❤️🔥My CEO's Forgotten One-Night Stand
Hadley's POV The front door stuck the way it always did in humidity, and I had to shoulder it open. Eight hours on the bookstore floor, three more in a lecture hall. All I wanted was a shower and a pillow that wouldn't ask me anything. Instead, every light in the living room was on. My parents sat on the couch with that particular stillness that never precedes anything good. "Hadley. We need to talk." My father's voice had an edge I rarely heard aimed at me. I let my bag slide off my shoulder. "Can it wait? I'm barely vertical." "No." My mother lifted a cream envelope between two fingers, the way a prosecutor holds exhibit A. "This arrived today." Gold script caught the lamplight, and my stomach folded over before I'd read a word. I didn't need to read it. "Jocelyn's wedding invitation." She announced it the way you'd mention traffic — as if my cousin hadn't taken a wrecking ball to my life six months ago and strolled away humming. "That backstabbing witch is not my cousin." My father's face darkened three shades. "Hadley Marie Vane. That's enough of that language." "She slept with Emmett." My voice cracked clean down the middle of the sentence. "In my bed, Dad. Four years I gave him. In my own room." My mother produced one of her trademark sighs. "Emmett was the one with a girlfriend. Jocelyn was just... confused. He manipulated her." A laugh scraped out of me, short and tasting like copper. "Confused. Is that the official family position? She looked me in the eye afterward and smiled, Mom." "This childish feud needs to end." She steamrolled on as though I hadn't spoken. "Your aunt is heartbroken that you keep skipping family gatherings." "I'm so sorry my trauma is inconveniencing everyone's holiday schedule." My father rose to his full height — a gesture he'd perfected over decades of ending arguments through sheer presence. "You're going to this wedding, Hadley. That's final." "I'm — what?" I searched his face for some flicker of irony. Nothing. Granite. "You hea
