書庫
搜尋
The Billionaire’s Regret Clause;One Year Together. One Love

The Billionaire’s Regret Clause;One Year Together. One Love

MM Romance
last update最後更新 : 2026-05-11
作者:  Clare已完成
語言: English
goodnovel16goodnovel
評分不足
297章節
1.5K閱讀量
閱讀
加入書架

分享:  

檢舉
作品概覽
目錄
掃碼在 APP 閱讀

故事簡介

Dark Romance

Third-Person POV

CEO

Arrogant

Intelligent

MxM

Second Chance

Divorce

Ernest West left the courtroom with wings on his feet. Leaving Don James was, in Ernest's opinion, the best thing he had ever done for himself. No more tense silences. No more Don's silent, smothering adoration. Ernest had been released. Three years have passed since then. Now, what once was the best choice has turned into a noose around their necks. There is a sinister provision buried within the small print of the divorce papers that Ernest's attorney overlooked; they are obligated to live together and manage the small beach hotel that they used to own as a couple for an entire year. Thus, Ernest finds himself back amid the groaning wooden boards and salty panes of glass within the walls of where their love once withered away. However, Don is no longer the same weak and longing man that Ernest abandoned. He now stands as an intimidating pillar of cold indifference, forged by the stony resolve and lack of concern. Not even a passing glance comes from Don’s green eyes, which regard Ernest with only polite reserve. A year of closeness. A year of unresolved tension. A year of dealing with each and every lie that Ernest tried to bury beneath "irreconcilable differences." In the beginning, the plan is a silent battle—appointments stuck to the fridge, dinners taken in different corners of the house. Yet, there’s something about closeness that reveals the whole truth. Ernest discovers the picture albums that Don never discarded. He listens to telephone conversations in the dead of night that reveal the loneliness he feels himself. And gradually, painfully, he discovers that the greatest error made wasn’t the separation. It was letting Don leave.

查看更多

最新章節

更多章節

你可能也喜歡

相關小說

新上架小說

致讀者

Welcome to GoodNovel world of fiction. If you like this novel, or you are an idealist hoping to explore a perfect world, and also want to become an original novel author online to increase income, you can join our family to read or create various types of books, such as romance novel, epic reading, werewolf novel, fantasy novel, history novel and so on. If you are a reader, high quality novels can be selected here. If you are an author, you can obtain more inspiration from others to create more brilliant works, what's more, your works on our platform will catch more attention and win more admiration from readers.

暫無評論。
297 章節
Chapter 1 A Clean Break
The divorce papers had been signed for two years, four months, and seventeen days. Ernest West knew this the way he knew the FTSE 100 index at any given hour—without effort, without conscious thought. Numbers lived in him. Dates were numbers. And so the date he had handed Don James a pen and watched him press it to paper with a steadiness that still, occasionally, unsettled him in the hours before dawn, was simply another figure filed away in the architecture of his memory. Two years. Four months. Seventeen days. He had not counted. He simply remembered. The morning London fog pressed low and grey against the floor-to-ceiling windows of West Capital's forty-third-floor offices. Ernest stood with his back to the room, a cup of coffee cooling in his hand, watching the city begin its slow articulation below him. Black cabs threaded through Mayfair like punctuation marks. Pigeons scattered from the rooftop of a Georgian building across the street. Somewhere beneath him, thirty-eight a
閱讀更多
Chapter 2 Life Without Him
On paper, Ernest West's life was extraordinary. This was not a matter of opinion. It was, in fact, a matter of public record. The Forbes profile from last spring had described him as "a man who has engineered success with the same ruthless elegance he brings to everything—his offices, his wardrobe, his silence." The journalist had clearly been trying to be both admiring and critical at once, which Ernest had found mildly interesting. He did not disagree with the characterisation. He was not the sort of man who found interest in disagreeing with the truth. He lived in a penthouse apartment in Belgravia that had been designed by an architect whose waiting list ran three years long. He drove a car that had been built to his specification. He ate at restaurants where the food was beautiful and the service was invisible and the other diners were of the sort who did not point or stare. He attended opera on Thursdays when his schedule allowed, not because he had always loved opera, but bec
閱讀更多
Chapter 3 A Forgotten Clause
Don James had expected this call for exactly forty-eight hours. He had, in fact, prepared for it in the methodical way he now prepared for most things—which was to say he had given himself thirty minutes in the morning to think about it clearly, had identified every possible outcome, had decided which outcomes were acceptable and which were not, and had then set it aside and gone about his day with the focused efficiency that had become, in the two years since his divorce, both his greatest professional asset and his most reliable emotional armour. He sat now in his office on the fourteenth floor of James Logistics' London headquarters in Canary Wharf, the Docklands spread behind him like a diagram of contemporary commerce, and listened to the careful precision of Ernest West's voice and felt absolutely nothing. Or so he told himself. "I wasn't waiting," Ernest said. "I was managing my schedule." Don could hear it—the slight formal tightening that happened when Ernest was navigat
閱讀更多
Chapter 4 The Condition Revealed
The meeting with Aldridge & Pennington took place on a Thursday morning in a conference room on the fourth floor of their offices on Chancery Lane—wood-panelled, heavy-curtained, smelling faintly of old paper and the particular brand of institutional gravitas that certain legal firms cultivated the way other establishments cultivated wine.Geoffrey Aldridge himself presided. He was, as Ernest remembered, a man who occupied space with the careful deliberateness of someone who had learned long ago that the appearance of certainty was as valuable as certainty itself. He wore a grey flannel and cufflinks. He had a solicitor's habit of looking at the centre of the table when speaking, as if the document itself were the primary audience.Ernest sat on one side of the table. Don James sat on the other.They had not spoken since the phone call. They had not looked directly at each other since walking into the room four minutes apart, Don first, already seated when Ernest arrived. Don glanced
閱讀更多
Chapter 5 Unwanted Reunion
The Hollowell Estate in Oxfordshire was, objectively, beautiful.Ernest had been here before—twice, during the portfolio acquisition process, back when he and Don had still been married and had still been, in the language of things that no longer existed, we. He remembered it as impressive in the way that significant properties often were: the long gravel drive through elms, the Cotswold stone façade wearing its age with dignity, the walled kitchen garden, the formal grounds. It had impressed him then as an asset. It had not particularly moved him.It was late afternoon on the twenty-eighth of the month when his car turned through the estate's iron gate and began the approach. The October light was thin and gold and the elms had turned, and the whole property had that quality of certain English autumns that was either melancholy or beautiful depending entirely on the internal state of the observer.Ernest's internal state was, he would have said, neutral.He noted the beauty without f
閱讀更多
Chapter 6 A Changed Man
Ernest had always been a man who catalogued things.Not consciously—not with a ledger or a list, not in any way he would have admitted to anyone, including Dr. Farrow, who would have had a great deal to say about it. But there was a part of him, running quietly beneath every professional and social engagement, that noted and filed. Details. Shifts. The small accumulated evidence of who a person was.He had spent six years cataloguing Don James.He knew, therefore, that the man sitting across the dining table last night had changed in ways that went beyond the surface. It was not the suit—Don had always dressed well, had always understood that presentation was a form of authority. It was not the composure—Don had been composed before, had been capable before, had carried himself with the unhurried confidence of someone who knew their own worth.What was different was the absence of anything that needed Ernest.This was not something Ernest had anticipated. He had anticipated difficulty
閱讀更多
Chapter 7 Eyes Without Warmth
Don had a system. This was not new—Don had always had systems, had always been the kind of person who established frameworks for the management of things that other people left unstructured and therefore vulnerable. But the system he had developed in the two years since the divorce was of a particular and deliberate kind, built specifically for the management of himself. The system had four components. First: clarity of purpose. Every day began with a defined set of objectives—professional, personal, physical—so that he always knew what he was doing and why. Second: emotional economy. He did not spend energy on feelings that had no productive outlet. He acknowledged them, filed them, and moved on. Third: self-containment. He did not require anything from outside himself that he could not, with sufficient preparation, provide for himself. Fourth: honesty. He did not lie to himself about what he felt or what he wanted. He simply managed the gap between what he felt and what he chose t
閱讀更多
Chapter 8 The Terms Accepted
The formal co-management agreement was signed on the fourth day. It was a document of considerable length—forty-two pages, which was appropriate given that it governed twelve months of the lives of two men who had already once signed a document intending to govern the rest of their lives, with results that had produced the present situation. Ernest's legal team had added seven supplementary clauses. Don's team had added four. They had negotiated, through representatives, the language around shared decision-making authority and the arbitration protocol, and had arrived at something that was, if not elegant, at least structurally sound. The arbitrator they had agreed on was a woman named Constance Adeyemi—a former commercial judge, now in private practice, who had a reputation for cutting through the architecture of professional disputes to what she called the operative reality. Both legal teams had approved her. Neither Ernest nor Don had objected. Ernest read every page of the agr
閱讀更多
Chapter 9 Bound by Contract
The first week established the shape of things.They worked in the east wing office from eight in the morning until approximately six in the evening, with the reliable rhythm of two people who had independently arrived at similar professional disciplines. Don was in the office first each morning; Ernest arrived within fifteen minutes. They did not discuss who was earlier. They did not discuss the silence, which was functional rather than hostile. They did not discuss the fact that they had, without conversation, developed a system of small courtesies—the coffee made for two when one of them made a pot, the window opened or closed based on what the other person's jacket situation suggested about their temperature preference, the way they naturally divided the phone calls and email trails that the estate required without needing to negotiate it each time.Ernest noticed all of this.He noticed it the way he noticed most things—as data, as information, as something to be processed. The d
閱讀更多
Chapter 10 A House Divided
The luxury of the Hollowell Estate had been designed for people who arrived with the intention of being comfortable.It accommodated two people who had arrived with the intention of being professional rather less elegantly.The residential wing was generous—there was no shortage of space, no practical reason for their paths to cross more than their working schedule required. Ernest had his bedroom and his study. Don had his. The shared sitting room between them remained largely unoccupied during the first two weeks—a room that awaited a use that neither of them had yet articulated. There was a fireplace that had not been lit. There were two chairs facing it in the manner of a conversation about to begin that neither party had started.Ernest walked past the sitting room door several times a day. He did not go in.He was aware that this was a choice.The house itself complicated things in ways he hadn't anticipated. A house has its own grammar—the patterns of movement and encounter it
閱讀更多
查看更多
探索並免費閱讀 優質小說
GoodNovel APP 免費暢讀海量優秀小說，下載喜歡的書籍，隨時隨地閱讀。
在 APP 免費閱讀書籍
掃碼在 APP 閱讀
DMCA.com Protection Status