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Chapter 9: The Performance Has Rules
publish date:
2026-03-26 00:22:31
Latest chapter
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 28: The Weight of Knowing Without Knowing
I didn’t confront him.I want to be clear about that, about the decision and the reasons for it, because it would be easy to frame what happened in the days after the gallery as avoidance. It wasn’t. It was something more deliberate than that.I had no proof. I had a contact name that was a single letter. I had a message preview I’d seen for less than a second. I had Vanessa’s voice at a bar and Clara’s hand at my door and the specific architecture of Adrian’s distraction assembled over ten weeks of paying careful attention. None of that was proof. All of it was instinct, and instinct without evidence was not something I was willing to carry into a conversation that could not be taken back.So I didn’t confront him.What I did instead was quieter and, I understood somewhere underneath the decision, more honest about where I actually was. I kept showing up. I kept performing. I did the events and the dinners and the coordinated press management with the same professional precision I’d
Fake Dating My Ex’s CEO Chapter 21: Victor’s Ultimatum Surfaces
My father called at seven forty in the morning, which meant he’d been awake since five thinking about something and had given it the courtesy of two hours before picking up the phone. That was Victor Cole’s version of restraint.“Breakfast,” he said. Not an invitation.I was at his house by eight t
Fake Dating My Ex’s CEO Chapter 20: The Almost Moment That Isn’t
The garden party was my mother’s idea.She held one every spring, and had done for fifteen years, the Cole family’s version of something casual, which meant sixty people on a manicured lawn in Westchester with catered food and a string quartet and my father circling the perimeter like a man conduct
Fake Dating My Ex’s CEO Chapter 18: Ethan Sees It First
~ Adrian POV ~I knocked on Ethan’s door, which I never did.He looked up from his monitor and read it correctly, the way Ethan read most things, without making a production of it. I closed the door behind me and sat in the chair across from his desk and he set down his pen and waited, because Etha
Fake Dating My Ex’s CEO Chapter 17: Lena The Day After
~ Lena POV ~The meeting was on the calendar for nine.Preparation review, Priya’s email said. Upcoming appearances, revised media strategy following the tabloid piece, alignment on messaging for the next six weeks. Forty-five minutes, Adrian’s office, coffee provided.I arrived at exactly nine. No
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