Chapter 50
Chapter 50:
After the fitting, when the studio door had closed and the silk organza had been returned to its garment bag and the mirrors had stopped showing Lara six versions of a woman with a red face, she sat alone in the changing room and pressed her palms against her cheeks.
They were still warm.
An incredible thought was forming in her mind — not logically, not through the careful analysis she applied to everything else, but through the body: through the residual heat on her skin, through the echo of his breath near her ear, through the phantom weight of his arm around her waist.
Had Edmund fallen in love with her?
She covered her face. Rejected the thought. They’d known each other for — what? Two weeks? Twelve days of marriage, five meetings before that, and a childhood memory of a solemn boy pinching her cheeks. That wasn’t enough time. That was barely enough time to learn someone’s coffee order, let alone fall in love.
But the jealousy had been real. The edge in his voice when he’d read Miriam’s message — that wasn’t performance. Lara had spent twenty years surrounded by men who performed emotions, and she could tell the difference between the manufactured and the genuine the way a jeweler could tell glass from diamond.
Edmund’s jealousy was diamond. Small, contained, but real, with the particular hardness of something that had formed under pressure.
He was jealous. Of two men he’d met once, in a registry office, who had been escorted away in zip ties. He was jealous because Lara had a past that didn’t include him, and the past had names and faces and twenty years of history that his twelve days couldn’t match.
She told herself it was normal. Spouses were jealous. It was contractual, practically — a feature of the arrangement, not evidence of feeling.
She didn’t believe herself.
Back at the Ashworth estate, Lara threw herself into work — sketching designs for the wedding reception, reviewing the guest list, making the kind of decisions that required the analytical part of her brain and left no room for the part that was still thinking about Edmund’s hands on silk.
Edmund, observing this with the quiet amusement of a man who recognized avoidance when he saw it, adjusted the desk lamp to the angle she preferred — fifteen degrees to the left, the angle that didn’t hurt her eyes — and withdrew without being asked.
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He retreated to his study and made a phone call.
“Loosen the surveillance on Callum Hargrove and Declan Thorne p>
His security chief paused. “Sir p>
“Not entirely. Reduce visible presence.
Give them the impression that our perimeter has gaps.” Edmund leaned back in his chair, turning a fountain pen between his fingers with the idle precision of a man whose hands were always busy when his mind was working. “I want to know exactly where they go and what they do when they think they’re unobserved.
Controlled access is more useful than total exclusion p>
It was a chess move. Not defense — invitation. Let them in, on his terms, through doors he controlled, into rooms he’d prepared. The difference between being invaded and hosting a tour was simply who held the keys.
The second call was to Harold and Dorothy.
Harold Ashworth answered on the second ring. His voice was steady, measured — the voice of a patriarch who had spent fifty years building a family name and was now, in his seventies, more concerned with maintaining it than expanding it.
Dorothy picked up the extension immediately, because Dorothy always picked up the extension when the call involved Lara.
Edmund explained the situation with the clinical precision of a briefing: Callum and Declan had been petitioning Miriam. They wanted to attend the wedding. They claimed to have accepted the marriage. Lara had agreed to let them come.
Dorothy’s reaction was immediate and volcanic.
“After what they did? After they used that woman to play games with my daughter’s heart? After Lala nearly died in a room full of flowers while they picked out roses p>
Her voice cracked on the word “roses.” Dorothy was not, by nature, a woman who lost composure — she was an Ashworth by marriage and a diplomat by temperament — but the details of what had happened in Halcombe, delivered to her by Miriam in a late-night phone call two weeks ago, had produced in her a fury that composure could not contain.
“How dare they come to Thornfield. How dare they ask to be at her wedding.
As if they hadn’t spent a month treating her like — like furniture. Like a thing that would wait p>
Harold’s silence was different from Dorothy’s noise. It was the silence of a man who agreed with his wife’s anger and was processing it through a different system — not hotter, not colder, but more structural. Harold thought in terms of families, alliances, consequences. He’d chosen Edmund for Lara not randomly but deliberately — had identified the Blackwell heir as the kind of man who would protect what Harold had spent a lifetime building, and who would treat Lara the way Harold believed she deserved to be treated: with constancy, with attention, with the particular, old-fashioned devotion that didn’t require jealousy games to function.
Callum and Declan had been, in Harold’s estimation, potential. They’d had the raw material — intelligence, loyalty, a love for Lara that was genuine even if it was expressed with catastrophic stupidity.
But potential without execution was just waste, and Harold Ashworth did not tolerate waste.
“They won’t get through the gates,” Harold said. His voice carried the weight of a man whose gates were not metaphorical. “I’ll speak with security p>
Edmund acknowledged this. Set the phone down. Returned to the fountain pen, turning it between his fingers.
The trap was set.
Callum and Declan would come to Thornfield. They would find the surveillance loosened, the barriers softened. They would believe they were making progress.
And then, when they arrived at the Ashworth gates — confident, hopeful, convinced that the path was opening — they would discover that the path had been a corridor, and the corridor led to a room with no exit, and the room was Edmund’s, and in that room, the only thing they would find was the truth: that Lara had moved on, and that the man she’d moved on with was not playing games.
In Thornfield, the Ashworth name meant something. The Blackwell name meant something more.
And the alliance between them — sealed by a marriage, cemented by a wedding that was now ten days away — meant that Callum Hargrove and Declan Thorne, for all their billions and their Halcombe influence, were visitors in a country where they held no passport.