登入分享
Chapter 46
publish date:
2026-06-18 12:05:09
最新章節
Rejected by the Billionaire, Returned With His Child Chapter 49
JAXONThe investigator's preliminary findings on Vivienne arrive on Hayes's desk on Friday, and I am there when he opens the file because I have stopped being able to sit in my own office waiting for information that affects my son."The gate mechanism was tampered with," Hayes confirms, reading from the security firm's report. "Manually disabled, then reset to look like a malfunction. Whoever did it knew the system." He looks up. "It wasn't Vivienne directly. There's a payment trail to a maintenance contractor — small amount, cash, untraceable on the surface. But the timing lines up exactly with her visit to the museum two days before the incident.""She was there," I say. Not a question."Logged in the visitor system under a different name," Hayes says. "Donor relations meeting that doesn't exist on the museum's calendar." He sets the report down. "It's circumstantial. Good circumstantial, but circumstantial. We'd need more to take it anywhere formal.""I don't need formal yet," I s
Rejected by the Billionaire, Returned With His Child Chapter 48
JAXONI rehearse what I'm going to say four separate times on the drive over and abandon every version before I reach the hotel.There is no version of this conversation that I can practice my way into. I have negotiated billion-dollar acquisitions. I have sat across from boards that wanted my company in pieces and talked them out of it. None of that prepares a man for walking into a hotel suite to be introduced to his five-year-old son as his father for the first time.Jenna told him yesterday. She called me last night to say it went — her word — "well," delivered in a tone that suggested well was doing a great deal of work. I did not press for details. I trust her to have handled it the way she handles everything, which is carefully and completely and with more grace than the situation strictly requires.I knock at exactly four in the afternoon, the time she suggested, because she said Zion does better with new information when he has had a nap and a snack and is not tired or hungry
Rejected by the Billionaire, Returned With His Child Chapter 47
JENNAEleanor takes Zion without asking questions.This is one of the things I love most about her. She reads the situation — one look at my face when I come through the hotel door, Zion asleep on my shoulder, Jaxon's name hovering unspoken in the air between us — and she simply opens her arms for him and says, "Come. I'll read to him." No interrogation. No raised eyebrow. Just the quiet competence of a woman who has navigated complicated things for eighty years and knows when to step forward and when to step back.I settle Zion into her bed. He doesn't wake. The scrape on his knee has been cleaned and bandaged and he has eaten half a bowl of soup and declared himself fully recovered, which is the kind of resilience that belongs exclusively to five-year-olds and which I have spent the last three hours being quietly, fiercely grateful for.I close Eleanor's door.I stand in the hotel suite living room and I look at the clock. Seven fifty-eight.I am as ready as I am going to get, which
Rejected by the Billionaire, Returned With His Child Chapter 46
JENNAThe afternoon is ordinary right up until the moment it isn't.It is a Wednesday, the kind of mid-week afternoon that has no particular significance — clear sky, mild air, the city doing its usual thing. Priya and I have finished a working session early and I have exactly two hours before I need to be back at the hotel for a call with the London team, which is enough time to collect Zion from the museum program Faith enrolled him in last week. A children's science exhibit three blocks from Vale Industries. He has been going every Wednesday for two weeks and coming home full of facts about dinosaurs and space and the water cycle delivered at high volume with the breathless energy of a child who cannot believe this information has been available all along and no one told him sooner.I am half a block from the museum when my phone rings. Faith."Hey — are you coming to get him?" she says. There is something in her voice. Not panic. The thing before panic, the thing that keeps its sh
Rejected by the Billionaire, Returned With His Child Chapter 45
JAXONI do not sleep on Saturday night.I try. I go through the motions — the shower, the quiet penthouse, the bed at a reasonable hour, the deliberate effort to let my mind settle. None of it works. I lie in the dark and the ceiling is there and the city hums outside and all I can think about is a small boy on a rooftop terrace holding a balloon dinosaur with a compromised neck, looking up at me with eyes that I know.I know those eyes.I have been telling myself since the first time — since I saw him, three seconds of contact before Faith swept him away — that I was imagining it. That guilt makes you see things. That a man who has spent five years wondering what happened to a woman will find her face in strangers, find echoes of himself in children who happen to have dark hair and dark eyes because dark hair and dark eyes are not rare, they are not evidence of anything, they are just a child at a party with a balloon dinosaur and I am a grown man who should be capable of rational th
Rejected by the Billionaire, Returned With His Child Chapter 44
JENNAI almost don't bring him.The Vale Industries family day is Serena's idea — a quarterly tradition, she explains, that Clinton Vale started decades ago and that Jaxon has maintained out of loyalty to his father's way of doing things. Staff bring their families, the building opens its top floor terrace, there is food and an embarrassing amount of balloon animals and a general atmosphere of enforced joy that Serena manages with the cheerful efficiency of a woman who genuinely believes in it.Serena invites the J. Kingsley team as a gesture of inclusion. She means it warmly. I accept on behalf of my team and then spend three days trying to decide whether to bring Zion.On one hand: he would love it. Balloon animals. Food. New people to interrogate. An entire building full of potential audiences for his various opinions. For Zion this is not a corporate event, it is paradise.On the other hand: Jaxon will be there.I have not yet found the right moment to tell Jaxon about Zion. I kno
你可能也喜歡
Madam Winters’s Fight For Her Children
Summer Wine1.2M 閱讀量Craving The Wrong Brother
Elysian Sparrow585.4K 閱讀量To Be Yours Again
Taylor1.0M 閱讀量I Fell For The Boy His Daddy Was A Bonus
LiLhyz942.4K 閱讀量Reborn in the Apocalypse:My Level-Up System
Kosi Antonia211 閱讀量Five Years Later, He Goes Wild for Her Again
Ginny Not Genie1.5K 閱讀量Pregnant by Her Best Friend Brother
Mr Grinch175 閱讀量Breaking Bro Code :My Brothers Best Friend
Pen Addictress110 閱讀量
