All Chapters of I WON'T MARRY A BILLIONAIRE : Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

Vivienne's POVHe was already there when I arrived.A corner table at a small place on Renton Street that I wouldn't have picked myself but was exactly right. Not showy. Not the kind of coffee shop that was really a statement about the person choosing it. Just a good quiet corner with decent light and enough noise from the other tables to make the conversation feel private without having to lower your voice.Louis stood when he saw me come in.That small thing. Standing. Not performing it. Just doing it the way men did when they had been raised in rooms where you stood when someone arrived."You came," he said, like he was genuinely pleased rather than simply greeting me."I said I would," I said.He smiled and we sat down.....The coffee was good.Louis ordered without looking at the menu which meant he had been here before or he was the kind of person who decided quickly and didn't second guess himself. Probably both.He was easy to sit with. That was the honest thing about Louis.

Vivienne's POVThe launch had been six months in the making.Lumière's new line. The one that had started with the formula I had almost approved on a tight timeline and hadn't. The one my mother's voice had stopped me from settling on. Close enough is how you end up with something you have to apologise for later.We hadn't settled. We had gone back and done it properly and what came out the other side was the best thing Lumière had ever made and we all knew it.The venue was full by seven. Press and buyers and the particular mix of industry people and genuine supporters that a Lumière event always drew. My team had done everything right. The lighting. The display. The way the product was presented so that it spoke before anyone in the room said a single word about it.I was in the middle of a conversation with a buyer from a department store group when I felt the room shift.Not dramatically. Just the subtle change in energy that happened when something was about to occur that most pe

Vivienne's POVHe sat on my sofa.I sat in the chair across from him. Not beside him. Across. Something about the weight of what was coming needed space around it. Not distance exactly. Just enough room for whatever was going to move through this apartment tonight to move properly.I had made tea without asking if he wanted any.My mother's habit finding me without my permission.He had wrapped both hands around the mug the way she always did and looked at it for a moment and something about that small thing, the way he held it, made my chest ache in a way I didn't have a clean explanation for.The apartment was quiet.The city outside was doing its late night thing. Distant and indifferent.He looked up from the mug."I need to tell you something about who I am," he said. "All of it. From the beginning.""Okay," I said.He took a breath.Not the breath of someone nervous exactly. The breath of someone who had rehearsed a long journey in their head many times and was now standing at t

Vivienne's POVWe drove back to my apartment in the early afternoon.Charles was quiet in the car. Not the comfortable quiet of the drive to my mother's house the night before. Something with more weight to it. He had his eyes on the road and one hand on the wheel and the set of his jaw was the set it had when he was thinking hard about something and keeping the thinking internal.I didn't push.I looked out the window and thought about my mother's face when she said it.Someone who knows you both.....I made coffee when we got in.Charles sat at the kitchen counter and watched me move around the space and didn't say anything yet. That was fine. I needed to do something with my hands and coffee was available and the familiar small routine of it helped the way familiar small routines always helped when something large was sitting in the room with you.I put a mug in front of him.I sat across the counter.I looked at him."I need to tell you what my mother said this morning," I said.

Vivienne's POVI looked at the card for a long time.The logo sat in the bottom right corner small and precise and completely certain of itself. The kind of mark that didn't need to be large because everything it represented was already large enough. I had seen it in print dozens of times. In financial supplements and market analyses and the kind of journalism that tracked serious private wealth because serious private wealth, even when it tried to stay invisible, left marks on the world that people eventually noticed and wrote about.I had read those articles.I had never connected the name at the top of them to the man sitting across my kitchen counter holding my hand.I looked at the card.Then I looked at him.Something rose through me.Not quickly. Slowly. The way water rose. Starting somewhere below everything and coming up through the layers of me one at a time, moving through the years in sequence as it climbed.I was eight years old in my mother's kitchen and she was telling