could offer. She filtered out the genuinely cruel things and summarized the rest and I listened and nodded and went about my days.The days themselves were quieter than I expected.I went to the city twice. Ran errands, got coffee, existed in public spaces like a person who had nothing to perform. Nobody approached me. One woman in a coffee shop looked at me for slightly longer than necessary and then looked away. That was the full extent o

CYNTHIAPortugal had done something to her bones.That was the only way she could describe it to Patricia on the last morning, sitting on the terrace with coffee and the impossible light and the sound of the water below. Something in her bones had shifted. Not healed exactly, healing was a longer process and she knew that. But shifted. Like furniture rearranged in a room that had been the same for too long.She had been here three weeks.Three weeks of yellow dresses and bad jokes from the fisherman next door whose name was Eduardo and who brought sea bass on Tuesdays and asked nothing of her except that she try the wine he recommended. Three weeks of long mornings and longer evenings and the particular luxury of existing without performance.She had cried four times.Not the careful managed version she had permitted herself in the early days at Patricia's house in the city. The real version, untidy and prolonged, the kind that came from the deepest part of a disappointment and took s

SCARLETTMonday arrived the way important days always did, quietly and without fanfare, the morning looking exactly like every other morning until you remembered what it contained.I was awake before my alarm.Lay in the dark for a few minutes listening to the house, the fountain distantly, the particular silence of early morning in the Laurent estate that I had learned over the past year the way you learned the specific sounds of any place you had lived in long enough to stop noticing them consciously.Then I got up.The bathroom mirror showed someone who looked approximately like herself but with the specific alertness of a person whose nervous system had decided that today required extra attention. I did my makeup carefully, not dramatically, the version I wore when I wanted to feel like myself rather than when I wanted to make an impression.Though I supposed today was both.I stood in front of my wardrobe for longer than necessary.The Threshold collection had taught me things ab

SCARLETTThe lunch was Petra's idea.She had found a place near campus during the second week, a small Italian restaurant two streets over with the kind of unpretentious menu that suggested it had been there long enough to stop trying to impress anyone. Good food, reasonable prices, the sort of place that filled up with people who knew what they wanted rather than people performing the act of eating somewhere."Thursday lunch," she said on Wednesday. "You, me, and whoever you want to bring.""Simon might come," I said.Petra looked at me with the direct assessing expression she used when she was evaluating structural integrity. "The Simon.""Yes," I said."Good," she said. "I want to meet him properly. Not the Saturday dinner version where everyone is performing slightly. The ordinary version."This was one of the things about Petra that I had come to understand in two weeks. She was interested in the ordinary version of everything. The performance told you what someone wanted you to

SCARLETTOctober settled into a rhythm.Weekdays had a shape now that I hadn't had before, the specific architecture of a life that was going somewhere. Up at seven, coffee with Simon in the kitchen, the forty-minute drive to campus, the building with its good light and its material libraries and Dr. Anand's precise silences and Petra at her textile table and Callum's competitive sketchbook-angling and the thirty-two people I was slowly understanding.Classes until four or five. Sometimes later when a workshop ran over or a problem needed another hour or Petra and I got absorbed in something in the material library that wasn't strictly on the curriculum but felt necessary.Simon picked me up on Tuesdays and Thursdays.This had not been arranged. It had simply started happening. The first time he appeared on a Tuesday evening outside the campus entrance I had looked at him through the glass door and thought he must have a meeting nearby. Then he had seen me and raised his hand in that