Semua Bab I WON'T MARRY A BILLIONAIRE : Bab 11 - Bab 20

Charles's POVI folded it twice and put it in my shirt pocket before anyone could see what was on it.Not because anyone was watching particularly. My colleague Dara had passed at the moment I opened it and slowed for exactly one second before continuing toward the far end of the restaurant with her tray. Whether she had seen my face I couldn't be certain. What I was certain of was that whatever my face had done in those three seconds needed to not happen again on the floor.I finished my shift.This was a more deliberate act than it had ever been before. The clearing of tables required conscious instruction from my brain to my hands in a way that table clearing had not required in the seven months I had been doing it. The checking on the couple by the entrance required me to actively remember what questions a waiter asked a couple by an entrance. The restocking of the side station required three separate attempts because I kept arriving at it and standing there with the specific blan

Vivienne's POVHe arrived like weather.Not the quiet kind that settles gradually until you realise the temperature has changed. The other kind. The kind that comes through a door and immediately reorganises the atmosphere of whatever room it enters, drawing attention without appearing to seek it, filling space without appearing to crowd it.I noticed him before Charles did.He was tall, well dressed in the particular way of someone for whom clothing was a language they had been speaking fluently since childhood, and he moved through The Harlow's entrance with the easy unhurried confidence of a man who had genuinely never considered the possibility that a room might not be glad to receive him.He saw Charles first.The smile that arrived on his face was immediate and completely unguarded, the smile of someone who means it, and something about its genuineness made me revise whatever mild wariness I had assembled in the three seconds between his entrance and this moment."Brother," he s

Vivienne's POVHe called at half past five on a Tuesday."You left your scarf," he said. "At The Harlow. Last Thursday."I looked across my apartment at the armchair by the window where my scarves lived when they were not in use. There were three of them draped across it with the casual permanence of things that had found their place and stayed there.None of them were missing."Did I," I said."Blue one. Soft material." A pause. "It's been in the lost and found for five days. I wanted to make sure it got back to you."I looked at the armchair.I had not worn a blue scarf to The Harlow at any point in the past month. What I had worn last Thursday was a grey coat and a very specific expression of someone trying to appear less interested in the person serving her water than she actually was."I see," I said."I could drop it by," he said. "If that's convenient."The pause he left after it was the pause of a man who had constructed a reasonably thin pretext and was aware of its thinness

Vivienne's POVMaya had been trying to engineer a casual gathering for three weeks.She had not called it engineering. She had called it a low key Saturday thing at my place, just us and whoever, completely relaxed, no agenda. I had agreed because refusing Maya's low key Saturday things was an exercise in temporary postponement rather than actual prevention and because I had known for approximately two weeks that the whatever of just us and whoever was specifically Charles and that the no agenda was the most thoroughly agendaed thing Maya had proposed since she orchestrated an entire product launch around a meeting she told me was a routine check in.Charles arrived twenty minutes after Maya and Lyla. Ella arrived simultaneously with him, which I suspected was not coincidental, and which produced a moment at my front door where the two of them stood in the corridor together for a beat before coming inside, Ella with her measuring expression and Charles with his baseline composure, two

Vivienne's POVI didn't plan to tell him.I had driven home from Lumière with the photograph in my bag and the four words sitting in my chest with the specific weight of something that had arrived uninvited and had no intention of leaving quietly and I had made myself tea I didn't drink and sat at my window and watched the city do its evening thing and told myself I was processing it.I was not processing it.I was sitting with it the way you sat with things that were too large for the space you had available for them, turning it over and over without making any progress on what it actually meant or what I was supposed to do with it or why a photograph of a three year old in an unrecognised garden with four words on the back had the power to make Vivienne Donald, founder of Lumière, builder of things from nothing, sit completely still for three minutes in a forty floor office in the middle of a Wednesday afternoon.My phone was on the cushion beside me.I picked it up and put it down