บททั้งหมดของ Lover by Design: บทที่ 71 - บทที่ 80

CelesteAdrian Swift called a war council, which is a thing Adrian does, because Adrian believes that with enough of the right people in a room any problem becomes a slide deck.He did it over encrypted video, all of us, the strange family this crisis has assembled. Me. Michael. Maya and Ollie. Marcus. Sienna, pale and steady in a window on the screen. And Adrian, my sister’s husband, the man who left me at an altar and has spent every month since being scrupulously, unbearably decent about it, which is somehow worse than if he’d been cruel.“Ferrand’s made contact with the Hartwell board,” Adrian said, in the calm executive voice that once told me he’d fallen in love with my sister. “Reputational pressure, regulatory noise, the beginnings of a squeeze. It’s leverage. He’s using the company because he’s using Celeste, and he’s using Celeste because she’s at the cent

CelesteHe pushed into me and I made a sound too much like a sob, and I hated it, and I moved against him anyway.Hard. Desperate. Chasing the oblivion, chasing the part of us that didn't know we were over.He filled me like he'd never left, like my body had kept the shape of him in storage, and every inch of the way in was a homecoming and a betrayal at once. I clenched around him and he swore into my hair, soft and wrecked: "Christ, Celeste."It was good the way falling is good, right up until the ground.I rode him against the wall, my spine scraping the plaster, my heels driving him deeper, and he met me thrust for thrust, the wet sound of us filling the room, the slap of his hips against mine, the slide of him inside me, slick and hot and perfect.I hated the perfection. Hated that my body knew his, had never forgotten, that every place he touched lit the way it always had.His mouth found my bre

CelesteYou can stop this.I stared at the three words for a long time, and then I did the thing Michael taught me without meaning to, the thing I now do by reflex. I didn’t react. I gathered.Because the message was bait, obviously, but bait tells you what the fisherman thinks you’ll bite on, and I wanted to know what Ferrand believed I wanted.His terms arrived within the hour, because Ferrand never makes you wait long for the hook once he’s shown you the worm. A second message. Longer. Almost warm.The attack on your sister’s company stops the moment you give me what I need. Your fragment. Your key. A single authentication, freely given, and Hartwell Aviation is left untouched, and its board never learns how close it came. That is the smaller half of the offer.The larger half is this. I can clear your name. Not quietly. Completely. The Huxley scandal, the money, the

CelesteMy mother called me for the first time in eight months, and she was crying, and I understood that Ferrand had found the one pressure I have no defence against.My parents had spent the year of my disgrace being publicly, elegantly ashamed of me, which for people like my parents meant silence and closed doors and a firm’s worth of lawyers making sure my scandal never quite touched their names.I’d made my peace with it, mostly. You cannot be a Hartwell and not know exactly how conditional the family’s love is. It’s printed in small type under everything.But now the machine had come for the company, and the company is the thing my parents actually love, more than each other, more than us, and my mother called me crying because the world she’d built her whole self on was being quietly dismantled, and somewhere in her fear she’d decided it was my fault, and somewhere under her decision she

CelesteAnne chose a greenhouse, which I understood the moment I walked into it, because Anne chooses spaces the way she chooses everything, for what they say without her having to.A botanical garden after hours, a great Victorian glasshouse full of things grown far from where they belonged, kept alive in a climate that wasn’t theirs by people who controlled every variable.I don’t think the metaphor was an accident. Anne doesn’t do accidents.She was waiting among the orchids, patient and smooth and exactly as I remembered her from a café that felt like a lifetime ago, and she smiled at me like I was a project that had turned out well.“You came alone,” she said. “Good. I wondered if he’d let you.”“He doesn’t let me do anything. That’s rather the point of me now.”“Is it.” She looked pleased, which I distrusted. &ldq