Todos os capítulos de The CEO’s Ruined Bride: My Ex Wants Me Back: Capítulo 41 - Capítulo 50

IsabellaThe ballroom of the old Kensington Assembly Hall glowed with a thousand paper lanterns, and for one evening it looked like a place where no child had ever been left on a doorstep.I had spent three weeks planning the gala with Sister Agnes and a committee of volunteers who had cried over the guest list, and the result stood around me in a bright wash of colour and music. Long tables were draped in white linen and strewn with golden confetti, and the children from St. Brigid's moved among the guests in their best clothes, small and solemn and shining. A string quartet played a gentle waltz on the stage beneath a banner that read Every Child Is Someone's Beginning, and I had needed to step behind a pillar and press a handkerchief to my eyes when I first read it.I wore a gown of deep green velvet that Travis's stylist had altered at the waist with a fussing concern that I had pretended not to notice. He had not come with me. He had told me at breakfast, in a voice stripped of e

TravisThe board vote ended at eight forty-seven, and by eight fifty-two I was in the back of the car with my tie loosened and my jaw clenched so tight that my teeth ached.I had won, which was the only reason that I allowed myself to leave the tower. Chairman Hollis had pressed for an emergency motion to compel disclosure of the Geneva trust, and I had defeated him by two votes after a ninety-minute argument that left me wrung dry. The victory tasted of ash, because while I had been fighting for the company I had also been staring at a photograph on my telephone of a man's arms around my wife, and I had not been able to put it away.Hale sat beside me with his tablet balanced on his knee, reciting numbers that I could not hear. I had ordered the car to drive at a speed that made him grip the armrest, and the streets of Kensington flowed by in a smear of wet light. The Assembly Hall rose ahead of us like a glowing lantern, and I saw the long line of cars outside and the doormen in the

KarinaThe locket reached my suite at the Savoy at half past six in the morning, borne on a silver breakfast tray beneath a dome of poached eggs I had never ordered.I sat on the edge of the bed in a silk robe with my hair still damp from the bath, and I stared at the gold heart lying beside the toast rack as though it were a live grenade. It was the very one that I had dropped on the lobby floor of Vanguard Tower, the one that had vanished from Travis's locked drawer, and its chain had been mended with a tiny new link that glittered in the lamplight. Someone had polished it until it shone, and someone had placed it before me with the careful indifference of a waiter serving a verdict.I called Julien, who answered on the first ring in the sleepy voice of a man who had been dozing in a chair beside my door. He swore that no one had entered the suite since midnight, that the tray had been brought by a hotel porter whom he had searched himself, and that the porter had been a gawky boy w

IsabellaThe courier arrived with the velvet pouch while I was still sitting on the edge of the bath at six in the morning, and I wondered afterward whether any woman had ever been so thoroughly ambushed by a piece of jewellery.I had spent the night turning the room upside down in search of the missing tests and the lily with the hair around its stem. I had searched the wardrobe and the dressing room and the drawers of the nightstand, and I had found nothing except a faint scent of jasmine on my pillow that I could not explain. Rosa had sworn on her grandmother's grave that no one had entered my bedroom, and the cameras in the corridor had shown only Travis's brief and tortured departure and my own lonely ascent. Whoever had slit the lining of my handbag possessed a skill that rendered every guard in the house a decoration.The locket lay in my palm like a small warm animal. Inside I found a photograph of Travis laughing on the deck of a yacht, young and sunburned and happier than I

ElianaMrs. Moore hosted her autumn supper on the Saturday after the gala, and she planned it with the ferocity of a general ordering a banquet inside a besieged fortress.The Hampstead house had been mortgaged twice since the audit began, and the staff who once carried the silver had been dismissed by letter that week. Puerto's mother had polished every fork herself, muttering curses at the creditors as she worked. Forty guests filled the dining room by eight o'clock, the wives of retired judges and the widows of minor peers, women who had known the Moore name when it still opened doors. They ate poached salmon beneath a chandelier with a missing crystal, and they spoke of the weather with a brittle gaiety that fooled no one.I sat at my mother-in-law's right hand in an ivory silk dress cut loose beneath the bust, with a band of folded wadding strapped under it that itched like a nest of ants. Mrs. Moore introduced me to each newcomer as the mother of her grandchild rather than as he