Todos los capítulos de Greyfen Love Chronicles : Capítulo 31 - Capítulo 40

Sadie arrived just after nine the next morning. Corinne opened the heavy front door with a pained expression. A layer of concealer and foundation sat thick across the left side of her face, but the purple black bloom around her eye still showed through, swollen and angry beneath the makeup. Her ribs ached with every breath. Sadie’s smile faded the second she saw her. “Corinne… are you okay?” Corinne gave the old, recycled answer she had already practiced in the mirror. “I’m fine. Walked into a wall last night. I’m so clumsy.” She laughed at that last part. Sadie’s eyes narrowed. She didn’t buy it. Not for a second. She held out the egg cartons in her arms and studied Corinne’s face for a long time as she took the eggs, but let it go. “Dom told me to give you this.” She handed over a small folded square of paper. Dominic’s handwriting with a phone number. Nothing else. Corinne’s fingers closed around it. Her official phone was gone. Harlan had taken it the night before,

It became a pattern. Whenever Harlan left for the office or for one of his long lunches with his associates, Dominic came. Sometimes he waited until the black car disappeared down the hill and the gate settled shut. Sometimes he watched from the neighbor’s trees until the housekeeper’s car pulled away too. Then he scaled the fence in two easy movements and dropped into the shadowed strip of lawn behind the workshop. Corinne always knew the moment he arrived. The air changed. She would look up from the clay or from the book she was only pretending to read, and there he would be, tall and frowning, already stripping off his jacket and reaching for her. They wasted almost no time on words. Hands found skin. Mouths found mouths. He fucked her in the workshop, in the kitchen, against the wall in the laundry room where the dryer hummed and covered the sounds they made. He was careful with her ribs until the bruises faded to yellow ghosts, and after that he was less careful. She l

The scholarship deadline was only three days away. Dominic had already been accepted on the strength of his work. His application portfolio had been strong enough that Highclere’s admissions office had accepted him immediately. After being accepted, he was at liberty to apply for a scholarship. One of the supporting required documents was a strong recommendation. Without it he wouldn’t be eligible to apply. He told Corinne on a Thursday afternoon while she sat on the workshop floor with a half formed vase between her knees. “What would you want your recommendation to say?” she asked, not looking up from the clay. Dominic leaned against the long wooden table, arms crossed. “That I can work well under pressure. That I take direction but I also know when to take initiative. That I’m reliable. That I care about both the food and its presentation. Something about the private chef r

The weeks after the scholarship letter arrived blurred into a single long ache of time. Every hour Harlan spent away, Dominic came to the workshop. He always found Corinne already waiting, and they’d fuck like people trying to memorize each other. Each time felt like the last time they’d be together. Dominic tried twice more to change her mind. The first time was late one afternoon in the workshop. She was at the wheel molding a vase, the soft whir of it the only sound until he spoke. “Please come with me,” he said. No preamble. She didn’t look up right away. When she did, her eyes were pleading. “Dominic—” “Please. Trust me to take good care of you.” She wiped her hands on a towel and crossed to him, taking his face in both palms. “I know you will,” she said. “You’re kind to me even when I don’t deserve it. But you already know my answer.”

Culinary school was harder than Dominic had expected.He had imagined long days of knives and fire, of searing and plating. He could do that even in his sleep. The kitchen still felt like the one place where his hands knew exactly what to do, where the rest of the world narrowed to heat and timing and the certainty that he knew what he was doing.But Highclere demanded more.There were lectures on food chemistry and molecular structure that made his head ache. Emulsions that refused to behave the way the textbook claimed they should. Sensory science. Cost control. Wine theory. He spent hours bent over dense pages under fluorescent lights while his mind drifted back to a workshop smelling of wet clay and a woman with green eyes who had once told him she loved him while he was still buried inside her.He forced himself to focus. He took notes until his hand cramped. He stayed after class to ask questions that made the younger stu