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Chapter 23: What Lena Doesn’t Know She Knows

作者: Sire Bliss
last update 公開日: 2026-03-31 00:43:22

Monday morning my boss called me in before I’d finished my first coffee.

That was never a good sign.

Patricia Huang ran our communications firm the way a surgeon ran an operating theatre, precisely and without sentimentality, and when she asked you to sit down and closed the door it meant the conversation was going to be specific and she expected you to receive it professionally. I sat. I received it professionally.

“The coverage,” she said. She had a printed copy of the tabloid piece on her de
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  • Fake Dating My Ex’s CEO    Chapter 34: The Rooftop

    ~ Adrian POV ~Priya cancelled the benefit dinner at four forty-seven.The host had a family emergency, the venue was closing, the event was being rescheduled to a date that hadn’t been confirmed yet. She forwarded the cancellation with her usual efficiency and added at the bottom: “Your evening is clear.” Three words that meant something different on a Thursday at four forty-seven than they would have meant three months ago.Three months ago a clear evening was a resource to be allocated. A board document to finish, a call to return, a contract to read all the way through without reading the same line three times.Tonight I put on my jacket and told Priya I was done for the day and got in my car.I didn’t tell the driver where to go.He looked in the rearview mirror. I said, “Brooklyn,” and looked out the window and didn’t examine the decision the way I’d stopped examining certain decisions in the ten days since the Saturday morning document.I hadn’t spoken to Vanessa since she’d co

  • Fake Dating My Ex’s CEO    Chapter 33: Ryan’s Ugly Turn

    ~ Ryan POV ~I told myself it wasn’t deliberate.That’s the first thing I want to be clear about, even if only to myself, sitting here on a Sunday night with the specific kind of quiet that follows a decision you can’t take back. I told myself it was just a conversation. That I was talking to Marcus from the PR team the way I talked to Marcus most Fridays, over drinks at the bar two blocks from the office, and that the things I said about Lena were just context. Background. The kind of thing you said about someone you knew when their name kept appearing in the press.I told myself it wasn’t deliberate.I’m not sure I believe that anymore.Marcus worked in PR. Not Cole Industries PR, the external firm the company used for overflow, which meant he had contacts in the press that sat outside Harold’s jurisdiction. He was discreet, mostly. The most was the part I hadn’t thought about carefully enough.I had two drinks. Maybe three. Ryan Blake after two drinks was approximately the same as

  • Fake Dating My Ex’s CEO    Chapter 32: What Adrian Thinks He’s Doing

    ~ Adrian POV ~I’ve always been good at knowing what I’m doing.Not in the arrogant sense, though I understand that distinction is not one everyone would grant me. In the practical sense. The sense of a man who has spent thirty-four years developing the habit of being clear with himself about his own motivations because clarity was more useful than comfort and he’d decided that early enough for it to become structural.I knew why I’d agreed to the arrangement. Family pressure, Vanessa’s timeline, the specific utility of a credible alternative presented to my father before he made a unilateral decision on my behalf. That was clear.I knew why I’d stayed in it past the point where the utility was straightforward. Victor’s three-month timeline had complicated the wind-down and extending the arrangement was the path of least resistance. That was clear too.What I was doing now required more precision to name.It was Saturday morning. Vanessa had been at the hotel for two nights. She’d tex

  • Fake Dating My Ex’s CEO    Chapter 31: Lena at the Limit

    ~ Lena POV ~It had been a hard week even before Thursday.The tabloid situation had flared again, a new piece, sharper than the previous ones, this time with photographs from the Morrison Group dinner that had clearly been taken from inside the room. Patricia had called me at eight in the morning to say the firm was receiving press enquiries and that she needed me to manage my visibility more aggressively. I’d said yes and managed it and handled it with the focused efficiency of someone who had been handling things for eleven weeks and was running low on the specific resource that made handling feel sustainable.Then Ryan had appeared at a work event I hadn’t known he’d be at, a cross-industry communications panel that Cole Industries had apparently sponsored, and I’d spent two hours managing the geometry of a room that contained my ex-boyfriend and three journalists who knew my name from the tabloids. I’d done it well. I’d gone home exhausted in a way that sat differently from tired

  • Fake Dating My Ex’s CEO    Chapter 30: Adrian and Vanessa Fight

    ~ Adrian POV ~I knew before I got home.Not from anything specific. Just the accumulated weight of a week that had been pressing on me from too many directions at once, the foundation event and Ethan in the corner with Lena before I arrived and the look on her face when I reached them, composed and steady and just fractionally too careful in a way that had been costing me sleep for two weeks.Vanessa was on the sofa when I came in. She had her laptop open and a glass of wine beside her and the particular stillness of someone who had been waiting long enough that the waiting had become its own activity.She looked up when I closed the door.“Late,” she said.“The event ran long.” I set my jacket over the chair. “How was the magazine sitting?”“Fine. The photographer was good.” She closed her laptop. “There are photographs from tonight already. Someone with a long lens near the entrance.”I looked at her.“You and Lena are arriving,” she said. Her voice was even. “Her hand on your arm

  • Fake Dating My Ex’s CEO    Chapter 29: Ethan Befriends Lena

    I arrived at the foundation cocktail event early.Not intentionally. The car had made better time than expected and the venue was already open and the staff were still arranging the last of the centrepieces, so I found a quiet corner near the window with a glass of water and watched the room prepare itself for people and thought about nothing in particular, which was what I did now when I had unscheduled minutes. I’d stopped filling them.Ethan Brooks arrived twelve minutes before Adrian.I’d met him at six events now. He was Adrian’s best friend and company vice president and the kind of person who was easy to underestimate because his warmth was so genuine that people sometimes missed the sharpness underneath it. I’d stopped underestimating him somewhere around the second event, when I’d watched him manage a difficult board member with the specific expertise of someone who’d been doing it long enough to make it look like conversation.He spotted me in my corner and crossed the room

  • Fake Dating My Ex’s CEO    Chapter 9: The Performance Has Rules

    ~ Lena POV ~The documents were ready by ten, which meant I had no reason to linger.I told myself that twice in the lobby of Cole Industries while the security desk printed my visitor pass and the city noise dropped away behind the revolving doors. Twelve floors of glass and clean lines above me.

  • Fake Dating My Ex’s CEO    Chapter 8: What Vanessa Knows (And Accepts)

    ~ Venessa POV ~The photo came through at six in the morning, Paris time.Claudia, my publicist, sent it with no caption, which was her way of saying she thought I should see it before anyone else brought it to me. I appreciated the instinct even when I didn’t appreciate the delivery. I sat up in t

  • Fake Dating My Ex’s CEO    Chapter 7: First Appearance

    ~ Lena POV -Adrian’s assistant had emailed the dress code at eight in the morning: “Business formal. Event begins at seven. Car at six forty-five.”That was it. No context, no briefing, no indication of what I was walking into beyond a building name and a time. I spent my lunch break looking up Co

  • Fake Dating My Ex’s CEO    Chapter 6: Ryan Notices

    ~ Ryan POV ~ I told myself it wasn’t her. That was my first move, the morning after the restaurant. I told myself I’d been tired, the lighting was bad, and the man across from her had been facing away so I couldn’t have been sure who I was looking at anyway. People looked like other people all the

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