All Chapters of Mistress To Heiress : Chapter 11 - Chapter 13

Heir to Skyfall Chapter 9 — The Interview Alexander made it through the night. The surgeon came at six in the morning with better news than she'd had twelve hours earlier — stable, responding, still in the ICU but no longer on the edge of it. Lydia sat with that for a moment, both hands wrapped around a coffee cup, and let herself feel the relief all the way through instead of just at the surface. Salvador was asleep in the chair beside her, head back, arms crossed. She let him sleep. He'd been awake longer than she had and she'd only gotten ninety minutes herself, head on his shoulder somewhere around three, waking to the buzz of his phone and settling back down when he silenced it. She looked at him for a moment in the early hospital light. The tension he carried in his jaw when he was awake had released in sleep. He looked younger. He looked like someone who had earned the right to rest and rarely let himself take it. She got up quietly to find the bathroom, and found B

Heir to Skyfall Chapter 12 — First I Love You The safe house was Salvador's idea. Not the penthouse — that address had been in the news too many times in the past two weeks. Not the estate — too many ears in the walls, too many eyes in the corridors. He had a property two hours outside the city that almost nobody knew about: a house on a rural property, surrounded by trees, the kind of place where the only sound at night was the wind and whatever lived in the fields beyond the fence line. He drove them there on a Thursday evening after a week that had included a poisoning attempt, a board motion, a hospital vigil, an ex-girlfriend, a legal threat from Elena Santa, and a leaked smear campaign. He said, "You need one night where nothing is coming at you," and she didn't argue, because he was right. The house was small and real. Wooden floors, a fireplace, mismatched furniture that had been chosen for comfort rather than impression. Books on shelves that had actually been read. A ki