Semua Bab I WON'T MARRY A BILLIONAIRE : Bab 1 - Bab 10

Vivienne's POVSome lessons are taught in classrooms.Some are taught in religious gatherings, in books, in the careful mouths of teachers who mean well but forget everything they say before the school bell rings.But the lessons that stay forever, the ones that carve themselves into the soft parts of you and never let go, those are taught in kitchens.Mine was taught on a Tuesday.I was eight years old, sitting on a wooden stool that wobbled on the left side, watching my mother wrap both hands around her chamomile mug like it was the only solid thing left in the world. The kitchen smelled like ginger and something older, something I couldn't name then but understand perfectly now.It smelled like survival."Come here, baby." Her voice was quiet. Not the quiet of peace. The quiet of a woman who had spent so many years screaming on the inside that her outside had simply run out of volume.I climbed closer and watched her eyes. They didn't fill with tears. I think she had cried everythi

Vivienne's POVI didn't sleep that night.I lay in my bed staring at the ceiling of my penthouse apartment, the city humming thirty two floors below me, and turned my mother's words over and over in my mind like something I kept hoping would change shape if I examined it long enough.*He found your company.*Donald Stone knew about Lumière.Donald Stone knew about me.I had built my entire life on the quiet understanding that he didn't exist. Not in any way that mattered. He was a name my mother said once in a kitchen when I was eight years old and then never again. He was the reason behind a warning that became a vow that became the foundation of everything I believed about love and men and the particular danger of beautiful liars with deep pockets.He was not supposed to be real.He was not supposed to be looking for me.I sat up at two in the morning, walked to my floor-to-ceiling window and looked at the city below. All those lights. All those lives. I had fought for mine with eve

Vivienne's POVI learned his name on a Wednesday.Not because he offered it. He wasn't the kind of man who offered things about himself freely. I had spent enough time in that restaurant watching him move through his work to understand that about him. He was careful with himself. Measured. Like someone who had learned at some point that giving people access to you was a thing that required consideration.I learned his name because I asked.He was refilling my water glass when I looked up from my phone and said simply, "What is your name?"He paused. Just briefly. Like the question had landed somewhere unexpected."Charles," he said."Just Charles?""Charles Dick."I turned the name over quietly. It wasn't a name that announced itself. It didn't carry the weight of old money or the polish of a family that had been important for generations. It was a plain, honest name that belonged to a man who apparently had no interest in being anything other than exactly what he appeared to be.I li

Vivienne's POVThe report was sitting on my desk when I arrived.Not filed neatly in a folder. Not placed with the careful discretion my assistant applied to everything that passed through this office. It was spread across my desk the way Maya spread things when she wanted them to be impossible to ignore, in a wide deliberate fan of printed pages that covered everything underneath them including my morning schedule, my quarterly projections and the proposal I had been meaning to review since Thursday.Maya herself was sitting in my chair.Not the visitor's chair on the other side of the desk where guests and junior staff and the occasional board member sat when they came to see me. My chair. The one behind the desk. She had her legs crossed and her coffee in one hand and the particular expression she wore when she had decided that normal social boundaries were temporarily suspended in service of something she considered urgent.I stopped in the doorway."You're in my chair," I said."

Vivienne's POVI was already in bed when she called.Not asleep. I hadn't been close to asleep since I got home, changed out of my work clothes and lay down on top of the covers with the specific intention of resting that my mind had immediately declined to cooperate with. The city was doing what it did outside my floor to ceiling windows, glittering and continuous and entirely indifferent to the fact that I was lying thirty two floors above it replaying the same sequence of moments on a loop that my brain had apparently decided needed more examination before it would permit me to close my eyes.Ella's office. The folder. The framework with its almost empty confirmed column. The question I had asked and the silence that had answered it.And underneath all of that, running like a current beneath everything else, the quiet restaurant and the mid-morning light and a man pulling out a chair across from me and saying *sometimes* like the word had found its way out before the part of him th