Tempting The Billioanire のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 41 - チャプター 50

Emily's POVTasha arrived at the penthouse the next morning at ten o'clock sharp, carrying two iced coffees and the particular expression she wore when she had been holding things in for too long and was about to let all of them out at once.I opened the door and she looked at me for exactly one second before pulling me into a hug that nearly knocked the coffees out of her hand."Okay," she said into my shoulder. "Okay. I'm here.""You're here," I agreed.She pulled back and handed me one of the coffees and walked past me into the penthouse like she owned it, which was very Tasha. She had been here enough times now that the initial awe had worn off and she moved through the space with the comfortable familiarity of someone who had decided to simply accept that her best friend lived somewhere extraordinary and move on.Alexander was in his office on the phone with Richard, working through the details of the board meeting scheduled for Wednesday. He had been up early, already dressed an

Emily's POVTasha talked about James for forty five minutes.Not continuously — there were pauses, digressions, moments where she caught herself and said something like "anyway, it's not a big deal" before immediately contradicting that statement with the next thing out of her mouth. But the sum total of the conversation, from the moment she said "so he called" to the moment she finally sat back and said "okay I think that's everything," was forty five minutes.I loved every second of it.Not because of the content, though the content was genuinely sweet — he had called at seven in the evening, they had talked for two hours without noticing, he had made her laugh three times in the first ten minutes which Tasha reported as though it were a statistic she had carefully logged, he had asked questions about her life and actually listened to the answers and then asked follow up questions, which Tasha described as "unsettlingly attentive" — but because of what it looked like on her face whi

Emily's POVTuesday arrived the way the day before something significant always does — ordinary on the surface and humming underneath.I woke early, earlier than usual, the particular alertness of a mind that had decided sleep was finished before the body quite agreed. Alexander was already awake beside me, which told me I wasn't the only one. He was staring at the ceiling with the focused stillness of someone running through a sequence of events they have no control over and checking it for gaps anyway."You've been awake for a while," I said."An hour maybe." He didn't look at me. "Go back to sleep.""I'm not tired.""Neither am I."We lay there for a moment in the early dark, both of us looking at the ceiling."Tell me what you're thinking," I said."I'm thinking about the order of events tomorrow. Richard opens the session. We present the evidence package. Victor Hale will object, probably loudly. Richard handles the procedural challenges. Then the vote." He paused. "I'm trying to

Emily's POVThe drive home was quiet in the way that only comes after something enormous.Not empty quiet. Full quiet. The kind that doesn't need to be filled because everything that needed to be said has been said and what remains is simply the fact of it, sitting solidly in the space between two people who have been through something together and come out the other side.Alexander drove. I sat with my head against the window watching the city go by, the afternoon light catching the glass faces of buildings and throwing it back in long bright strips. I was aware of him beside me the way I was always aware of him now, not with the self conscious hypervigilance of the early weeks but with the easy peripheral certainty of someone who has grown accustomed to a presence and would notice its absence immediately.His phone had been ringing since we got in the car. He had silenced it."Richard will want to debrief," I said."Richard can wait an hour."I looked at him. "That might be the most

Emily's POVThe weekend arrived the way weekends do after a week that has contained too much — with a particular quality of stillness, as though the world had agreed to lower its voice for a few days and let things settle.Saturday morning I woke up to rain.Not the brief performative rain that Los Angeles occasionally produced as though fulfilling an obligation, but real rain, steady and serious, the kind that turned the windows grey and made the city below disappear into soft focus. I lay listening to it for a while before I opened my eyes, tracing the sound of it against the glass, the particular percussion of water finding its way down a building that was very tall and entirely made of surfaces.Alexander was awake beside me, which was no longer remarkable. He woke early by constitution, not by choice, the habit of years of early meetings and international calls."It's raining," I said, for no reason except that it seemed worth acknowledging."Has been since four," he said. "I was