Reborn to Dodge the Bad Marriage novel Chapter 75

Chapter 75 Not Family Yet

Finished

Everything in Nera wanted to turn around and leave. The company was hers now, though, and she wasn’t going to walk away from a meeting she had chased across the city for.

Adrian was lounging in his chair, and he looked up at her. “You don’t look happy to see me, Nora.”

Hearing her name in his mouth made her skin crawl.

Lionel’s eyes moved between them. “You two know each other?”

“Not well,” Nora said.

“Her sister is my girlfriend,” Adrian said. “So we’ll be family soon enough. It would be rude to call her anything but Nora.”

That made Lionel laugh. “Family, then. This should be an easy conversation.”

Nora had no patience for any of it. “Nobody’s married yet. There’s no rush to start playing family, Mr.

Pierce.”

Seriously. I could throw up.

Adrian smiled. “I’m in a hurry to marry Mandy, and getting on your good side first should speed that up.”

Nora gave a dry laugh. “Then take her down to City Hall tonight and sign the papers. You can be family after

that.”

She wanted the two of them married as fast as possible.

“City Hall’s closed,” Adrian said.

Nora smiled. “With your money, getting City Hall reopened tonight shouldn’t be a problem.”

Adrian stopped answering and simply watched her, and the look in his eyes had gone cold.

Lionel watched them trade lines, and inside of a minute the air over the table had turned sharp enough to

cut.

He jumped in with a laugh. “Let me get the food started. Miss Sinclair, is there anything you don’t eat?”

The deal still mattered more than her mood, so she didn’t storm out. “Nothing.”

She took the seat furthest from Adrian that the room allowed.

Lionel stepped out, which left the two of them alone, and being shut in a room with him made it hard to breathe.

In her first life, he had locked her in a room every time she came home. Then he would go down the list of every man she had seen that day, asking whether she had let any of them so much as shake her hand.

Ordinary manners were enough to convince him she was sleeping around, and then he beat her for it.

Į

1/3

75:29 Thu, Oct 1

Chapter 75 Not Family Yel

God, he’s exhausting.

chair scraped across the floor.

Finished

Nora’s arm came up in front of her forehead before she thought about it, an instinctive block that was already halfway to a punch, and she stared at him over the top of it.

Adrian’s frown cut deep. “I moved a chair. That’s the reaction I get?”

She caught herself and made her voice flat. “I was wiping my forehead.”

Adrian had put a chair through people before, hard enough to break it. One of those had left her with a concussion.

The fear had settled in deep, so alone in a room with him, a chair moving made her guard first and swing second.

He watched her a moment too long. “Miss Sinclair, we barely know each other. Why were you already this guarded the first time we met?”

He had felt it that first day at the Sinclair house.

The way she reacted to him was nothing like normal.

It was as if she knew the worst version of him and was keeping her distance from it.

None of it added up.

The sharpness of his stare put her on edge, so she dug a candy out of her bag and started unwrapping it. “You’re my sister’s boyfriend. I keep my distance so nobody gets the wrong idea.”

He watched her, frowning. “You like butterscotch too?”

Her fingers stopped on the wrapper.

Then she finished unwrapping it slowly and put it in her mouth. “Not especially. Mandy handed it to me this morning when she told me your good news. Call it a party favor.”

He frowned at the way she ate it, and then his eyes went to her legs under the table.

The scrape on her calf had almost finished scabbing over, most of it gone, new pink skin underneath.

Mandy’s calf still carried a long scab across it.

Nora frowned back at him. “Mr. Pierce, you’re about to marry my sister. Staring at my legs isn’t a good look.

“If your head is in the wrong place and your character is worse, I’ll have to think about whether I want you anywhere near her.”

He looked up to find her spitting the half-eaten candy back into the wrapper, like something had tasted

wrong.

“You’ve misread me, Miss Sinclair. I only noticed that your injury and Mandy’s sit in almost the same place, and you were both in Deerridge that day. That’s a lot of coincidence.”

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify