Sweet Romance11 min read
Trapped in a Frame, Freed by a Kiss
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I woke to light and the distant pounding of a door. For a second the whole world was soft and slow: the linen under me, the steady breath beside me, the way his face looked when the armor came off and left only warmth.
Sancho Ramirez was impossible to dislike when he slept. His jaw relaxed, eyelashes feathering, and the murderous edge that ruled his daylight vanished. I let my fingertips travel his jaw without thinking. The skin was warm and real beneath my touch.
A noise — rapid, impatient — made my heart sliver. Someone was at the door.
“Stay still,” Sancho whispered without opening his eyes. His voice was sharp with warning. “Whatever happens, don’t show your face.”
I blinked. He tugged the blanket up and over my head like a shield. My pulse thudded in my ears. “Why?” I mouthed.
“Because,” he breathed, “we are going to handle raccoons at the front door.”
The knock grew louder. Sancho sat up, composed himself with a patience I had always mistaken for indifference, and opened the door.
A woman in a sharp dress stormed in like a hurricane without asking permission. Her hair was styled just so; her eyes were frantic and practiced. Seeing Sancho made her stumble. “Sancho—” she said, voice thin with accusation.
“Agatha?” Sancho said, and his tone tightened.
Agatha Dickinson blinked tears into existence. “Why won’t you let me in? Isn’t there a woman inside? Who is she?” Her words were a blade aimed at me.
I heard flashes then: shutters, a battery of cameras, the shiver I felt when flashes painted the room white. Agatha had come prepared; for someone who looked like she’d just stepped off a runway, she had thought this through.
“You think I’m keeping you out?” Sancho’s expression cut her off. “Go ahead. See for yourself.”
She moved toward the bed with the determination of a woman who had rehearsed victory. “Chloe,” she cried. “How could you be here? Have you no shame?”
Flashes burst. Voices asked questions I could hardly understand. I crawled from the covers, all composure falling away with every step I took.
“Agatha, stop,” I said, my voice small. “You’re making a scene. There are people— why are you bringing reporters here?”
“You set me up!” Agatha screamed. “You stole my fiancée! You ruined everything.”
Sancho sat up, calm as a storm center. He picked my hand and let the whole room quiet around it like a coin dropping. His tone was slow and deliberate. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, and the microphones framed him like a lord on a dais, “I hereby announce that my engagement to Agatha Dickinson is over. I will be marrying Chloe Alvarado.”
Agatha went pale enough that the makeup couldn’t hide it. “What did you say?” she hissed.
“I said the truth,” Sancho replied. “Leave us.”
She stumbled backward, then turned and fled like a betrayed queen. Reporters filed out after her like vultures, shouting and snapping. Sancho closed the door with the cool certainty of a man who had planned this pageant better than his rivals.
Later, when the storm had passed outside and the hotel smelled only of expensive soap, Sancho studied my face as though reading a book. “Tell me exactly how you ended up in my room.”
I told him the story, but not the truth. I couldn’t let him know I had planned some of it. I couldn’t have him know I had wanted him to notice me. “I’m sorry,” I said, and meant it and didn’t mean it all at once.
“You were with Agatha drinking last night,” Sancho said simply. “She arranged reporters to be at the door this morning.”
“She put something in the drink,” I said, remembering the cold trickle of the moment I had faked stumbling. I told him the version the world was supposed to hear: the scared, clumsy girl caught in circumstances beyond her control.
He watched me, then asked for my ID. “Do you want to marry me?” he asked with a smirk that made my chest a little light.
“My head is still spinning,” I managed. “Are you asking me?”
He was ridiculous. “I’m asking you to accept that this is the best defense against scandal.”
I looked at him and saw, in one breath, the old boy who’d once veered away from me like the sun from a storm cloud and a man who had just used a public announcement to slam a door on someone else’s scheming. I said yes because Agatha’s hurt face had been a small triumph, and because I had a plan that needed time to ripen.
We registered the marriage that day, then bought rings at a jeweler whose assistant smiled like a man who felt very clever. We signed our names on a sheet and the world called us husband and wife.
The next morning, Sancho took me to his apartment — a modern duplex with balconies that rubbed against the city sky. “This is our home,” he said, as if to test whether my voice would tremble. “You’ll live here with me.”
I nodded. Inside, I found a drawer of clothes, small and soft and clearly chosen for me. “Your so-called secret wardrobe,” I teased.
He smacked my head lightly. “Put it on. Also, don’t go back to your family until I say so.”
I had returned five years ago to a life that smelled of old paper and older grievances. Agatha’s family — the Darlings of her socks-and-portfolio world — were not going to let an incident slide. Her father was a businessman with fingers in the same pie as Sancho’s family. If I wanted to keep my head on my shoulders and out of a scandal scrapbook, I would need Sancho’s protection.
The day after we moved in, Sancho’s grandfather — the stern old man who had never liked me — saw us and bristled. He accused me of ruining family plans. He demanded that we cancel the wedding.
“I will not,” Sancho said. “She is mine.”
“You are a stubborn child,” his grandfather grunted, then slid into the world’s oldest trick: half-complimented mercy. “I am old. Do as you wish.”
The fight should have ended there, but family grudges have long memories. Old men whisper grudges into ears and they bloom like poison in other hearts. Agatha and her parents did not give up. That night she and her father made another plan.
Sancho learned quickly that he had an enemy at every corner. He crammed my hand into his and announced our marriage to the world and the result was both chaos and armor. When someone tried to run us off the road on the way to the hotel for the official ceremony, Sancho pulled me from the car and carried me safety into the crowd. Guests whispered; cameras found us; some clapped because the romance seemed staged and glorious. But it was the moment of the big screen scandal that brought the house down.
We had gathered for the ceremony. The hotel’s big screen — a ceremony montage — suddenly switched to a video that made the throat tighten in the room: Agatha in intimate scenes with another man, scenes that broadcast small cruelty and worse — a betrayal of the image she presented to the public.
“Turn it off!” Agatha shrieked, clutching at her throat like someone trying to grab words back into her mouth.
Curiosity rippled through the room like a living thing. “Is that—?” someone asked.
“It can’t be,” someone else began.
Sancho stood perfectly still. Then he nodded to Wesley Castillo, his assistant, and Wesley pressed a key. The big screen cut from the tawdry video to another footage: hotel hallway footage from the night before that showed Agatha making a call, pouring a drink, then staggering to the door where she placed reporters, and — crucially — a clip where she collapsed and left a cup on the table. The camera then showed me switching the cups, pulling Agatha toward the hotel room she thought was mine, and the rest was the aftermath.
“You set me up,” Agatha cried, hope turning into panic in her eyes.
I cried, too. I let the room see tears and told them my version softly and honestly. “I didn’t mean to take anyone’s life,” I told the crowd. “I did what I had to.”
The crowd’s reaction was instantaneous: gasps, whispers, then an ugly hum of judgment. But then the tide turned to anger against Agatha. She had tried to destroy me; she had colluded with paparazzi and lied under the halo of innocence.
Agatha’s face went first from triumph to shock, then to fury, then to denial. “You’ll pay for this!” she hissed. “You think you can ruin me?”
The men and women in the room were no longer spectators; they were jury and executioner. One guest stood, camera phone in hand.
“You expected applause?” he said aloud. “You made yourself a story.”
Agatha shouted, “This is a setup! Someone is blackmailing me, it’s a lie—”
A woman near the back — someone I had never met — edged closer and said loud enough for many to hear, “If she’s lying, she can prove it. Otherwise, why would she plant reporters at my cousin’s door?”
The whispers hardened into sentences. “She’s a liar.” “What a show.” “How low can you go?”
Sancho did not leave me to the wolves. He took my hand again and, in the grandest voice he had cultivated for boardrooms and press calls, said, “We will not let lies win today.”
Wesley stuck an U-disk into the main feed and pushed a final video. It was longer. It was careful. It showed Agatha’s call-time, the cups, the moment she left her glass unattended. It showed the reporters waiting. It showed Agatha shaking her head, furious and triumphant, and then — most damning — it showed her calling a man and telling him she had arranged everything.
The room fell silent. People shifted, eyes hunting for the family that could keep up appearances after a public humiliation.
Agatha went through the arc the rules asked: she was smug, then baffled, then furious, then public-denial, then collapse.
“How could you?” she said finally, voice hoarse.
“You chose one way to ruin me,” I said, voice steady now. “You chose a public stage. So I used the same stage.”
Her father slammed a hand on the table and declared, “We’ll sue.” He looked every inch the patriarch. But no one applauded him; they only turned their cameras toward the woman who had tried to ruin another.
The punishment was public not because I wanted it that way — I only wanted to survive — but because justice in our world is sometimes a spectacle.
The aftermath lasted for days. Agatha’s invitations were uninvited. Her father’s business partners dialed and dropped calls with careful, almost surgical coldness. A social media bedlam swelled into a river that refused to calm. Friends who had once tolerated Agatha’s cruelty now clicked “unfollow.” Sponsors withdrew goods. Her father, shamed in front of clients, had to hold a corporate meeting to justify why his daughter’s conduct had not affected their brand.
On a windy afternoon a week later, in a restaurant that once hosted their family dinners, Agatha and her father were expected to attend a luncheon where they would be forced to resign from a philanthropic board. Instead, Sancho walked in with me on his arm and Wesley trailing with a folder. Cameras camped at the entrance like small, hungry birds.
“You cannot be serious,” Agatha’s father whispered.
Sancho smiled that patient, terrible smile. “The truth has a place,” he said. “Public lies need public correction.”
They called the meeting in the hotel ballroom. The room filled quickly. People remembered the spectacle and came to watch the fall. Agatha arrived with an entourage, each face drawn and pale, the panic of a family facing reputational ruin. She took the stage because she had to — the room demanded the final act.
“Agatha,” the chairman began, voice flat as stone, “this board finds your conduct unbecoming. You have deceived partners and misused corporate hospitality. Effective immediately, you and your representatives are relieved of your duties.”
Agatha’s eyes flashed with denial. “This is revenge. This is blackmail!”
Her father tried to speak and had his words swallowed by the crowd’s murmurs. Reporters recorded everything: the shuffling of papers, the dry croak in his throat.
Then the worst part happened — the slow public unraveling that no lawyer could patch. A woman from the audience stood and told a story — a personal one about being shamed in youth by Agatha’s social games, about being laughed at and undone. Her voice carried. Others nodded and then shared their stories. Agatha’s polish cracked like porcelain.
“Do you see what your schemes have done?” someone in the crowd asked. A man with a decade in PR and a hundred dollars in integrity spat the words for the room. “You told me you were flawless,” he snapped. “And you did this.”
Agatha tried to beg, to cry, to plead for the old connections to save her. “Please, I didn’t mean—” she started.
“Save you?” a woman called from the back. “Why should anyone save the person who tried to ruin another woman’s life?”
Agatha’s defense shrank. Her father’s face crumpled under the weight of manifest social scorn. Cameras thrust microphones forward. A young intern filmed live; a thousand strangers watched as the formerly polished family bowed from their slippers and dignity.
At one point Agatha’s misdeeds were read aloud in stark contract language: orchestrated intoxication, hiring photographers to trap a rival, false postings to humiliate. Her voice rattled until the room lost patience and started to clap — not for her innocence, but for the sudden, communal sense that truth had been restored.
Agatha’s reactions changed in sequence: first indignant, then frantic denial, then the quick, hollow plea. Her face flushed, then lost color. People in the room took out their phones, not to cheer but to document, to ensure the record would not be erased. A woman near me snapped photos and said, “People like her need to learn not to cross basic decency.”
Eventually Agatha slunk out, shoulders tight, eyes wet with a mixture of shame and manufactured hurt. Her father followed, the sound of their steps smaller than their entrance. The banquet staff remained, the guests returned to their meals, and the ballroom resumed its normal rhythm.
When the crowd thinned, Sancho and I walked out together. I felt like an exhausted athlete and the improbable winner of a race that had been rigged against me.
“That was ugly,” I said.
“So is trying to ruin someone’s life for personal gain,” Sancho said. He squeezed my hand, slow and warm, like he had earlier when lying on a bed of linen.
We married without much grandeur after that. Sancho taught me the small joy of steadiness: crosswords on Sundays, a hand that reaches for mine, dinner cooked together even when one of us had spent the day closing deals. Our honeymoon was both soft and awkward. He loved me in a way that made me suspicious and then, after a long time, certain.
I kept hidden the truth of some of my own actions: the small manipulations, the moments I had steered the public gaze, or slipped a truth into someone’s path. I wasn’t proud of all of it. I would tell myself later that it had been necessary.
There were other intrigues, other villains. Sancho’s grandfather, old and stubborn, could not fully accept me. A woman from abroad — a girl named Elliana Orlov had once been arranged as some long-forgotten match. She arrived with an air of entitlement only a privileged exile could hold. She tried little stunts to make us doubt each other. When she sneered and hired photographers to catch us in vulnerable moments, Sancho quietly warned her. “One more attempt and I will remove you from this house,” he said. He did not need to raise his voice; his eyes said everything.
Elliana learned the lesson the hard way. A public broadcast of her plotting backfired. She begged and hurled accusations that fizzled as people withdrew support. In public, her charm ripped like a cheap dress. The world closed ranks around us, not because we were perfect, but because the truth had teeth.
“Why did you stand by me?” I asked Sancho once, late in the night when the city peered through the windows like a cluster of restless stars.
“Because you picked up your sword and fought, too,” he said. “Because you were not content to be torn apart quietly. Because you are yourself, messy and brave.”
I am still learning what love looks like when two people are not the same. I still mistrust some of my impulses. But I have learned that there is a kind of justice a woman can win without losing herself completely: she can stand, speak, and, if necessary, be loud enough that the people who would shame her cannot hide their own hands.
Weeks later, when the dust had settled and Agatha kept to private dinners behind closed doors, her world narrower with every declined invitation, I stood at the balcony of our home and watched Sancho at his desk bend the world in small ways. He was a man who had once been a boy who avoided me. Now he taught me how to be seen.
“Do you regret it?” I asked him, voice small.
“What?” he said without looking up.
“Marrying like this. In public. With the circus.”
He smiled, slow. “I regret nothing that keeps you from being hurt.”
I put my head on his shoulder, and the city hummed below us like a reminder that our lives would not be simple. But in my hand, his fingers fit like a kindness I planned to keep.
The End
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