Chapter 24
Chapter 24
~GRAYSON~
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Blair sat on the opposite side with a tissue pressed against the smear on her arm, staring out the window like the city might offer an explanation for the last twenty-four hours.
I kept my eyes forward, jaw/locked, replaying the terminal in my head. The crowd that shouldn’t have gotten that close. The first egg hitting her.
The fact that I had moved without thinking.
Someone had fed the press more than speculation. The rumors about Blair forcing the marriage and pushing Lily out hadn’t appeared out of thin air.
Private details, enough to sound credible, had been shaped into a story that was already doing damage. I wanted names. I wanted to know who had decided our arrangement was public property and how much of
it had been deliberate.
My phone remained silent. Lily hadn’t called since the island. That silence felt intentional.
Beside me, Blair’s phone buzzed.
She glanced at the screen and went still. For a second I thought she would ignore it. Then she answered, voice carefully flat.
“What do you want, Chase?”
I stiffened.
Chase? That asshole?
Hearing his name in her mouth felt wrong. After everything, after what he’d done, inviting him to the wedding and the revelation that she had spent six years with him, I hadn’t expected her to take his call like it was the most natural thing to do.
They hadn’t ended things nicely from what I could tell. From what little she had told me, he had betrayed her in the most public way possible. So why was she speaking to him now?
I kept my expression neutral and listened.
“I am okay,” she said after a pause.
Whatever he said next made her close her eyes briefly.
“It isn’t any of your business,” she replied. “You don’t get to check on me. I do not need your fake sympathy or whatever this is.”
Another stretch of silence.
I could hear the low murmur of his voice but not the words. Blair’s free hand curled into a fist against her
thigh.
“No. You don’t get to call because you suddenly feel guilty.” Her tone sharpened. “You married someone else without telling me. You used our song at your wedding. You let the entire world find out before I did. And now you want updates because someone threw an egg at me? Spare me.”
My grip tightened on my knee.
She kept going. “I didn’t ask for your concern. I didn’t ask for your research or your second thoughts. You made your choice. Live with it.”
Chase said something else. Blair let out a
Successfully
blocked
“Because it is different now,” she said. “I’m married. You’re married. Whatever version of me you think you’re trying to reach doesn’t exist for you anymore. Stop calling.”
Chapter 24
She ended the call without waiting for a response and dropped the phone into her lap.
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Thated that he still had her number. Hated that he had such easy access to her. Hated that he had her for six whole years.
I stared out the window for a few seconds, trying to sort the reaction sitting in my chest. Anger was the easiest label. Anger that she had answered him at all. Anger that he still felt entitled to her time. Anger that the sound of his name could still pull something out of her when she had spent days holding herself together under far worse pressure.
I didn’t like that he had called.
I didn’t like that she had felt obligated to respond.
I didn’t like the way my pulse had picked up when she said his name, or the territorial feeling that had
nothing to do with the debt or the arrangement and everything to do with the woman sitting two feet away with egg still drying on her sleeve.
I frowned at my own reflection in the glass.
I was angry that I felt anything at all.
This marriage was supposed to be a transaction. A temporary obligation I endured until it could be removed.
I had told Lily I would make Blair hate me. I had told myself the same thing.
Wanting her, protecting her at the terminal, reacting to Chase’s voice on the other end of a phone, remembering the exact way she had felt against me in the pool when she was too drunk to consent to any of it, was a complication I had no interest in claiming.
I had pulled back that moment for a reason.
She still didn’t remember it. That was good.
Blair shifted in her seat and finally looked at me.
“You’re quiet.”
“Processing,” I said.
‘About the call?”
‘About a lot of things.”
She studied my face for a moment, then glanced down at her phone again like she was tempted to throw it out the window. “He heard about the rumors. Saw the attack at the terminal. Apparently it’s already online. He wanted to know if I was hurt.”
“And you answered.”
“I answered so he would stop calling.” Her voice was tired. “I’m not interested in his concern. I’m interested in him leaving me alone.”
I believed her. That was part of the problem. Believing her made it harder.
It made the protective instinct from the terminal harder to dismiss as pure reflex. It made the memory of
her mouth and the sound she had made when my fingers were inside her even more difficult to bury under logic.
I looked away first.
The city continued past the windows. Somewhere ahead was the mansion, the next round of damage control, and a public narrative that had turned her into a homewrecker overnight.
I didn’t ask about Chase again.
I didn’t tell her what I was really thinking about.
Chapter 24
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I just sat there with the unwanted truth that I was no longer as detached from this marriage, or from her, as
needed to be
Damn it. I needed to get my feelings under control. Especially where Chase was concerned. I didn’t need another reason to punch him in the face the next time we met on the ice.
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Dex Morgan
Dex works to elevate each story with clean writing, emotional balance, and thoughtful flow for readers.