All Chapters of The CEO’s Ruined Bride: My Ex Wants Me Back: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

IsabellaThe bookshop on Mayfair's Shepherd Market had been my sanctuary since before I was married, and on the morning after Karina's arrival I fled to it as a wounded animal flees to the only hollow it trusts.It was a narrow Georgian building with a green door and a bell that jingled like a spoon against a teacup, and its owner, Mr. Abernathy, was an elderly widower who kept a kettle on a hot plate behind the poetry shelves. I had discovered the place at nineteen while avoiding the Moore household on a rainy Saturday, and for seven years it had been the only room in London where no one demanded anything of me. The shelves rose to the ceiling in crooked ranks, the air smelled of paper and beeswax, and a ladder on brass wheels leaned against the history section like a patient servant.I left my guard Tomas at the front of the shop with a paperback he pretended to read, and I wandered into the back where the old atlases were kept. I had slept two hours, and my b

IsabellaI stood frozen in the last pew with my pulse hammering in my ears until the humming broke off in the middle of a bar, and a door clicked shut somewhere behind the altar.By the time I reached the front of the chapel, the vestry was empty. A single candle burned in a red glass cup on the altar rail, and beside it lay a white lily that had been laid down so recently that droplets still clung to its petals. I searched the back rooms and the tiny sacristy and even the bell tower stairs, and I found nothing except a damp footprint on the stone and the lingering smell of lavender and wet wool. When I returned to the garden, Sister Agnes was gathering the scattered photographs from the grass with trembling fingers, and she would say only that no one had passed her while she knelt among the carrots.I did not tell her what I had heard. I did not trust anything in my life enough to hand it to another person that evening, and I rode home through the evening rain

ScottI had been a poor liar all my life, and I had never before regretted it as much as I did in the thirty seconds after Isabella Vanguard looked at my telephone.She did not accuse me. She stood in the doorway of the tea shop with one arm in her coat and the other hanging empty, and her dark eyes searched my face with an intelligence that made my stomach drop. I opened my mouth to produce one of the smooth evasions that I had rehearsed in the mirror that morning, and I found that none of them would come. In the end I said only that the message was from a friend who worried about me, and that I was sorry she had seen it, and she nodded slowly with the expression of a woman filing a fact for later.Then she thanked me again in a voice as steady as glass, walked out into the drizzle, and climbed into the car that I had summoned for her without once looking back. I watched the tail lights disappear around the corner of the mews, and I stood in the cold doorway un

IsabellaThe Global Women in Finance Summit filled the Lancaster ballroom with four hundred guests and the unrelenting glitter of crystal chandeliers, and I walked into it that morning wearing a smile that I had practised in the lift.I had slept barely three hours after the night in the guest room, and I had eaten nothing but a single dry cracker because the smell of the breakfast tray had turned my stomach inside out. Travis had left before sunrise with a curt message through Hale that he would be in meetings until evening, and I had read it standing at the window with my forehead against the cold glass. We had not spoken since the argument over the photographs, and the silence between us had begun to feel like a third person living in our rooms.The summit organisers had seated me at the head table beside the Minister for Trade, a stout man who talked about tariffs with the enthusiasm of someone describing his grandchildren. Around us, the room hummed with th

TravisI slept three nights on the leather sofa in my office on the fortieth floor, and on each of them I woke at four in the morning smelling jasmine.It was not a real scent, I told myself, but a ghost left in my lungs by those few seconds in the lobby when Karina's lips had brushed my cheek. I opened the window to let in the freezing air, and I stood naked to the waist in the dark with the whole of London glittering below me, and I tried to remember what it felt like to be a man who did not carry a dead woman's perfume in his bones. The gold locket lay in the locked drawer of my desk where I had placed it that first night, and I had not opened it, because I knew that whatever it held would take something from me.Isabella's question had arrived each morning as promised, written on a small cream card that she slid under my study door before I woke. The first read Do you believe your mother is alive? and I had answered it truthfully, standing in the corridor wh