Todos os capítulos de Vows of vengeance: His contract wife : Capítulo 21 - Capítulo 30

( Rhoswen)The restaurant he'd chosen wasn't the kind that took reservations from people who had to ask what it cost. It was the kind that existed at the end of a private elevator, nine tables, no menu, waitstaff trained never to let a glass sit empty long enough for a guest to notice they were being watched.I arrived twelve minutes early. Arriving exactly on time would have felt like conceding something. I spent those twelve minutes rehearsing the version of this conversation where I laid out the Calloway fraud in clean, clinical terms and Torin Blackwood agreed, purely out of self-interest, to help me take Graham apart.He arrived exactly on time, which told me he didn't feel the need to concede anything either."Ms. Marsh." He said it the way you'd press a thumb into fruit at a market stall still testing whether it held weight. He sat across from me, not beside me. I noted it and filed it away. A man who wanted to see a face, not sit next to one.I handed him the folder before the

(Rhoswen)I read it three times, exactly like I said I would, in a hotel room with the curtains drawn and a pot of coffee going cold beside me. By the third pass I'd stopped looking for the trap and started, despite every instinct trained into me over two years, looking for the parts that frightened me for entirely different reasons.The terms were exactly what he'd promised. One residence is his, though the contract listed it under both our names within the first week, a detail I read four times to be sure I hadn't imagined it. Public appearances scheduled and coordinated. Private life genuinely shared, no performance clause dictating what that had to look like behind closed doors, which felt more unsettling than if he'd tried to script it. No end date. A dissolution clause that activated only once Calloway Holdings had been fully, legally, irreversibly dismantled protection for me, I realized on the second read, not a trap. If he walked away first, I kept everything. If I walked awa

(Rhoswen)He introduced himself as Desmond Hale, and the name meant nothing to me which unsettled me more than if it had meant everything. A woman who'd spent two years memorizing every name attached to the Calloway fortune should have recognized a man who looked at her like an old debt came due. I didn't. That gap in my own research felt, standing there in the gold light with his hand extended, like the first crack in a wall I'd believed was load-bearing."Mr. Hale." I took his hand because refusing would have drawn more attention than accepting. His grip was dry and precise, an old man's handshake that had learned formality somewhere it actually mattered. "I don't believe we've met.""No," he said, and something in the way he said it made the single syllable last a beat too long. "Not as such. Congratulations on your engagement, Ms. Marsh. Blackwood is a fortunate man.""Thank you.""Your dress." His eyes moved, briefly, deliberately, to the small antique clasp at my shoulder, a pie

(Rhoswen)Desmond Hale's flat sat above a shuttered pharmacy in a part of the city the gala's guest list would never have reason to visit, and he opened the door before I'd finished knocking, as though he'd been standing on the other side of it since the moment his text left his phone."I wondered how long it would take you," he said, stepping back to let me in. "Faster than I expected, honestly. She was always the patient one. But you're not quite her, are you. Not entirely.""Who are you?" It wasn't a question anymore. I'd stopped pretending the moment I read his message, and something in my voice must have told him that, because he simply gestured me toward a worn armchair and sat across from me with the tired economy of a man who'd been carrying something heavy for longer than he wanted to admit."I was Graham Ashworth's man for eleven years," he said. "Fixer, if you want the honest word for it. The kind of employee who handles the parts of a man's business that can't survive bein

(Rhoswen)I hadn't heard Callum's name on the guest list for anything at Torin's house, and the sight of him standing uninvited in the study doorway, his jaw set with the particular determination I remembered from every argument we'd ever had, sent something cold and electric through my chest that had nothing to do with the fixer's warning or Graham's name."You have some nerve," Torin said, his voice gone dangerously flat, already moving to put himself half a step in front of me without seeming to decide to do it. "This is a private residence, Reydo it. "This is a private residence, Reyes. I don't recall an invitation.""I'm not here for you." Callum's eyes hadn't left my face since he'd walked in, and something in the way he looked at me not at Elena Marsh, not at Torin Blackwood's fiancée, but at me, in a way that felt uncomfortably precise sent my pulse climbing into my throat. "I need to speak with your fiancée. Alone, if she'll allow it."