Lahat ng Kabanata ng Mr Billionaire's Borrowed Wife: Kabanata 41 - Kabanata 49

I was on my feet before I could reconsider and head out onto the terrace.His driver turned to me at once. “I’m sorry, ma’am. He said he was fine.”“I am fine,” Nicholas said flatly, his voice roughened by alcohol, because of course it was.I stopped one step away from him. The smell of whiskey, night air, and expensive cologne reached me first.“You look like a mess.”Nicholas finally turned his head. His blue eyes looked a shade darker tonight. “I can walk on my own.”I took in the slight tilt of his shoulders. “And I’m Miss Universe.”“I don’t need help.”“I’m not offering.”He let out a breath, then started walking.The first two steps were steady enough.The third made him sway slightly as he climbed the terrace steps.My hand moved faster than my pride.I caught his arm.His body heat pressed straight into my palm, hard and alive. The muscle beneath his shirt tightened as if I’d touched a live wire.Nicholas looked down at my fingers curled around his arm. Then his eyes lifted b

A few days after that breakfast, Nicholas turned into an expensive shadow that only ever seemed to pass through.Sometimes I heard his car pull in when the house was nearly asleep. Sometimes I came downstairs early and found his coffee already gone cold in the sink, but the man himself had vanished, as if he had a natural talent for making a room feel used without ever truly inhabiting it. A suit would change places. A brief phone call would drift through the hallway. Footsteps would come and go too quickly for me to classify as presence.What was interesting was that he still made time for Sienna.Enough for the small things that, for some reason, were even more unsettling. Two minutes at the door before leaving, bending slightly when Sienna held up a new drawing of a mermaid armed with a glitter bazooka. One large hand ruffling her cute little bangs while he said, “This is a national security threat.”One afternoon, when he came in only to grab something from the study, he still sto

I lay on my back, staring at the dark green ceiling of my bedroom, one hand on my stomach, my hair spread across the pillow like I had just lost a duel with expensive hair spray. Outside the window, Manhattan moved with its usual shameless urgency. Cars passed. Some birds of indeterminate species chirped. A gardener in the courtyard below trimmed the hedges with the precision of someone who maybe had a secret contract with the aesthetic mafia.I had barely slept.Every time I closed my eyes, all I saw was Nicholas’s hand rising toward his temple, then changing direction into the motion of fixing his cuff.I hated knowing him that well.I hated that my body still kept a complete catalog of all his habits. The way his jaw tightened before he denied pain. The way his shoulders dropped half an inch when the ache started winning. The way he blinked slower when the world around him got too loud.Five years ago, knowing things like that made me feel special. Now it felt like having VIP acces

Nicholas disappeared.Traces of him still lingered in the house. black coffee sometimes left half-finished on the breakfast table, the sound of his car arriving too late, dark suit jackets appearing over the back of the study chair, short messages to Bianchi that made the whole house move. But his face was rarely here.The funny thing, of course, was that he still found time for Sienna.I woke to the sound of a door in the hallway.Sienna’s door.I sat up in bed, hair falling over my face, my body going instantly rigid. The clock on the nightstand read 1:17.For a few seconds, there was no sound.Then Sienna’s door hinge moved softly.I climbed out of bed without turning on the light. My bare feet touched the thick carpet, and I moved carefully toward the door. I opened my bedroom door just a crack.The hallway was dark, washed only in the soft glow of the wall sconces.Nicholas came out of Sienna’s room.Still in his white work shirt, sleeves rolled up, hair slightly messy, his tie m

“I didn’t ask for that,” I said at last.“I know.”“I don’t like people arranging my life.”“I know that too.”“And yet you did it anyway.”“Because you’re trying to do everything alone.”I laughed softly. Not because it was funny. “I’m the owner, founder, and CEO. That’s literally my job.”“You don’t have to control everything.”I looked at him as if he had just suggested I trade Sienna for a houseplant. “Excuse me?”“Help is there. Your team is enough. The funding is enough. Legal is enough. The vendors are enough.” He nodded toward the screen on my desk. “You don’t need to sit here until night deciding whether the napkins should be warm ivory or bone white.”“First of all, those are two different colors. Second, do not talk about napkins in that disrespectful tone inside an event planner’s office. Third, if I’m not working, what am I supposed to do?”He didn’t answer right away.I raised an eyebrow. “Sit in your mansion? Stare out the window in a silk dress and wait for my husband