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Chapter Fifteen:
publish date:
2026-02-19 15:48:46
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HER BILLIONAIRE'S SECOND CHANCE Chapter Sixty-One:
Julian's POVHer name was Serena Cole.I hadn't thought about her in three years. We'd dated for eight months before my marriage to Nadia, the kind of relationship that existed in the space between two people who were convenient for each other and honest enough not to pretend otherwise. It ended cleanly. No damage, no residue.Or so I'd thought.She called on a Monday morning while I was at the office.I didn't recognize the number. I picked up because I was expecting a call from the London team. "Julian." Her voice was exactly as I remembered it. Precise, slightly amused at everything. "It's Serena."I sat back in my chair."Serena," I said."I'm in New York. I heard through reasonably reliable sources that you're at a firm called Meridian now." A pause. "I wanted to reach out. It's been a long time.""Three years.""Almost four." Another pause. "I'm not calling to complicate anything. I have a business proposition. My firm is looking for a CEO consultant for a six month project. Som
HER BILLIONAIRE'S SECOND CHANCE Chapter Sixty:
Nadia's POVI woke before Julian.That didn't happen often. He was constitutionally early, up before six most days with the quiet efficiency of someone who'd decided morning was worth being present for. I lay in the dark and listened to him breathing, and looked at the ceiling, and felt the particular quality of a Sunday that had nothing in it.No calls. No deadlines. No travel. Just the apartment and the three of us. I stayed in bed for twenty minutes because I could.Julian was up by seven.I heard him in the nursery, the low voice he used with Elise in the mornings, explaining the day in terms she was assembling into meaning. She had twelve words now. She used them with the precision of someone who understood that language was a tool and tools should be used correctly.I came downstairs at seven-thirty.He was at the stove with Elise in the carrier on his back, which he'd started doing on weekend mornings when she wanted to be held and he wanted his hands free. She was examining th
HER BILLIONAIRE'S SECOND CHANCE Chapter Fifty-Nine:
Julian's POVI was up at six-thirty. Elise was already awake, talking to herself in the nursery in the way she did before deciding whether the day required announcing. I went in before she made that decision.She looked at me."Morning," I said. She held up her arms.I picked her up, and we went to the kitchen. The rain against the windows, the apartment warm, Nadia still asleep. Saturday routine, no different from any other Saturday except that nothing required us to go anywhere.I made coffee and held Elise on my hip while the machine ran, and she examined the rain on the window with the focused attention she gave to the weather."That's rain," I told her. She pressed her palm against the glass. "Cold," she said. New word from Thursday, deployed accurately."Yes. Cold."She looked at me to confirm she'd used it correctly. "Very good," I said. She accepted this and went back to the rain.Nadia came down at eight.Hair not right, the oversized sweater she wore on weekend mornings, cof
HER BILLIONAIRE'S SECOND CHANCE Chapter Fifty-Eight:
Nadia's POVWashington was three days of the most focused work I'd done since Mumbai.Carol and I spent the first two days in the hotel preparing. Not the presentation itself, that was ready. The room. Who would be in it, what they cared about, and where the framework intersected with the specific policy problems the World Bank working group was trying to solve.The working group lead was Dr. Amara Osei. Ghanaian, sixty, had spent thirty years at the intersection of development economics and infrastructure policy. Carol had sent me her published work in July. I'd read all of it.She'd built the theoretical foundation I'd been standing on when I built the framework. I hadn't fully understood that until I was sitting across from her.The meeting was four hours.Not a presentation. A working session. Dr. Osei had read the Mumbai presentation, the methodology section of the research paper, and two of my firm's Southeast Asia market reports. She arrived with seventeen pages of notes.We we
HER BILLIONAIRE'S SECOND CHANCE Chapter Fifty-Seven:
Julian's POVSeptember arrived with the particular focus of a month that had things in it.The Columbia application deadline is on the eighteenth. Nadia's World Bank meeting on the fifteenth. The shelter's public opening on the first, which Elena had kept small but which still required Julian Ashford to stand in a room and accept that what he'd built mattered without deflecting it into someone else's credit.I was working on that.The public opening was on a Tuesday evening.Elena had invited city council members, the grant committee, local press, and the organizations that partnered with the shelter. Forty people in the newly finished space, moving through it the way people move through spaces that have been done right. Noticing without being able to articulate what they were noticing.Jo was there. Patricia came, which she hadn't mentioned she was going to do, arriving without announcement and moving through the building with the focused attention she'd used on her own brownstone.S
HER BILLIONAIRE'S SECOND CHANCE Chapter Fifty-Six:
Nadia's POVDr. Mehta had proposed three options. I'd chosen this one because it said exactly what the paper did without performing importance. He'd agreed immediately, which told me we thought the same way about language.We were four months into the eighteen-month timeline. The methodology section was finished. The data collection was underway across six tier two cities in Maharashtra and three in Rajasthan. Dr. Mehta's team on the ground, my framework driving the variables.I sent the methodology section to Carol on a Tuesday.She called twenty minutes later."The World Bank has a development economics working group," she said. "They publish frameworks that influence policy across member countries." A pause. "I sent them the Mumbai presentation in May. They've been in touch."I sat very still."In touch how?" I said."They want to meet. September, Washington. You, me, their working group lead." She kept her voice even, but I knew Carol well enough to hear what was underneath it. "N
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