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An hour later. The bridal suite.
Eliana sat at the vanity table in the new house and looked at her reflection after taking off her wedding makeup.
The memories from earlier in the day were still in her mind as she combed them through.
When she'd landed back in Edinburgh after everything, her father had been at the airport. He'd pinched the soft skin of her inner arm in greeting and steered her toward a man she'd never met.
"Eliana, darling. This is Sebastian Calloway."
Sebastian Calloway was tall, well-dressed, and striking — not in the way that tried to be striking, but in the way that simply was. His reputation was impeccable: he'd pulled his family company back from the edge of ruin when he was barely thirty, and since then he'd accumulated both the wealth and the restraint to go with it.
The list of women who'd pursued him was long. None of them had succeeded.
Which made it stranger that he was standing here being offered Eliana Ashford, a divorced woman with her particular history, in a business arrangement orchestrated by her father.
Her father left the room at Sebastian's quiet request. And Sebastian sat down opposite her with the manner of someone who had no interest in pretending.
"Miss Ashford. I know you have no reason to want a second arranged marriage. I want you to know that if you'd rather I declined this one, I can do that. I can make it easy for you to leave your father's arrangements entirely."
She studied him.
"Because I saw you," he said. "Seven years ago. At your first wedding." He paused, but his eyes were direct. "I could tell then that it wasn't what you'd chosen. I don't think this one is either."
"What does your father have on you?"
The question was careful and honest.
Eliana was quiet for a while.
She thought about Gerald Ashford, who had spent her childhood using her mother as a target for his temper and his indifference, and who had removed his family entirely to take up with other women while her mother still bore his name. Who had left her mother with nothing but jewellery and a rosewood keepsake box of small, personal things, and who had kept even that — dangling it as leverage.
She thought about what she wanted. Not what she'd been trained to accept. What she actually wanted.
Power. Independence. And the chance, just once, to be the one holding the leverage.
"My father has something of my mother's. I want it back."
Sebastian Calloway nodded.
"I need something from the Ashford Group," he said simply. "Once I have it, your father becomes irrelevant. If that works for you —"
"Do whatever you want to him afterwards," she said.
Something shifted at the corner of his mouth.
She extended her hand.
"Then I accept."