Lahat ng Kabanata ng Fake Dating My Ex’s CEO : Kabanata 31 - Kabanata 40

~ Lena POV ~It had been a hard week even before Thursday.The tabloid situation had flared again, a new piece, sharper than the previous ones, this time with photographs from the Morrison Group dinner that had clearly been taken from inside the room. Patricia had called me at eight in the morning to say the firm was receiving press enquiries and that she needed me to manage my visibility more aggressively. I’d said yes and managed it and handled it with the focused efficiency of someone who had been handling things for eleven weeks and was running low on the specific resource that made handling feel sustainable.Then Ryan had appeared at a work event I hadn’t known he’d be at, a cross-industry communications panel that Cole Industries had apparently sponsored, and I’d spent two hours managing the geometry of a room that contained my ex-boyfriend and three journalists who knew my name from the tabloids. I’d done it well. I’d gone home exhausted in a way that sat differently from tired

~ Ryan POV ~I told myself it wasn’t deliberate.That’s the first thing I want to be clear about, even if only to myself, sitting here on a Sunday night with the specific kind of quiet that follows a decision you can’t take back. I told myself it was just a conversation. That I was talking to Marcus from the PR team the way I talked to Marcus most Fridays, over drinks at the bar two blocks from the office, and that the things I said about Lena were just context. Background. The kind of thing you said about someone you knew when their name kept appearing in the press.I told myself it wasn’t deliberate.I’m not sure I believe that anymore.Marcus worked in PR. Not Cole Industries PR, the external firm the company used for overflow, which meant he had contacts in the press that sat outside Harold’s jurisdiction. He was discreet, mostly. The most was the part I hadn’t thought about carefully enough.I had two drinks. Maybe three. Ryan Blake after two drinks was approximately the same as

~ Lena POV ~The email arrived on a Monday morning, three days after the rooftop.I’d been carrying the rooftop carefully, the way you carried something fragile that hadn’t been named yet, not because naming it would break it but because it wasn’t ready for the weight of a name. We hadn’t spoken since. Not because something had gone wrong, the opposite, because something had gone right enough that we were both, I thought, sitting with it before the next thing.The email had a magazine header I recognised. A journalist whose byline I’d followed for two years, sharp and fair, the kind of writer who did actual reporting rather than the manufactured intimacy of celebrity coverage. The pitch was flattering: an exclusive profile of Lena Carter, the woman behind the Cole Industries CEO, framed as a story about independence and strength and the particular kind of woman who moved through powerful worlds without losing herself.I read it twice.Then I read it a third time with the part of my br

~ Lena POV ~ I found it before Adrian could tell me about it.Seven forty-two in the morning, still in my pyjamas, first coffee not yet finished, the specific defenceless quality of an early Wednesday before the day had decided what it was going to be. I’d been scrolling through my industry news feed, the professional habit of checking what had moved overnight, and the piece appeared between a merger announcement and a quarterly report like it belonged there.It didn’t belong there.I read it once quickly, the way you read something when you’re hoping the speed will change what it says. It didn’t change. I set down my coffee and read it again slowly, the way I read things when I needed to understand their architecture rather than just their surface.Lena Carter. The speed of the transition. The questions that transition raised. The framing that stopped just short of saying gold digger and arrived at the same destination through implication and carefully chosen words.I knew this kind

~ Adrian POV ~I found Ethan at nine forty-five.Not in his office. On the roof terrace of the Cole Industries building, which he used when he needed to think without a desk in front of him, a habit I’d known about for twelve years and that had always struck me as inefficient and that I’d never said anything about because Ethan’s thinking, wherever it happened, consistently produced the right answer.He was holding a coffee and looking at the city and he turned when he heard the door and looked at me with the expression he’d been wearing since the Saturday morning text, the one that meant I know and I’ve been waiting and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.I closed the door behind me.“The gallery was last night,” he said.“Yes.”“Vanessa was there.”“Yes.”He turned back to the city. “And Lena.”“Yes.” I moved to the low wall beside him and looked at the view he’d been looking at, the morning spread of the city, glass and light and the specific indifference of a skyline that had been