《The Playboy Stepbrother's Rules》全部章節：第 91 章 - 第 100 章

Paxton asked to meet in person.Not the apartment—too many walls that had already held too much family noise. A worksite trailer at lunch, coffee in paper cups, the door half open to the sound of drills. Troy went. Alex stayed at 3B with a seminar open and the phone face-up, because “stay boring” still allowed waiting for a report.Paxton didn’t waste time. “The questions aren’t random. A compliance guy on the partnership liaison side—Merrick—asked whether your residential change needed to be reflected on any disclosure forms. Then he asked, casual, if there was ‘Morrison family context’ he should be aware of so he wasn’t blindsided in a meeting.”Troy’s jaw set. “Who fed him family context.”“I don’t know. Office gossip has a long half-life. Someone heard you moved. Someone remembers Silas from a board lunch. Someone likes connecting dots that aren’t on the page.” Paxton crushed the empty cup. “I said your address was updated where it needed to be, your work wasn’t affected, and fami

They met at a park café with outdoor tables and enough foot traffic that neither of them could raise a voice without consequences.Bridget had suggested the place and then stayed away. “If I’m there, he’ll perform restraint for me instead of talking to you,” she’d said. Alex had agreed. Troy had driven him as far as the corner and said only, “Exit when you need to. I’m a text away.”Silas was already seated when Alex arrived. No tablet. No folder. A paper cup cooling between his hands. He looked like he had slept poorly and come anyway.“Thank you for coming,” Silas said.Alex sat. “You asked for more than a call. I’m here for more than a call. If it turns into a verdict, I’m leaving the same way I did the hallway.”Silas nodded once, as if he’d expected the line and had decided not to fight it. “I’ll try not to earn the exit.”A runner passed. A child complained about ice cream at a nearby table. Ordinary noise. Under it, the silence between them had weight.Silas spoke first. “On th

Silas asked for another call at the end of the week.Not a park. Not a café with a car across the street. A call, he said, because some things were easier when he did not have to manage his face in public. Alex took it at the counter in 3B with Troy in the bedroom again—present, not hovering—door half open.“I’m listening,” Alex said when the line connected.Silas was silent for a second, then: “I’ve been practising the part where I don’t treat your life as a problem set. I am not excellent at it yet. I am better than the man who froze a portal to make a point.”Alex’s hand rested flat on the counter. “That’s a low bar.”“I know.” A dry breath. “I’m calling to clear a debt, not to clear a bar. I wronged you. Not only by being shocked in a doorway—that was human—but by what I did with the shock. The condition. The exile. The tools. The hour that treated your belongings like a supervised extraction. I told myself I was preserving a family. I was preserving my authority. You should not h

Sunday morning in 3B had no agenda.Alex woke to rain against the window and Troy still asleep beside him, one arm thrown across the mattress as if even unconscious he kept track of where Alex was. The quiet was complete in a way the Morrison house had never managed—no distant tablet, no polished hallway, no one measuring the temperature of a closed door. Alex watched the rain for a while, then slid out carefully and put the kettle on.Troy appeared ten minutes later, hair flattened on one side, reaching for the mug Alex had already poured. “You’re up early.”“Rain.”Troy grunted agreement, drank, and leaned against the counter until his eyes focused. “No site today. No seminar for you. Dangerous.”“Dangerous how.”“We might have to talk about something that isn’t a crisis.” Troy’s mouth tilted. “We’ve gotten out of practice.”Alex huffed a soft breath. “We could practise.”They took coffee to the sofa. The neighbour’s television was silent for once. Rain stitched the city into a sing

The listing that stuck was a second-floor flat ten minutes further from campus and five minutes closer to Troy’s main site, with a bookshelf built into the living room wall and a kitchen you could stand side by side in without performing a traffic system.Alex walked through it twice on a Wednesday afternoon while the agent waited in the hall and Troy checked the window locks with the same focus he used on site scaffolding. The place smelled like fresh paint and someone else’s detergent. It did not smell like polish. It did not smell like a study.“Bookshelf,” Alex said, needlessly.“I saw.” Troy’s mouth tilted. “You’re already putting Nathan’s box on the bottom shelf in your head.”“I’m putting the seminar spines at eye level.” Alex ran his fingers along the empty wood. “Bottom shelf is still the box. Some habits are structural.”They stood in the doorway of the bedroom and looked at a bed that wasn’t theirs yet. Light cut across the floor in a wide strip. Outside, a tree moved again