All Chapters of Lover by Design: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

***Lover by Design is the sequel to Bride by Default and begins six months after Sienna and Adrian’s story.While this book follows Celeste Hartwell and Michael Harbinger as the main couple, it continues the conspiracy, characters and events introduced in Bride by Default. For the best reading experience, I recommend reading Book One first.***CelesteHis mouth was on the inside of my thigh, and I still didn’t know his name.That was the point. The whole point.I hadn’t come to The Veil to be courted. I didn’t want candlelight, or a man deciding I was special, or the soft violence of being chosen. For six months the world had made me a story about being left. Tonight I wanted one hour that belonged to me and to no headline.He’d let me set every step of it. That undid me before his hands did. In the gold dark of the private room he had waited, watching me through that plain black mask, steady and unhurried, until I closed the last of the distance myself. Until I was the one who push

CelesteI didn’t wait for Adrian’s security people. I never do well with being handed a schedule.While the flat filled with Adrian’s phone calls, I slipped out the service entrance and took a cab to the old consultancy office in Clerkenwell. Nobody knew I still kept it. I’d stopped paying attention to it years ago, which was exactly why I trusted what was inside: a locked drawer of offline notes from the season Anne first came smiling into my life.I let myself into the dark and knew, before I found the switch, that I wasn’t alone. I knew because the blinds were open.I never left them open. The managing partner in the building opposite had spent eighteen months pretending not to watch me make coffee, and I disliked rewarding persistence.I closed the door behind me.“Hello?”A lamp clicked on across the room.He sat in my chair as if it had always been his, dark coat, still hands, watching me the way you watch a door you’re expecting to open.I knew the face from nothing. I knew the

CelesteMichael tried to teach me how to pretend to be rich. I let him go for almost a minute because it was entertaining.“Stay close to me.”“How close?”“Within reach.”“So less girlfriend, more kidnapping victim.”“We need to appear established.”I fastened an earring. “We’ve been together three years.”Michael stopped. His cover story had given us six months.“Why three?”“Six months invites questions. Three years makes people assume they’re rude for not already knowing.”“That creates unnecessary history.”“History is what makes relationships believable.”His expression suggested he remained unconvinced.I picked up my clutch.“Darling, I’ve been pretending to like rich men since I was sixteen. Keep up.”His expression was priceless.“Now, You’ll follow my read, and if I touch your elbow twice it means you’re talking too much.”He went quiet. I’d surprised him. I was starting to enjoy that.The event occupied a glass room above the river, all champagne and low laughter and peopl

CelesteBy morning I was a genre.Not a person. A genre. There’s a kind of headline that gets its own font, and I’d earned it overnight.THE £250,000 BRIDE.HARTWELL’S SECRET DOUBLE LIFEI had apparently slept with Sebastian Huxley six times, blackmailed him twice and killed him once.Productive week.The genre specified that escort had become fact. Some outlets had already moved on to think-pieces. One columnist I’d sat beside at three separate weddings wondered, in print, what it said about modern womanhood that a Hartwell would sell herself. She’d once begged me to get her daughter into a members’ club.I made a note. The trouble with being a genre is that everyone assumes they’ve already read you.Michael had moved us to a third flat, because the second was, in his words, “statistically unwise.” Thi

MichaelMaya and Sienna’s ex Ollie worked out of a rented office that looked like a failed startup, which is the correct camouflage for people who are good at their jobs.Maya with her journo background ran on instinct and contacts and a phone that never stopped lighting up. Ollie, as a finance wizard, ran on spreadsheets and patience. He trusted numbers more than the people who generated them, and it showed.They finished each other’s sentences and then argued about the ending. That was new. Probably a hangover from their investigation into the shit that hit Sienna, which was all related to this Anne, the reason Adrian and I aren’t friendly anymore, and the new Celeste/Huxley clusterfuck.I clocked it and said nothing. It wasn’t my business, and Celeste had already noticed anyway. She sees that kind of thing before the people involved do.We were in Adrian’s secure meeting room again, althoug