LOGINShare
Chapter 28: The First Real Date
publish date:
2026-04-21 13:37:06
Latest chapter
One Night with My Ex's Billionaire Best Friend CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: GABRIEL KANE MAKES A HOUSE CALL
Lucian leaves the hospital at nine the next morning.Not because he wants to. Because I tell him to, and because Dr. Carter tells him to, and because between the two of us we represent a combined force of persuasion that even Lucian Blackwood cannot comfortably resist. He has a meeting that cannot be moved, a call with the compliance team about Nathan Sterling that Daniel arranged and that Ethan says needs to happen before end of week, and a company that is still running despite everything trying to slow it down.He leaves with his jacket over his arm and his phone already in his hand and he pauses at the door of the room and looks back at me in the bed with my breakfast tray and my laptop that Dr. Carter has not technically forbidden and says, "No working.""I'm reading," I say."What are you reading," he says.I show him the cover of the novel Olivia brought last night along with a change of clothes and three things from the kitchen I did not ask for but apparently needed. He looks
One Night with My Ex's Billionaire Best Friend CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: THE SECRET THAT WAS NEVER JUST HERS
Dr. Carter is already in the examination bay when we arrive.I do not know how that is possible. I did not call ahead. I did not have Olivia call ahead. But she is there, in her white coat with her notepad and her direct, unhurried expression, and she looks at me and then at Lucian beside me and then back at me with the particular look of a woman who has been expecting this visit and is unsurprised only by the timing.“Mrs. Blackwood,” she says. “Sit down.”I sit on the edge of the examination table. Lucian stands beside it. He has not let go of my hand since the cab and he does not let go of it now, which I know Dr. Carter registers because she registers everything, but she does not comment on it.She checks my blood pressure first. Then my pulse. She asks me questions in the brisk, methodical way she has, and I answer them honestly because I am past the point of managing what I tell her. Skipped meals. Disrupted sleep. The dizziness in the board meeting corridor two weeks ago. Today
One Night with My Ex's Billionaire Best Friend CHAPTER TWENTY: THE COLLAPSE SHE CAN’T HIDE ANYMORE
The strategy meeting is at two.It is the kind of meeting that under normal circumstances I would have run without difficulty, twelve people in the Blackwood Holdings main conference room, acquisition timelines, media response framework, the quarterly risk assessment that Marcus insists on regardless of what else is happening because Marcus believes that structure is what keeps things from becoming chaos and he is not wrong.I arrive at one fifty with my notes and my coffee and the particular focus I have been using as a load-bearing wall for three weeks, the professional version of myself that does not flinch and does not stumble and gives the room exactly what it needs for as long as it needs it.I take my seat. The meeting starts. I present the first section of the risk assessment and the numbers hold and the questions are answerable and for forty minutes everything is exactly as it should be.Then the room tilts.Not dramatically. Not the way it tilts in films, not a sudden lurch
One Night with My Ex's Billionaire Best Friend CHAPTER NINETEEN: WHAT ISABELLA SAID WHEN NO ONE WAS LISTENING
I do not tell Lucian about the meeting.Not immediately. Not because I am keeping it from him, but because I need to understand what Isabella said before I hand it to anyone else, and the only way to do that is to sit with it in the quiet of my own head without other people’s reactions filling up the space where my thinking needs to happen.I text her the morning after the Evelyn lunch.I want to meet. Just us. No lawyers, no buffer, somewhere we won’t be recognized.She takes forty minutes to respond. I spend those forty minutes not watching my phone, which is to say I spend them watching my phone.Her answer is a coffee shop name and a time. Thursday at eleven. A place in the West Village that I have never been to and she apparently knows well enough to choose without deliberation, which tells me something about where she goes when she wants to be left alone.I take a cab. I wear sunglasses I do not usually wear. I arrive two minutes early and find a corner table with my back to the
One Night with My Ex's Billionaire Best Friend CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: EVELYN DRAWS A LINE IN THE WRONG PLACE
The restaurant Evelyn chooses is called Carême.It is quieter than Maison Privé and smaller, which means she is not staging this for an audience. She is staging it for me, which is in some ways more deliberate and in some ways more honest, and I file that away as I walk through the door and spot her already seated, already composed, her coat draped over the chair beside her with the particular precision of a woman who arrived early enough to arrange herself.She stands when she sees me. Air kiss, left cheek, the formal kind.“Ariana,” she says. “You look tired.”“Good afternoon, Evelyn,” I say.We sit. A waiter materializes and disappears with our drink orders before I have fully settled my bag. Evelyn unfolds her napkin across her lap and looks at me with the expression she uses when she has decided something and is in the process of delivering it.“I wanted to speak with you privately,” she says. “Before things move further.”“Further,” I say.“The legal process. The press attention
One Night with My Ex's Billionaire Best Friend CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: THE INTERVIEW THAT LIT A MATCH
I find the article at six forty in the morning.Lucian is still asleep. I am on my second coffee at the kitchen island with my laptop open and my phone face-up beside it, running the daily check I have started doing before he wakes, the particular ritual of a woman who has decided she would rather know bad things early than be surprised by them later.The piece is long. Fifteen hundred words, maybe more. Published overnight in a mid-tier outlet that I know by name because it has a history of running stories that larger publications will not touch without better sourcing. The headline is in the font they use when they believe the story will travel, and it does, I can already see it has been picked up by two aggregators in the forty minutes since it went live.The Other Woman’s Daughter.I read it with my coffee going cold beside me.It is well written, which is almost worse than if it were not. The journalist, a man named Benjamin Ross, has done the kind of work that looks like empathy
One Night with My Ex's Billionaire Best Friend Chapter 101: Arrival
The cameras start flashing before we’re out of the car.Press. Photographers. Everyone wanting the shot. Lucian Blackwood. Ariana Vale. Baby Emma. First public appearance.Chen opens my door. Bodyguard mode. Professional.“Ready, Ms. Vale?”“No. But we’re doing it anyway.”Lucian comes around. Take
One Night with My Ex's Billionaire Best Friend Chapter 100: The Morning of the Gala
Three weeks after Emma’s birth. The morning of the gala.I wake to Emma crying. Four AM. Right on schedule.Lucian’s already up. Changing her. Talking softly.“Good morning, Emma. Yes, you’re wet. I know. Terrible. We’ll fix it. There we go. Much better.”I watch from bed. This man. My fiancé. Chan
One Night with My Ex's Billionaire Best Friend Chapter 97: The Day Before
My due date is tomorrow.I wake up knowing. Just knowing.Emma’s coming soon. Maybe today. Maybe tomorrow. But soon.Lucian’s already awake. Watching me.“You feel it too?”“I feel it. She’s ready.”We spend the morning preparing. Checking hospital bag. Reviewing birth plan. Timing practice contrac
One Night with My Ex's Billionaire Best Friend Chapter 96: Lucian’s Promise
The morning after my confession, Lucian wakes me with breakfast in bed.Pancakes. Fruit. Decaf coffee. Everything’s perfect.“What’s this for?”“Sit. Eat. Then I need to tell you something.”I eat. He watches. Nervous. Which makes me nervous.“Okay. I’m sitting. I’m eating. What’s going on?”He tak
You may also like
Madam Winters’s Fight For Her Children
Summer Wine1.2M viewsLet Me Go, Mr. Hill!
Shallow South6.5M viewsOur Billion-Worth Twins
Velvet Antler613.0K viewsThe CEO's Ten Million Dollar Wife
R.C.BRIE15703.5K viewsWild Enough To Heal
Oghenemine Etu7 viewsDirty Lessons With My Brothers’ Best Friend
LaurG186 viewsHe Chose My Sister, So I Married His Enemy
Aveline Kryss37 viewsBillionaire Daddy and Son’s Nun Maid
Pennwright186 views
