Todos los capítulos de One Night With My Fiancé Ruthless Uncle : Capítulo 31 - Capítulo 40

The boardroom had become a pressure chamber.Jennifer stood perfectly still as the formal vote began. One by one, the members of the Kane Holdings board spoke their positions into the tense air. Some voices were steady. Others carried the slight tremor of people who understood they were choosing a side that could not be unchosen later.Prestwick recorded each response with clinical precision.The first three votes landed in favor of suspending Margaret Kane’s remaining authority and authorizing full forensic preservation of the records. The fourth member—an older man who had always struck Jennifer as permanently uncomfortable with conflict—hesitated long enough for the silence to turn sharp before he aligned with the majority. The sharp-featured woman who had challenged Carter earlier voted against, her tone clipped with warning about liability and due process. Two more followed her lead.The room split.Jennifer counted silently as the remaining members spoke. Carter’s presence at he

The private hospital suite had taken on the quality of a bunker.Jennifer stood at the narrow window with her arms wrapped around herself, watching the late-afternoon light harden across the city. Somewhere out there her father was sitting under the watch of strangers with guns and earpieces because she had chosen to stand in a boardroom and speak her mother’s name. The knowledge sat in her chest like a stone she could neither swallow nor cough up.Behind her, Carter shifted against the raised bed and bit off a low sound of pain. The morning’s exertion—the board, the elevators, the sheer force of will required to remain upright while the vote unfolded—had come due with interest. The nurses had increased his pain management against his preference. Even so, the grey undertone had not left his skin.Jennifer turned from the window and crossed to him. His eyes tracked her immediately, the same focused intensity that had become as familiar as her own pulse. When she sat on the edge of the

Night settled over the hospital like a second bandage—thin, insufficient, and unable to stop what was already bleeding through.Jennifer lay carefully along Carter’s uninjured side in the private suite’s adjustable bed, her head resting in the hollow of his shoulder, one palm flat over the center of his chest. The position was awkward. The rails and the IV line and the need to avoid his wound made it a study in careful angles. None of that mattered. The alternative—returning to the chair, putting even a few feet of distance between them—had become intolerable.Carter’s arm was heavy across her back. His fingers moved in slow, absent strokes along the ridge of her spine, each pass feeding the low current that had been building between them for days. The monitors continued their steady, indifferent rhythm. Beyond the reinforced door, the security detail held position. Across the city, her father sat under protection and tried to sleep inside a life that had been rewritten without his co

The hours after Jennifer returned from the secondary location settled into a strange, brittle quiet.The suite felt smaller. The air denser. Every sound from the corridor—footsteps, the soft beep of a distant monitor, the low murmur of the security detail changing shifts—registered like a potential breach. Jennifer sat curled in the chair closest to Carter’s bed with her knees drawn up, the ballistic vest long since discarded, her body still carrying the residual adrenaline of the convoy and the look on her father’s face when she had been forced to leave him again.Carter had not taken his eyes off her since she walked back through the door. The pain medication had been adjusted upward after the morning’s stress, but it had not dulled the intensity of his focus. He watched her the way a man watched the only variable in a plan that still had too many ways to fail.“You’re replaying the exit,” he said.Jennifer didn’t bother denying it. “He looked smaller. Sitting on that sofa with stra

The first public reports of the charges hit the major outlets just before six.Jennifer did not need to turn on the television to feel the shift. The atmosphere in the suite changed the way air pressure changed before a storm—subtle at first, then impossible to ignore. Her phone began to accumulate messages from numbers she had not given out. Gerald’s tablet chimed in a steady, ugly rhythm from the chair where he had left it during his last pass through the room. Even the security detail outside the door seemed to stand a fraction more upright, as though the formal language of the criminal complaint had traveled through the walls and into their posture.Carter lay against the raised bed with his eyes half-lidded, the latest round of medication taking the sharpest edge off the pain without touching the vigilance underneath. His hand rested against the curve of Jennifer’s hip where she sat perched on the mattress facing him. The contact was light. It still felt like a claim.“She’s goin