All Chapters of In Love With The Hot Billionaire.: Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

95 Chapters

~Author Note~

To all my readers who have come this far, I want to say a very big thank you. Thank you for not dropping the book, thank you for adding to library and thank you for not getting bored with Adrien and Camille 🤭 🌸 You all don't know how happy it makes me 🥹 Please stick to Camille and Adrien's story because it's about to get hot 🔥 Muah as you continue (⁠ ⁠ꈍ⁠ᴗ⁠ꈍ⁠) **Author Carabella｡⁠◕⁠‿⁠◕⁠｡**

~The Cost Of Dreaming~

CHAPTER SEVENTYCamille's POVThree days passed and Adrien barely came home.I noticed without meaning to. That was the humiliating part, the noticing. The way I registered his absence the same way a room registers a dropped temperature.He left early. Before Noé was awake, before breakfast, before the apartment had properly begun its day. He came back late, after Noé was already in bed, after the dinner things had been washed and put away and the living room had settled into its nighttime quiet. Sometimes I heard the front door at eleven. Once, past midnight. I lay in my room and listened to his footsteps in the hallway and stared at the ceiling and told myself this was fine. This was correct. This was what an employer was supposed to do.Go to work. Come home. Maintain appropriate distance from his employee.The fact that it felt like something had been withdrawn from me specifically was my problem and nobody else's. I had caused it. I had stood in that hallway and said what I said

~The Architect~

CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONEJulien's POV I have always been a patient man.People mistake this for kindness. They look at the easy smile and the open hands and the way I can sit across from someone for an entire evening making them feel like the most interesting person in the room, and they think patience is a virtue I came by honestly. They think it means I am generous. That I am warm. That I am the kind of man who waits because he cares about the outcome.I wait because I am good at it.There is a difference.I am sitting in the back of my car outside the building where Camille has decided to rebuild herself, because that is what she is doing, I know her well enough to know that. She finds a corner and she patches herself together with whatever materials are available and she looks up with those dark eyes and decides she is surviving. She has always been like that. It was one of the things I found interesting about her initially, that quality of quiet endurance, the way she absorbed things

~The Weight Of Her~

CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO I came home to a quiet apartment. This was not unusual. I had been making a point of quiet apartments lately, arriving after everything had settled and everyone had gone to bed, moving through the hallway with the lights off and telling myself this was practical, this was efficient, this had nothing to do with a conversation in a narrow hallway that I was apparently still carrying around with me like something I had forgotten to put down. I set my keys on the hall table, took off my stethoscope and moved toward the kitchen for water because the hospital ran on recycled air and I always came home slightly parched and slightly emptied of whatever human quality the day had required of me. I stopped in the kitchen doorway. She was at the table. Asleep, face turned to one side, her cheek resting on her folded arms, dark hair spilling across the surface around her. The borrowed laptop was open in front of her, screen still glowing, and in its light I could see what

~Find Out~

CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREEI had been sitting in that chair for forty minutes before she woke up.I want to be precise about that because the imprecision of it bothers me. I am not a man who sits in chairs in other people's bedrooms at seven in the morning for forty minutes. I am a man who has rounds and paperwork and a son to get ready for school and a hospital that runs on a schedule that does not accommodate extended periods of sitting and thinking about things I cannot fix yet.And yet.I had taken care of Noé first. That is important. I had heard him at his usual hour through the wall, the morning monologue beginning, and I had gone in and done the routine with the thoroughness she usually brought to it, the cereal and the toast and the finding of the missing shoe which was, again, behind the radiator, a location it seemed to prefer. I had combed his hair with less success than she achieved and he had informed me of this diplomatically. I had put him in his coat and sent him down to M

~Plans To Disappear~

CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOURCamille's POV I woke up to a ceiling that didn't look like where I dozed off.This was different. This was my ceiling, my room, my bed, and I was in it when I should have been at the kitchen table with a borrowed laptop and a column of numbers that refused to cooperate, and it took me three full seconds to understand how I had gotten here.Someone had carried me.The jacket was the evidence. Still draped across my shoulders, too large, the collar brushing my cheek when I turned my head, dark fabric that smelled like a hospital and something underneath the hospital, something clean and specific and entirely his. I lay there for a moment holding that information.Adrien had carried me upstairs.I did not let myself think about what that meant. I started to, briefly, the image of it arriving before I could stop it, his arms, his hands, the particular quality of being held by someone who handled things with that precise and total care, and I shut it down with the fir

~Tomorrow~

CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE The phone rang before I had finished deciding anything. I looked at the screen. Margot. I stared at it for one ring, two rings, then I picked it up. "Mademoiselle Camille." Margot's voice was warm and unhurried the way it always was, carrying the particular ease of someone who had been managing the logistics of this household long enough that very little surprised him. "I am calling about Thursday." I said nothing and waited for his next sentence. "Monsieur Duval asked me to let you know." A brief pause, and I could hear Noé's voice in the background, high and bright and narrating something with great conviction to nobody in particular. "He has agreed to the arrangement. For the school morning. You will attend as Noé's mother." The bag sat beside me. The packed bag, with the practical clothes and the borrowed laptop and Dr. Rousseau's card in the front pocket, sat beside me on the bed, and I pressed my lips together and looked at the wall and felt something

~One Last Evening~

CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIXI moved the bag while the apartment was still quiet.Not back into the wardrobe. Down the stairs, one careful step at a time, and into the narrow space beneath the staircase where the cleaning things were kept and where nobody had any reason to look. I pushed it far enough back that it sat in shadow, invisible unless you were specifically looking for it. Then I straightened up and smoothed my shirt and went to start dinner preparations because Noé would be home in an hour and I wanted everything ready.I wanted this evening to be good.That was all I wanted from it. One good evening, simple and warm and entirely his, the kind he would remember without knowing he was storing it, the way children stored things in their bodies before their minds knew how. I wanted him to come home and find the kitchen smelling of something he loved and I wanted to stand beside him at the counter and let him help and listen to everything he had been saving up to tell me since morning.

~Not This Time~

CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN Adrien's POV I found it by accident. That is the honest version. I was not looking for anything. I had just returned from the hospital, and I had passed the staircase and something had caught in my peripheral vision the way things caught when you had spent years training your attention to miss nothing, a shape in the shadow that did not belong there, an edge of fabric tucked back against the wall in the space beneath the stairs. I stopped,crouched down and I pulled it out. It was a small bag packed with the specific efficiency of someone who had done this before, who knew how to compress a life into the minimum required and move quickly. I held it for a moment without standing up, just crouching in the hallway with the bag in my hands and the quiet apartment around me, and I turned it over once and felt the weight of it. It wasn't heavy. That was the thing that moved through me first before anything else arrived. It was not heavy. Whatever she had put in h

~Helping Her~

CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT She sat across from me and said nothing for long enough that I began to understand the silence was not obstruction. It was preparation. The gathering of something that had been held in one place for too long. The particular quality of stillness that preceded not a lie but the terrifying architecture of a partial truth. I waited. I am good at waiting. It is perhaps the only form of patience I have cultivated without an agenda. The clinical understanding that pressure applied too early collapses the thing you are trying to open. So I sat with the bag on the table between us and I looked at her and I gave her the room. She looked at her hands first. Then at the bag. Then at some middle point between us that was neither. "It's the family of my ex husband," she said. Her voice was quiet. Not the performed quiet of someone managing information. The quiet of someone setting something heavy down after carrying it for a very long time. I said nothing. I kept my face

...

5 6 7 8 9 10

SCAN CODE TO READ ON APP