"What did you wish to say to me?"
Allen Morgan’s voice, smooth as aged bourbon and resonant with a hidden, magnetic authority, drifted across the silent expanse of the memorial gardens. It was not a shout, but in the oppressive stillness of the foggy morning, it carried the weight of a thunderclap.
The spectators—the self-important cousins of the the Hobbs family, the fawning secondary Patriarchs, and the hired help—all froze in their tracks. A collective gasp seemed to hang in the air, suspended by the sheer audacity of the man they had spent three years mocking.
Christian Hobbs jerked her head up, her tear-stained eyes widening as she stared at the back of the man standing before her. It was a silhouette she had seen ten thousand times in the dim light of their shared home, yet today,
