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Chapter 63: When Love Becomes a Liability
publish date:
2026-05-09 13:49:19
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One Night with My Ex's Billionaire Best Friend CHAPTER SIX: WHAT INSECURITY SOUNDS LIKE AT 2 AM
I do not tell Lucian I am struggling.This is a decision I make consciously, somewhere between Sophia leaving at noon and Lucian coming home at nine, somewhere in the six hours I spend answering emails I don’t fully read and sitting through a media strategy call where Sophia uses words like narrative containment and pressure cycle and I take notes in handwriting that gets smaller and tighter as the hour goes on.I do not tell him because he is already carrying Emma and the board and the leak investigation and the particular grief of a man who has just learned he missed ten years of a child’s life. I do not tell him because I am the person he leans on, and I have never minded that, have never once resented it, but tonight the weight of being that person feels different. Heavier. Like something shifted in the foundation while I wasn’t looking.He comes home looking tired in a way he doesn’t usually show. He eats the dinner I reheated without tasting it. He tells me the board call went a
One Night with My Ex's Billionaire Best Friend CHAPTER FIVE: THE MORNING THE MEDIA WOKE UP
I wake up at 5:47 AM to the sound of Lucian’s phone.Not his alarm. His actual phone, the distinct buzz of a call coming in at an hour when calls mean something is wrong. He answers before the second buzz, already half-sitting up, his voice low and immediate in the way it gets when he has shifted from sleep to full alert without the usual middle ground.I lie still and listen to his half of the conversation.“When.” A pause. “How many outlets.” Another pause, longer. “Don’t release anything. I’ll be there by seven.”He hangs up. The room is still dark. Neither of us pretends I wasn’t listening.“Marcus,” he says.“I assumed,” I say.He gets up and goes to the window, pulling the curtain back an inch. The city below is doing its pre-dawn thing, quiet and grey, nothing that looks like catastrophe from up here. It never does.“The photograph from yesterday went wide overnight,” he says. “Six outlets picked it up. Two of them ran full pieces.”I sit up. “What kind of pieces.”“The specula
One Night with My Ex's Billionaire Best Friend CHAPTER FOUR: BEFORE THE WORLD CHANGES
There are flowers on the counter when I get home.Not the kind he orders through his assistant, pre-arranged and delivered in cellophane. These are the kind you pick yourself, or ask someone to pick for you with specific instructions, white peonies and something small and yellow I don’t know the name of, stuffed into the tall glass vase I bought at a market in the West Village eight months ago and never told him I loved.He noticed anyway. He always notices.His best scotch is already poured on the kitchen island, one glass, waiting. The apartment smells like something he cooked and gave up on, because there is a pan soaking in the sink and a takeout bag from the Italian place three blocks away sitting open beside the stove.I stand in the doorway for a moment and just look at all of it.Then Lucian comes out of the bedroom in a grey shirt with his sleeves pushed up, and he stops when he sees me, and the look on his face is the one I married him for. Not the controlled boardroom versi
One Night with My Ex's Billionaire Best Friend CHAPTER THREE: THE ENVELOPE ON HIS DESK
Marcus arrives in four minutes.I know because I count them. I am standing at the conference room window watching the city do its indifferent thing while Lucian is on the phone in the corridor and Isabella is very still at the table behind me, her hands folded over the manila envelope like she is holding it down.Four minutes is fast, even for Marcus.Which means he already knew.He comes through the door with his phone in one hand and a tablet in the other, takes one look at Isabella, one look at me, and says to Lucian, who has followed him in, “We have a twenty-minute window before this goes from a gossip alert to a full news cycle. Maybe less.”“Then we use it,” Lucian says.“I need the floor cleared and a statement drafted in the next ten minutes.” Marcus sets the tablet on the table without sitting down. “Something measured. Acknowledges nothing, denies nothing, requests privacy.”“No,” I say.Both of them look at me.“A statement that acknowledges nothing reads as guilt,” I say.
One Night with My Ex's Billionaire Best Friend CHAPTER TWO: THE WOMAN WHO KNOCKED WITHOUT WARNING
The elevator opens to the executive floor and the first thing I notice is the quiet.Not the usual quiet of a Tuesday morning, people at their desks, keyboards, low phone voices. This is the other kind. The kind where everyone in a room knows something happened and they are all performing normalcy so hard it becomes its own noise.Three people look up when I step out. Two of them look away too fast.Olivia is waiting near the corridor, her tablet against her chest, her face doing that thing where she is trying to look neutral and her eyes are giving away everything.“Where is he?” I ask.“Conference room B. He cleared the floor about an hour ago.” She falls into step beside me. “He asked me to call you, but I got a strange call first, I wanted to mention it, a man asking whether you’d been told yet, and I didn’t recognize the number, so I saved it, I can show you later if that’s useful.”I stop walking.“A man asked whether I’d been told?”“Before anything went public. Before the floo
One Night with My Ex's Billionaire Best Friend BOOK 2-THE PRICE OF FOREVER
PROLOGUEI used to think peace was something you earned once and kept.Like a trophy you put on a shelf, and it stayed there, collecting dust in the best possible way, untouched and permanent. I thought that after everything Lucian and I survived, after the gala and the scandal and Ethan’s public breakdown and Richard Vaughn’s quiet defeat, we had earned it. Our peace. Our ordinary mornings. Our life.I was wrong about what peace actually is.It is not a destination. It is not the absence of chaos. It is something you choose, again and again, in the middle of whatever is trying to take it from you. I know that now. I know it the way you only know things that cost you something real to learn.What I didn’t know, two years into our marriage, was that the cost wasn’t finished yet.That morning started like every other. Coffee on the terrace. His hand finding mine without either of us reaching for it. The city below us doing its endless, indifferent thing.I should have known that when th
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