All Chapters of I WON'T MARRY A BILLIONAIRE : Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

Vivienne's POVI didn't sleep.Not the restless half-sleep of someone whose body was tired but whose mind had declined to cooperate. Full wakefulness. The specific alert quality of a mind that had received information it considered unfinished and had no intention of standing down until the unfinished parts had been addressed.I lay in the dark until two in the morning and then stopped pretending that lying in the dark was a productive use of the available hours and went to my desk.Richard Cole's profile was still on my screen.I read it again with the careful attention of someone who had already read it twice and was now reading it the way she read contracts, looking not for what was there but for what the presence of what was there implied about what wasn't.Chief Operations Officer. Seventeen years in the role. Before that a decade in private equity at a level that explained the quality of the suit and the particular bearing of a man who had spent his professional life managing lar

Vivienne's POVI opened the laptop again at eleven forty three.I told myself I was going to look at it one more time and then close it and go to bed and approach everything with the clear head that sleep produced and the muddled head of a sleepless night could not.I looked at it for two hours and nineteen minutes.Not continuously. I got up twice, once for water and once for no reason I could identify except the physical need to move through the apartment rather than sit still inside what I was feeling. But I came back both times and sat down and opened the laptop and looked at the photograph and then looked at myself looking at it in the dark reflection of the window behind the screen.Charles in a suit.That was the simple fact of it. A man in a suit standing in front of a building. If I had been handed this photograph without context, without the white shirt and the dark apron and the seven months of careful observation and the accumulated weight of everything I had built my unde

Vivienne's POVHe arrived at six with four bags.Not the careful stacked containers of previous cooking visits. Four actual bags, the kind that came from markets rather than shops, filled with the specific combination of ingredients that serious cooking required when it was planning something more ambitious than the available time suggested was reasonable.I opened the door and looked at the bags and then at him."It's my birthday," I said. "Not yours. You're supposed to receive things on other people's birthdays. Not carry four bags up fourteen floors.""The elevator did most of the carrying," he said. "Can I come in."I stepped back from the door.He came in and went directly to the kitchen the way he moved through my apartment now, without the slight navigational consideration of someone in an unfamiliar space, with the easy directness of someone who knew where things were and moved toward them accordingly.I stood in the doorway and watched him begin unpacking the bags onto my cou

Vivienne's POVI stopped holding back.That was the only way to describe what shifted after that Friday evening with Maya, Lyla and Ella sitting in my apartment with a laptop between us and a financial quarter that lined up too neatly to mean nothing.I made a decision.And I stopped managing around it.I invited Charles into my life. Not slowly. Not with the careful step by step approach I had been using since the napkin. I just opened the door and let him in.....I took him to a Lumière supplier dinner on a Wednesday.He sat beside me and talked to people the way he talked to everyone. Like they were worth listening to. He asked questions that had nothing to do with impressing anyone and everything to do with actually wanting to know. He didn't perform. He just showed up.The head of my product team caught me at the end of the night."Where did you find him?" she said."A restaurant," I said.She nodded like that made perfect sense and walked away.I took him to an art opening Lyla

Vivienne's POVHe replied and I never sent a time or a place.He didn't ask.That was Charles. He never pushed into silences that weren't his. He waited at whatever pace something actually needed and didn't pretend otherwise.I sat in my apartment that evening with the journalist's words and felt something move underneath me.Not collapse. Nothing dramatic. More like walking across a floor you were certain was level and feeling it tilt slightly under your foot. Not enough to fall. Enough to make you stop and look down and wonder how long it had been that way without you noticing.Someone in the cosmetics industry.He had been watching someone in the cosmetics industry.....I had walked into The Harlow on an ordinary afternoon and seen a man in a white shirt and believed I had found something.That belief had felt completely real. It still felt real. The bracelet on my wrist was real. The birthday dinner with the candles and the stories and that laugh I couldn't manage even when I wan