Act Like You Love Me (Jessica) novel Chapter 94

Chapter 94

Aaron’s POV

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“Don’t,” I murmured, my grip tightening on her waist. “Don’t say anything that’s going to break this. Just stay here. Just for tonight, pretend the last six years were just a bad dream.”

I felt her relax against me, her head dropping onto my shoulder. But as I held her, my mind drifted back to the mystery of her life six years ago.

I could feel a strange tension in her, a guardedness that didn’t belong here. She was still keeping secrets.

I could feel them in the way she held her breath, in the way she looked at her phone when she thought I wasn’t watching.

I closed my eyes, and let the music swirl around us in the cool night air.

The guitar and strings began to fade, bleeding into a distant silence-still there, but faint and low, mirroring the slow, deep beat of our hearts.

The world stopped spinning, leaving us anchored to each other in the center of the dark arena.

Slowly, I pulled back just enough to look at her.

Our eyes met, and the air between us became thick and charged.

I could see the words written clearly in those deep, oceanic pupils of hers. They were heavy and restless, begging to be spoken.

My own emotions stared back at me, mirrored so perfectly in her eyes; the same longing, the same confession perched right on the tip of my tongue.

But I held it back. We both did.

A heavy, unspoken understanding passed between us.

Somehow, the timing felt warped, split in all the wrong places. It wasn’t the right moment to let those words. tumble from our lips.

There were too many memories with teeth waiting in the shadows of this bullring, too many lies left to unravel, and too many truths still hidden in the dark.

We needed to sort through the wreckage of our past before we could ever hope to build a future on those three words.

For now, the silence was enough. It was the only thing that felt honest.

The dance faded out, and we sat on the ground together.

I held her against me, the scent of her perfume and the warmth of her skin under the peach silk making my

16:05 Wed, Jan 21

Chapter 94

head spin.

She looked satisfied, her head resting on my chest as we watched the Spanish sky.

ང རྭ

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I could feel the steady beat of her heart, and for the first time in half a decade, my own didn’t feel like a jagged stone in my chest.

As if the universe itself resented my happiness, my thoughts snapped back to the phone call I’d overheard the night before. Auntie. Adrian.

The names stayed in my mind, impossible to forget.

Who was the boy she loved enough to whisper to in the dead of night? Who was this “Aunt” she trusted with her life?

I wanted to demand the truth. I wanted to shake her and ask why she’d replaced me, why she’d built a family that didn’t include the man who had nearly ended his own life because of her absence.

But then she looked up at me, her eyes reflecting the candlelight, and the anger died a sudden death.

She’s here, my inner voice whispered. She’s finally here.

I remembered the day she left. I’d come back to the apartment with a ring in my pocket and a heart full of plans.

I found nothing but a cold room and a hollow ache that had never truly gone away.

I’d spent years becoming the man the world wanted: the cold, untouchable athlete, the billionaire, the man engaged to a woman who looked good on paper but felt like cardboard in my arms.

Lauren was a strategy. Jessica was the other part of my soul.

I tightened my grip on her waist, pulling her closer, wanting to merge our shadows on the sand.

I watched her, the secret of how much I actually needed her burning in my chest. She was my only weakness in a world that thrived on exploiting them.

People looked at me and saw a brand, a player, a target—but they didn’t realize that she was the only person in the world I would go to war for.

I’d let the whole industry crumble before I let them touch a hair on her head.

“What are you thinking about?” she whispered, her fingers playing with the hair at the nape of my neck.

“I’m thinking about how much I hated the stars for six years,” I said, my voice rough. “Because they were the only thing that could see where you were, and they wouldn’t tell me.”

She pulled me down for another kiss, her lips soft and yielding. In that moment, surrounded by a thousand candles in the heart of Spain, I made a silent vow.

I didn’t care about the engagement. I didn’t care about the press or the “Adrian’ waiting for her back home.

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Chapter 94

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I had her back in my reach, and this time, I wasn’t just going to love her. I was going to capture her.

I was going to find out every secret she was hiding, and then I was going to make sure she never had a reason to run again.

As we stood there, lost in each other under the Madrid sky, the world outside the bullring felt like a distant, fading dream.

As the candles began to flicker out, one by one, a cold realization settled in my gut.

The seventy-two hours were over tomorrow. And I wasn’t ready to let the illusion die.

岀

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