All Chapters of MISTLETOE,MOONLIGHT AND MY SECRET: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

I had exactly four seconds to decide whether Eleanor Whitmore was here to end this before it started.She was smiling. That told me nothing. Eleanor had been smiling at people she wanted to destroy since she was nineteen years old, and I'd watched her do it to men twice my size in boardrooms that mattered a great deal more than this suite."Eleanor." I kept my voice even. "You're early.""I got bored." She crossed the room, hand extended toward Maya like this was any ordinary introduction and not the moment my entire arrangement could come apart. "Your mother said Thursday. I've never once trusted your mother's version of a timeline, and clearly I was right not to.""Maya," Maya said, shaking her hand. "Though you already knew that.""I did. Victoria's been very thorough." Eleanor's eyes moved over her quickly, assessing, the kind of look that catalogued a person in under a second and rarely got it wrong. "You're not what I pictured.""What did you picture?""Someone easier to dismi

Maya's face told me everything before she said a single word, and none of it was good."Julian." Eleanor stood, unhurried, smoothing her skirt like she hadn't just been caught mid-conversation with a woman who looked like she'd seen a ghost. "This isn't what it looks like.""It looked like Maya was terrified. Explain that part first.""She wasn't terrified of me.""Then who?"Neither of them answered right away, and the silence stretched long enough that I felt something cold settle into my chest, the specific dread of watching two people decide, in real time, how much of the truth I was allowed to have."Maya." I kept my voice level, though it cost me something to do it. "What did she tell you.""Victoria's investigator has been talking to people from my old town," Maya said. Her voice was steadier than her face had been a second ago, which told me she'd had practice building that steadiness fast, on command, more times than any of this should have required. "A neighbor. Someone from

I had exactly one talent that had ever mattered in this family, and it was knowing precisely when a door was about to close on information I needed.Julian's suite went quiet the second I stepped inside. Two people who had clearly just stopped talking, and were now working very hard to look like they hadn't been."Mother." Julian stood, positioning himself half a step in front of Maya without seeming to notice he'd done it. "This isn't a good time.""It rarely is with you." I set my bag down on the entry table, exactly where I always set it, because precision was the one thing in my life nobody had ever managed to take from me. "I won't stay long. I only need an answer to one question before I can plan tomorrow properly, and I'd rather have it from you than piece it together secondhand, the way I seem to be piecing together everything else lately.""What question?""Is Bianca going to write something tomorrow night that embarrasses this family, or isn't she?" I looked at Maya directl

Maya hung up the phone and sat there for a full ten seconds without saying anything at all, and I made myself wait for her instead of demanding answers I wasn't sure she had ready yet."Who is Ren?" I finally asked, when the silence had stretched past what either of us could stand."Someone from before." Her voice came out flat, careful, the tone she used when she was choosing every word like it cost her something. "Before the shop. Before this town. Before any of it.""That's not an answer.""I know it isn't." She pressed both hands against her eyes, and when she dropped them, the fear had hardened into resolve, arriving late but arriving all the same. "He's someone I used to know. Someone I was supposed to end up with, a long time ago, before I left.""Left what?""The place where I grew up. The people I grew up with." She looked at me, and I could see her deciding, in real time, how much of the truth could survive being said out loud tonight. "It's a long story, Julian, and I promi

I'd rehearsed this story a hundred times in my head over three years, and every version I built died the second Julian actually looked at me, waiting."It wasn't a love match," I said. "It was never meant to be. Where I grew up, marriages get arranged the way business mergers get arranged here, for stability, for bloodlines, for reasons that have very little to do with what either person actually wants. Ren and I were promised to each other when I was sixteen.""Sixteen," Julian repeated flatly."It's not as sinister as it sounds. Nobody expected us to marry at sixteen. It was an agreement between families, the kind that gives everyone years to get used to the idea before it actually happens." Ren's voice was steady, matter-of-fact, no defensiveness in it at all. "We grew up close. It wasn't cruelty. It was just how things worked. My father was close with the Alpha. It made sense to everyone but us."Julian's brow furrowed. "The Alpha?"I felt my stomach drop a half second too late