All Chapters of Lover by Design: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

CelesteMichael spent forty minutes with the device before he’d let me speak.He’d taken it apart on the kitchen table of the steam-smelling flat, the pieces laid out in a row, spaced and squared like evidence. I sat across from him and drank his coffee and waited, because I’d learned that Michael thinking is Michael working, and Michael working is the only time he’s quiet.“It’s not a tracker,” he said finally.“You sound disappointed.”“I’m recalibrating. A tracker would make sense. Someone wants to know where you are.” He turned a sliver of circuitry to the light. “This doesn’t report your position. It doesn’t listen. It does one thing. It connects to a single number, encrypted, one direction, and you can’t trace back through it, because there’s nothing on the other end but a voice.”“So someone paid a man to tackle me in a corridor and plant a telephone.”“Someone paid a man to make it look like a robbery

CelesteMichael’s idea of a cover story read like a tax return.He slid two passports and a printed page across the table. Julian and Nathalie Rourke. Married four years. He in private wealth advisory. She in “art consultancy,” which is what they always make the woman do, because no one can prove she isn’t.“Art consultancy,” I read aloud. “You’ve made me a woman who gets paid to agree that ugly paintings are investments. I’m almost impressed by the contempt.”“It’s unfalsifiable.”“It’s an insult with a per diem. I’ll allow it.”“This is where we live,” he said. “This is how long we’ve been married. This is our stated reason for being in Monaco. Memorise it.”I read the page. Accurate, complete, and dead on arrival.“We’ll be caught by lunch,” I

CelesteUp close, Luca Ferrand was the most frightening man I’d ever met, and it took me a whole course to work out why.It wasn’t menace.Menace I know. Menace is a man raising his voice to feel large. Ferrand did the opposite.Villains should have the decency to advertise. A facial scar.  A monocle. Perhaps a coat made from endangered animals.Ferrand made the whole table feel chosen.He asked Nathalie Rourke about her art consultancy as though it were the only honest work in the room.He remembered the loud broker’s daughter’s name and the Geneva men’s preferences in wine.He was warm, and attentive, and delighted, and every delighted thing he said was a small deposit in an account he plainly intended to collect.“Rourke,” he said, tasting the name. “I don’t think I know your people, Mrs Rourke, and I know almost everyone’s peop

CelesteOne suite. One bed. One very small sofa, which Michael had already claimed, grimly, as though discomfort were a personality.We couldn’t change rooms. Changing rooms meant a front desk, a name in a system, a reason. So the Rourkes, happily married, would share their happy marital suite, and I would lie awake three feet from the man who’d spent all night surprised that I was good at the only thing I’ve ever been good at.That was the part I couldn’t put down.“Say it,” I said, into the dark.“Say what.”“‘You’re very good at this.’ You said it like you’d discovered I could do sums. Like charm was a party trick you hadn’t known I’d mastered.” I sat up. “You’ve watched me read every room we’ve walked into. You’ve used what I found. And it still surprised you. Why?”He was quiet in

CelesteOne moment I was above him, running every pace. The next he’d stood up with my legs still wrapped around his waist, his cock still balls-deep inside me, and carried me to the bed.But he didn’t put me down gently. He pulled out, then flipped me onto my stomach and down onto the mattress in a single easy motion that emptied the air out of my lungs, and his weight came down warm along my back, and his mouth found my ear.“This what you want?” His voice had gone rough, all that careful control finally cracked straight through. “Use your words. You’re good at those.”“Yes.” I pushed my hips back against him, shameless, greedy, past caring how it looked. “God, yes, Michael, please”He dragged my hips up, arranged me the way he wanted me, and drove back into me in one long stroke that reached somewhere new and deep and tore a cry out of me I muffled in the