Semua Bab Married To The Forgotten Heir : Bab 51 - Bab 60

The car pulled out of the parking structure and into the evening traffic, the city lights beginning to flicker on around them as dusk settled fully over the streets. Neither of them spoke for a long while, the silence stretching comfortably rather than tensely, both of them apparently content to let the quiet do whatever work words might have made harder.Aurora watched the passing storefronts blur past the window, her wrist still faintly aching beneath her sleeve, the adrenaline of the day finally settling into something closer to simple exhaustion. Beside her, Damien drove with his usual careful precision, though she noticed his knuckles hadn’t fully relaxed on the wheel, the tension from earlier lingering somewhere just beneath his composed exterior.“Thank you,” Aurora said eventually, breaking the silence gently. “For coming yourself. You didn’t have to.”“I already told you,” Damien said, glancing briefly toward her before returning his eyes to the road. “It wasn’t a question of

The ballroom glittered with the particular, practiced elegance of old money, crystal chandeliers throwing soft light across a crowd that Aurora recognized, almost immediately, as exactly the kind of world she’d spent her whole life on the outside of.“You’re doing fine,” Damien murmured near her ear, his hand resting lightly at the small of her back as they moved through the crowd together. “Just smile and let them talk about themselves. That’s usually all anyone here actually wants.”“Easy for you to say,” Aurora murmured back. “You’ve had years of practice.”“Practice doesn’t make it comfortable,” he said, something wry in his tone that surprised her. “Just survivable.”They were stopped every few minutes by well-dressed strangers offering congratulations that felt, more often than not, thinly disguised curiosity about the scandal of Damien Kingsley’s sudden, whirlwind marriage. Aurora smiled through each exchange, answering polite questions about how they’d met with a carefully reh

For the rest of the evening, Damien didn’t leave her side.He introduced her to people with a quiet, deliberate pride Aurora hadn’t seen from him before, his hand finding the small of her back or resting lightly over hers at intervals that felt less accidental with each passing hour. He answered questions about their marriage without the careful evasiveness she’d grown used to, offering warm, simple truths instead ….. we met under difficult circumstances and chose each other anyway ….. that silenced, one conversation at a time, the murmured speculation that had followed them since they’d first arrived.“You’re different tonight,” Aurora murmured, catching a rare quiet moment between conversations.“Am I?”“You’re not performing,” she said. “Not the way you were earlier.”Something flickered across his face, thoughtful rather than defensive. “I suppose I got tired of performing.”They were approached shortly after by an older man Aurora didn’t recognize, silver-haired and impeccably dr

Aurora locked her phone screen quickly, the anonymous text still burning in the back of her mind, though she pushed it aside for now, unwilling to let it swallow whatever fragile thing had just been building between them.“Aurora?” Damien asked again, closer now, concern still etched across his face.“It’s nothing,” she said, which wasn’t entirely true, though it was true enough for tonight. “Just a strange message. I’ll deal with it later.”Her phone rang again before she could set it down properly, the screen lighting up with a different name this time ….. Emily’s, an oddly persistent late-evening call that made Aurora’s stomach tighten with fresh irritation.“I should probably take this,” she said, glancing apologetically toward Damien.Something in his expression shifted, subtle but unmistakable, the warm, unguarded openness from moments ago beginning to retreat behind his usual careful composure. “Of course,” he said, his voice already cooler than it had been seconds before. “I s

Aurora watched the color drain slowly from Damien’s face as he stared at the screen, his jaw tightening, his whole posture shifting from the loose, tentative openness of moments ago into something rigid and controlled.“Damien?” she asked carefully. “What is it?”“It’s nothing,” he said quickly, too quickly, already pocketing the phone with hands that weren’t quite steady. “You should go back to sleep.”“That didn’t look like nothing.”“It’s a work matter,” he said, backing toward the hallway, his voice clipped now in a way that felt entirely disconnected from the quiet vulnerability he’d shown her only minutes earlier. “I need to handle it.”“At this hour?”“Some things don’t wait for convenient hours,” Damien said, already turning away, his focus visibly elsewhere now, somewhere far beyond this hallway, this conversation, this fragile moment they’d just built together.“Damien, please. You looked like you’d seen a ghost.”He paused, one hand braced against the doorframe, and for a m