BILLIONAIRE'S DEAD WIFE RETURNS のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 11 - チャプター 20

Jake.The chaos doesn’t stop.If anything, it grows. The moment Kyla disappears deeper into the gala, the cameras whip toward me. I’m suddenly drowning in a sea of microphones, shouts, flashes that make my vision blur.Normally when this happens it's because they all want a statement from me about something business related and I always know how to handle it. Over ten years in the business I had become a pro at this. But this moment, nothing could have ever prepared me for this. “Mr. Donovan! Did you know Kyla was still alive?”“When was the last time you saw your wife?”“Jake, were you hiding her?”“How does it feel to see her after five years?”"Is she okay with you marrying her blood sister?"Questions are hurled at me like stones, each one heavier than the last. The words your wife sting like acid, because she isn’t mine anymore. She stopped being mine the moment I betrayed her and married her sister. Amina’s grip tightens on my arm, nails digging into my tuxedo sleeve. Her perfu

Jake.The silence swallows me after she leaves.Her perfume lingers, faint but sharp, cutting through the sterile hotel air. My hands still ache from gripping her arms too tight, but I don’t regret it. I needed to feel her, to know she was real, not some cruel hallucination conjured up by guilt.Kyla is alive. And I just touched her arm, she is alive. The thought pounds in my head with every heartbeat, relentless and impossible to quiet. My chest feels like it’s caving in, as though five years of buried grief just clawed its way out all at once.I press my palms against the wall, leaning forward, dragging in a breath that doesn’t steady me. My throat burns, my vision swims. I’m not the man who unravels in public, not the man who loses control, but right now, I’m standing on the edge of collapse. I feel like my whole life has just been removed from under me. I don't know what's real anymore or what's not.And then her voice cuts through.“Jake?”I freeze.When I turn, Amina is there, f

Jake. I can’t sit still.The gala is over, but my head is still buzzing, my body pacing like a caged animal. The glass of scotch in my hand is untouched, the ice long since melted, the amber liquid as flat as the pit in my chest.Kyla. Her name keeps clawing at me, dragging through every nerve ending, refusing to let me rest. Five years. Five years of mourning her. Of cursing her memory. Of building a life without her. And tonight she just walked in like a ghost deciding to bleed back into the living.I slam the glass down on the desk, the sharp crack reverberating through the study. My chest is heaving, my palms clammy.I can’t make sense of it. None of it.She looked the same, only sharper somehow. The Kyla I buried was soft, fragile, warm in ways that cracked me open. Tonight’s Kyla was steel. And yet her eyes. Those eyes still held the same storm. The same fire I used to drown in.“Damn it,” I mutter under my breath.I yank my phone from my pocket and scroll to the only number I

Amina. I reached up and tangled my fingers into his hair, holding his head as I kissed him back and met demand with demand. My hips rose up to thrust against him, and his taste and smell invaded me like a drug. My skin burned as all the pent up desire and anger I had buried deep burst out of my body in a flood of heat. I was ravenous for his taste, for his hands to strip off my clothes and take me right there against the wall, and I reveled in his wild response that was so opposite his rigid control.An alarm bell rang in my head and cut through the mist of sexual fog. He had been drinking. If we were interrupted, he might calmly step away with a reasonable explanation to why sex would not be a good idea. The knowledge he’d done it twice before skated along the edges of my mind, until I dragged my mouth from his and yanked the hair at the nape of his neck.His head shot up. He blinked as if coming to from a long sleep, and I caught the question held in his eyes. I made myself say the

Kyla.The ceiling blurs above me as I lie in bed, unable to shut my mind off. The headlines, the whispers, the cruel speculation none of it hurts as much as the memories that won’t stop clawing back when I least expect them.And tonight, they come like a tidal wave.I close my eyes, and suddenly, I’m not here anymore. I’m back there five years ago, the night my body betrayed me and the contractions started far too soon.I can still feel it. The sharp twist low in my belly, the tightening that stole my breath and had me gripping the edge of the bed until my knuckles turned white. I remember whispering to myself, Not now, please not now, but my body didn’t listen. My babies wanted out, and I was terrified. I was all alone with no family and no help. I reached for my phone with trembling hands, my heart pounding as I scrolled to the only number I wanted at that moment. Jake. My husband. The man who once swore he would never leave my side.It rang once. Twice. Three times. Panic surged i