All Chapters of Signed, Sealed, Sinful : Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

*Lara's POV*Sunday came with grey skies and the smell of rain.I wore a deep blue wrap dress to Richard's house in Greenwich, which was not a house in the way I used the word; but a three-story colonial with a stone drive and old oak trees that had clearly been there longer than the building beside them.Xander drove. He had been quiet since we left the city, and the quiet was not the comfortable kind from shared meals in his office; it was the kind that came from something he was carrying and hadn't decided to put down yet."How was your father?" I asked, twenty minutes into the drive.He glanced at me. "I told him about Tonia last night."I went still. "How did he take it?""Hard." A long pause. "He didn't speak for almost five minutes. He just sat and looked at his hands." Xander's grip on the wheel was careful and even. "And then he said, 'Everyone has a price, Xander. I just thought I knew hers.'"I looked out the window. "I'm sorry," I said."He'll process it the way he process

Lara's POV*I stood on Richard's front step for eleven minutes.I know because I watched the time on my phone without meaning to, counting the minutes the way I used to count them as a child when something large was happening and I needed to feel that time was still moving at a regular speed.The oak trees at the end of the drive were bare at the tops, their highest branches thin against the grey sky, and the stone under my feet was cold through the soles of my shoes; behind me, through the closed door, I could hear the faint sound of Xander's voice and then Richard's, low and indistinct.I pressed my fingers against the door frame and breathed the cold air in and out, four counts in, four counts out, until my hands stopped being cold for the wrong reasons.The door opened behind me; I heard Xander's footsteps — measured and careful, the way he moved when he was managing something inside himself — and then the warmth of him close behind me without touching."Do you want to go?" he ask

Lara's POV*Samuel was awake when I knocked at nine Sunday morning, which meant he had been awake for a while.He opened the door in a worn grey sweatshirt and looked at me the way he looked at things he was concerned about — with his chin slightly down and his eyes very level; he stepped aside without a word and I came in.The apartment was small and tidy in a way that was different from our Brooklyn place — less lived-in, more deliberate, like someone who had learned to organize their space because the inside of their head was enough disorder; there was a cup of coffee waiting on the table that wasn't his."That's for you," he said.I sat; he sat across from me."Tell me," he said.I told him — from the beginning, not from Friday night at the rooftop bar, but from the fire, from the folder, from Richard Williams' voice in the kitchen telling me that my parents had died in a building whose dangerous wiring he had chosen not to repair.Samuel listened with his hands flat on the table

Lara's POV*I went back to Evelyn's on Monday morning at seven.Not because the plan required it — because when I woke at five-thirty with the board session sitting in front of me like a wall I had to walk through, the only place I wanted to start the day was in her kitchen.She was already up — Evelyn was always already up — and she opened the door before I knocked and said, "Come in; the tea is hot."I sat at her kitchen table in my coat and she poured without asking and sat across from me, and we were quiet for a moment in the way of people who didn't need conversation to be comfortable together."Today is the day," she said. Not a question."Three PM." I wrapped both hands around the mug. "Board meeting; Crawford is making his move.""And you're going.""I was summoned.""That's not the same as going." Her eyes were sharp and clear. "You could decline.""I could." I looked at the steam rising from the mug. "But I'm not."She studied me for a moment. "What are you afraid of?""That

Lara's POV*The Williams Group boardroom on the thirty-fifth floor was a long, formal room with a glass wall overlooking Midtown and a table that seated fourteen.I walked in at two fifty-eight with Xander on my left and Franklin on my right, and the room was already half-full; Mercer was seated midway down the table and gave me a small nod when I entered; Farris was at the far end reviewing papers; Solís sat near the window, her notepad open, pen uncapped.Albert Crawford arrived at two fifty-nine.He came in alone — no lawyer, no associate — and that absence was deliberate, the way everything he did was deliberate; he wore a dark suit and a composed expression and he looked at me across the table with the same pleasant assessment he had deployed at the charity gala."Mrs Williams," he said."Mr Crawford," I said.Xander sat beside me and did not speak.The board chairman, James Alderton, called the session to order at three-five and outlined the agenda: Crawford's motion, responses