Semua Bab SHADOWED DESIRES — 50 Acts of Pure Forbidden Pleasure: Bab 11 - Bab 18

Chapter FiveCHLOEMrs. Hollis had worked in the Wrenfield estate for thirty-one years.She had worked for my grandmother before my father inherited the house. She had watched me grow from seven years old to twenty-four. She knew every room, every floorboard that creaked, every window that stuck in winter, and she knew — with the specific certainty of a woman who had spent three decades reading a household like a book — when something in it had changed.She set breakfast on the table at eight.Toast. Eggs. Coffee. The Harlow City morning paper folded to the left of my plate the way it always was.Rowe came in at eight-oh-five.He sat at the far end of the table the way he always did — not with me, never with me, always at the periphery, always positioned between me and the door. Professional. Precise. He poured his own coffee and opened his phone and read whatever he read in the mornings and said nothing.Mrs. Hollis moved between the kitchen and the dining room with her usual quiet e

Chapter SevenCHLOEHer father's car crunched on the gravel at seven fifty-eight.I heard it from my room. Sat up. Rowe's side of the bed was cold — he'd been gone before six, back to the guest cottage, back to the professional version before the house woke up.I dressed slowly.Stood at the top of the landing and looked down.My father came through the front door at eight exactly. Tall, silver-haired, the particular contained energy of a man who moved through the world like he'd already decided how it was going to go. He handed his coat to Mrs. Hollis and looked around the entrance hall with the satisfied expression of a man coming home.Rowe was already there.Standing at the foot of the stairs. Straight. Hands at his sides. The full professional composure — but I'd spent ten days learning the difference between Rowe's professional stillness and his real stillness and this was neither. This was something else. Something braced.My father saw him.Stopped.Something passed between th

Chapter TwoLILYHe was already in the kitchen when I came downstairs.Seven am. Coffee made. Two mugs on the counter — one for him, one placed at my usual spot like he'd been doing this for years. Like I hadn't been gone three years. Like midnight had simply happened and now morning had arrived and both of them were facts.I sat down.Picked up my mug.He leaned against the counter across from me with his coffee and looked at me with dark eyes that were doing absolutely nothing to pretend last night hadn't happened."Sleep?" he said."Eventually," I said.The corner of his mouth moved.We drank coffee in the quiet Wrenfield morning. Outside the kitchen window the grounds were pale and still. The third floorboard creaked when he shifted his weight. Same creak. Same kitchen. Everything different.At half past eight his phone rang.He looked at the screen.Then at me."Our parents," he said.Video call. Both of them on screen — my mother's face and his father's face, Edinburgh hotel roo

Chapter Four LILY He was cooking when I came downstairs. Not coffee and toast — actual cooking. Eggs in one pan, something with mushrooms and tomatoes in another, the specific smell of butter and good bread toasting that hit me at the bottom of the stairs and stopped me where I stood. Cole at the stove in sweatpants and a grey shirt with a dish towel over his shoulder and bare feet on the kitchen tile. That was what frightened me. Not the bedroom. Not the things we'd done in it or the sounds we'd made or the way he'd looked at me in the moonlight afterward. All of that I'd been prepared for — had been bracing for it in some form since I was nineteen years old. This I hadn't been prepared for. Cole making breakfast like we were something. Like this was a morning that belonged to us. He turned and saw me in the doorway and said nothing for a moment — just looked at me with dark eyes that had seen me thoroughly undone twelve hours ago and were apparently perfectly comfortable wi