Lahat ng Kabanata ng When Forbidden Feels This Good: Kabanata 101 - Kabanata 110

Racheal’s POVThe kiss was warm and brief and entirely disarming, which I suspected he knew, which I suspected was precisely why he had deployed it at this specific moment, this man who had learned the specific geography of my defences with the patient thoroughness of someone who found the learning genuinely interesting.Despite everything, despite the suitcase and the three days and the eight hundred Houston hotels I had been prepared to call in sequence, I felt something ease.The laugh came before I could prevent it, small and genuine, escaping through my attempt to maintain the serious face the situation warranted."Stop it," I said, but the authority had gone out of it.He was already moving, the hands at my waist shifting, guiding me away from the suitcase and toward the bed with the unhurried confidence of a man who had made a decision about the next hour and was implementing it with the full expectation of cooperation."How about", he said, his voice dropping into the register

Scarlett’s POVThe tears came first. Embarrassing and unstoppable, streaming down cheeks that were still damp from the rain. I pressed my lips together, trying to hold back the words that were clawing up my throat.But they came anyway. The way things do when you've been carrying them too long."Silvio." My voice broke on the name. "He raped me, Gio.”The silence that followed was absolute.Giovanni went so still that he looked carved from the same stone as his beloved sculptures. The colour drained from his face so completely that I was afraid he was going to collapse.Then sound came out of him. French, rapid and broken, something between a prayer and a curse that I didn't fully understand but felt in my bones."When?" His voice, when it came back to English, was barely above a whisper. "When did this happen?""That same night. After you left for your doctor's appointment." I stared at my hands. "He took me to a room. There were substances. I don't remember all of it, Gio. I don't

Cade’s POV"Interesting threat," he said, "from a man whose pregnant girlfriend is currently in the custody of my people." He said it without heat, just observation, just the reminder of the relevant variables and their current positions. "It seems to me that you have considerably more to lose in this room than I do. So I suggest you listen carefully to what comes next."I said nothing.Because he was right about the variables, and acknowledging it was less costly than pretending otherwise.He turned slightly, the movement bringing Ezra into the sightline of both of us, the three of us forming a triangle in the flat industrial light."Ezra is my nephew," he said. "As you have now established. And he has developed, in the course of his time in Houston, a genuine interest in Scarlett." He said her name with the easy familiarity of someone who had been aware of her for longer than the last several days, the familiarity of someone for whom she was not a new variable but an existing one. "

Scarlett’s POVThe drive to the airport was quiet in the way that only certain kinds of quiet were quiet, not the comfortable silence of two people who had nothing to say and were at peace with that, but the loaded silence of two people who had a great deal to say and had agreed, without discussing the agreement, to say none of it yet.At the airport, we moved through the private terminal with the efficiency of people who had done this before and were not in the mood for ceremony. The jet was ready. The flight attendant received us with the practised serenity of her profession and asked if we needed anything. Cade said water. I said the same. We sat in the facing seats, and the engines found their frequency, and Houston fell away beneath us, and Texas assembled itself in the distance, and the whole of it happened in a silence that neither of us broke.I tried once, somewhere over the midpoint of the journey, when the flat geometry of the land below us had settled into its familiar pat

Cade’s POVScarlett, who had been sitting in the armchair near the window with her feet tucked under her and her own coffee in both hands and her eyes directed at the middle distance with the practised quality of someone maintaining a neutral expression in a room full of people watching for cracks in it, turned her head toward the entrance hall.I watched her face.Watched the information arrive in it, the name, the word boyfriend, the fact of his presence at the door of the Blackwood estate on the day after Houston, and watched her run it through whatever she was running it through with the rapid, visible quality of a very intelligent person receiving a surprise and processing it faster than surprise usually allowed.Her eyes found mine.The look lasted two seconds.In those two seconds she communicated, without words, without any of the social signals that the others in the room might have read, a question so direct and so specific that it required no translation.Did you know he wa