Chapter Thrity One

Jules' POVIt happened on a Tuesday.Not because Tuesday was significant. Not because anything particular had occurred to tip the scale, no watershed moment, no grand gesture. It happened on a Tuesday because I woke up and lay in my bed in the early gray light listening to Eli moving around in his room — that particular small-person shuffling, the thud of feet hitting the floor, the sound of the top drawer being investigated for the shirt he had decided he wanted — and I thought about the fact that Adam would be here in two hours, and instead of the complicated layering of feeling that thought had produced for weeks — the careful hope tamped down under equal and opposite caution — I just thought: good.Just good. Plain, simple, without qualification.I lay there with that for a minute. The ceiling. The morning light starting to press through the curtain edge. Eli's drawer opening and closing with the industrious energy of a small person who had opinions about his own clothing. And the

Chapter Thrity Two

Elena's POVShe had been in the apartment for eleven days since Adam's deadline.This was, by any reasonable measure, a violation of the instruction she had been given, but Elena had learned long ago that instructions from men in the immediate aftermath of emotional confrontations were rarely as final as they felt in the moment. Men said things with conviction and then softened. They gave ultimatums and then found reasons why full execution of those ultimatums was inconvenient. Elena had built much of her adult life on an accurate reading of that particular gap between declaration and follow-through.But Adam was not softening.She could tell. She had tried — a text, phrased carefully, three days after the confrontation: I think we should talk when things have calmed. There's context you don't have. He had not responded. She had sent a second one: Whatever Cooper has told you, you're only seeing part of it. I need you to hear my side. Nothing.And then, two days ago, she had received

Chapter Thrity Three

Jules' POVI smelled it first.That was the thing about fire. It announced itself before it arrived — that particular sharpness in the air, the acrid edge beneath the ordinary smells of a sleeping building, the thing that woke some old animal instinct that doesn't respond to conscious instruction. I was asleep. I was solidly, deeply asleep in the good way I had been sleeping since the Tuesday I told Adam I wanted to try, and then my body woke me at two-seventeen in the morning because something was wrong with the air.I lay still for exactly three seconds. Then I got up.The hallway outside my bedroom door had smoke in it. Not thick — not yet — but visible in the light from the streetlamp coming through the window at the end of the hall, a thin, moving gray that was enough. More than enough. I had a brief, electric memory of standing in the dark outside Nana's farm watching orange light crawl up the sky, and that memory did something to my nervous system that was very useful because i

All Chapters of The Billionaire's Runaway Country Girl : Chapter 31 - Chapter 33

Chapter Thrity One

Chapter Thrity Two

Chapter Thrity Three