All Chapters of THE RAKE WHO CHASED ONLY ME: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

DEXTER’S POV I had known the moment she walked in.Not because I saw her immediately, I did not, I was in a conversation about something I could not now recall, the words moving through the air between me and whoever I was talking to while the party did its thing around us. I had known because of the shift. The particular adjustment in the room’s temperature that happened when something unplanned arrived.I had looked up.Found her across the room at the kitchen counter. Speaking to Daisy.Something cold had moved through me, controlled immediately, filed behind the professional stillness that served me in depositions and negotiations and every situation that required me to process information without showing that I was processing it. I had kept my eyes moving, not fixing on either of them, reading the exchange from my peripheral vision.Then Ivy had arrived. I had watched the hallway conversation, the particular body language of it, Ivy’s pleasant surface and the firmness undernea

DEXTER’S POV I had an idea and the idea required Lily to believe she had won something.That was the architecture of it, not a confrontation, not a scene, nothing that gave her the visible moment she had been engineering all evening. What I needed was to remove the conditions that made staying useful to her. Lily did not linger in rooms where she was not getting what she came for. She was too strategic for that. If the room stopped producing returns she would leave on her own, with her dignity intact, which was also in her interest.The condition making the room useful to her was uncertainty.Specifically, uncertainty between me and Daisy. The careful quality that had developed over the last week, the small degree of distance. That was what Lily had come to confirm and if possible extend. The hand on the chest had been the move, visible, territorial, designed to plant something in Daisy and see whether I would let it sit.I had removed the hand.But Lily was still here, watching,

DAISY’S POV I had needed five minutes.That was the honest accounting of why I had stepped onto the balcony, not to escape the party, not to avoid Lily, not because anything had broken. I had needed five minutes of something that was not the careful management of a room full of people and one woman who had spent eight months engineering her way back into our lives.I had called Casper.Not because I owed him a call or because the situation required his input. Because Casper King was the specific kind of safe that came from someone who had seen you clearly, made a decision about you with full information, and asked nothing difficult back. Our last conversation had ended at a coffee shop table with him squeezing my hand once and saying go figure out your version of this one and since then we had exchanged a handful of messages, warm, easy, the texture of a friendship that had found its right form.He answered on the second ring.“Daisy.”“Hi,” I said. “I’m at a party and I need five m

DEXTER’S POVWhen I was Arguing with Daisy at the balcony I turned around and Lily was standing at the balcony door.She was not coming out. She was standing in the frame of it, one hand on the glass, the party behind her, looking at me with an expression that took me a second to fully read because the top layer of it was so convincing. Concern. Warmth. The particular softness of someone who had overheard something painful and was feeling it on your behalf.I read the top layer.Then I read what was underneath it.Underneath the concern, underneath the warmth, underneath every practiced element of the expression she had put on, was something else entirely. Something that had nothing to do with sympathy. Something that sat in the corners of her eyes and the very edges of her mouth like a person who had just confirmed the thing they had come to confirm.She had heard everything.The argument in the doorway. Daisy’s voice saying I am tired of a relationship that moves two steps forward

DAISY’S POV The last guest left at midnight.Not dramatically, the party wined down the way good parties wined down, gradually and warmly, people collecting coats and saying goodnight and promising things they may or may not follow up on. By eleven forty five it was just the three of us and a room that looked like a party had happened in it.We cleaned up.That was the thing, nobody suggested it, nobody assigned roles, we just moved into the apartment the way we had learned to move through it together. Dexter collected glasses. I wiped down the counter. Ivy stacked things by the sink with the quiet efficiency of someone who cleaned when they needed to do something with their hands.Nobody spoke much.Not in the way of an awkward silence, in the way of people who had been through something together and were in the particular quiet that came after something that had required a lot of them. The music was off. The party energy had gone with the last guest and what remained was the apartm