Todos os capítulos de The CEO’s Ruined Bride: My Ex Wants Me Back: Capítulo 11 - Capítulo 20

IsabellaThe first time I sat before Vanguard's board of directors, I wore armour disguised as a navy suit and a pearl necklace that Travis had left on my dressing table without a note.The meeting was held by video conference, with fourteen faces arranged in a grid across the wall-sized screen in the penthouse study. Travis sat to my left with his hands steepled beneath his chin, and Hale stood near the door with a tablet, and I could feel their attention on me like two different kinds of weather. Travis had told me the board needed to see my face before the Geneva trip so they would stop whispering about a stranger who had appeared from nowhere and taken his name.What he had not told me was how cruel they would be about it."Mrs. Vanguard, we are delighted to meet you at last," said the chairman, Gerald Hollis, a heavy man in his sixties whose silver moustache twitched whenever he spoke. His voice dripped with a courtesy that was clearly counterfeit. "Forgive us if we seem surprise

ElianaDr. Marlow's private clinic smelled of lavender disinfectant and old money, and I had chosen it precisely because the walls were thick and the receptionist was paid not to remember faces.I arrived forty minutes before Puerto, wearing a loose cream dress that I had padded at the waist with a folded silk scarf, and I carried a handbag with a thick envelope tucked inside the lining. The waiting room was empty except for a potted orchid and a glass table stacked with magazines about babies I would never hold. I sat down, crossed my ankles, and practised the expression of fragile courage that I had rehearsed in the mirror all week.Dr. Marlow received me in his consulting room with the careful smile of a man who had already calculated what I was worth to him. He was tall and silver-haired, with the manicured hands of a surgeon and the shifting eyes of a gambler who had lost more than he admitted. He closed the door behind me and turned the lock with a soft click that made my pulse

IsabellaThe smell of frying bacon reached me before I had even opened my eyes, and my stomach responded with such violence that I barely made it to the bathroom.I knelt on the cold marble with my forehead pressed against the rim of the sink, my hair falling loose around my face, while the room tilted in slow, sickening circles. Only a week earlier, the scent of breakfast had been a comfort that reminded me of my grandmother's kitchen at the orphanage, where the sisters fried eggs on Sunday mornings. Now it felt like an assault, and I gripped the porcelain and waited for the tremors to pass.When at last I rose and splashed water over my face, the woman in the mirror looked like a faded copy of the bride who had stood on Travis's balcony. Her skin had a greenish pallor beneath the cosmetics, and her eyes were glassy and wide. I told myself that it was nerves, that the board meeting and the Geneva journey had exhausted me, and that no sane woman could be expected to sleep soundly in a

Unwanted LiliesPuertoThe florist on Brook Street had been arranging blooms for duchesses since before I was born, and she regarded my wrinkled shirt with the polite horror of a woman who had watched many ruined men carry apologies through her door.I had slept three hours in the back seat of my car, parked beneath a sodium streetlamp with the memory of the black sedan still pressing against my skull. The white lily that had dropped from the gloved hand lay on the passenger seat beside me, bruised and slowly browning at the edges, and I had not been able to throw it away. Somewhere between the second whisky and the dawn, I had decided that the only way to survive the men who owned me was to become exactly what they wanted, which meant becoming a man who haunted Isabella with tenderness."Three dozen of the Casablanca lilies, please, wrapped in cream paper with no ribbon," I told the florist, laying my last unfrozen credit card on her counter. "She detests

IsabellaThe car had barely cleared the Baron's gates before I slid the photograph from my clutch with trembling fingers, and Travis lunged across the seat as though I had drawn a knife."Do not look at it," he said, but I had already turned it over.The image was old, its colours softened to the dusty tones of a faded sunset, and a white border curled at the edges. A young woman stood before a pair of towering iron gates, which I recognised at once as the entrance to the Vanguard estate, because the same black falcon-wing finials crowned the posts of the gates I had seen in photographs on Travis's study wall. She was perhaps twenty-five, with dark hair coiled at her nape and a long camel coat belted tightly against some unseen wind. In her arms she held a baby wrapped in a pale blanket, and the infant's tiny fist was curled around a single silver chain at the woman's collar.I knew the baby, though I had never seen a photograph of myself before the age of three. The knowledge arrived