Chapter 29
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The clock struck midnight while Donovan and I stood together near the center of the ballroom, his hand laced through mine, and I felt the precise, invisible moment his grandfather's condition finished being satisfied, the legal weight of an entire family fortune shifting permanently into his hands simply because he had remained, in the eyes of the law and everyone watching, faithfully married for the required span of time.
The room erupted into applause and toasts, friends and board members raising glasses to Donovan's victory, to the company secured, to the legacy preserved against Reginald Castellan's grasping ambition.
Donovan smiled through all of it, accepted the congratulations with the easy grace of a man who'd spent his entire life performing exactly this kind of composure in public.
Reginald himself approached briefly, glass in hand, his congratulations smooth and entirely hollow, the particular courtesy of a man who'd spent two years counting on a different outcome and had run out of time to engineer one.
"Well played, cousin," he said, and there was nothing in his tone that suggested he meant either word kindly. Donovan simply inclined his head, accepted the comment as the concession it was, and let Reginald walk away without bothering to dignify the bitterness underneath it with a response.
I felt him trembling, very slightly, where our hands stayed joined.
Only the two of us understood what midnight actually meant beneath the celebration.
The contract had just reached its natural, fully satisfied conclusion.
I was, as of this exact moment, entirely free to walk away with the settlement we'd negotiated all those months ago at his lawyer's glass tower, no further obligation attached to either of us, the precise ending we'd both written into existence with our own signatures before either of us understood what we were actually signing away.
Donovan leaned down at one point, ostensibly to kiss my temple for the cameras still capturing the celebration, and murmured against my ear that he loved me, quietly, almost desperately, the words nearly lost beneath the noise of the party around us.
I told him I loved him too. Neither of us said anything about the papers waiting, finished and ready, in his study.
The room kept celebrating his victory for another hour.
I watched him smile and accept toasts and thank guests for coming, and underneath every gracious, practiced word, I watched a man who had just won everything his grandfather's will had promised him quietly devastated by the one thing the will had never once promised to protect.