《One Night Stand With My Hubby's Cousin》全部章節：第 241 章 - 第 250 章

Julian's POVThe group laughed again.I continued.“The first crack of thunder made the horse nervous. The second made him agitated. By the third one, he'd decided civilization had failed and we were all going to die.”Even Evelyn laughed at that.The sound immediately made it harder to concentrate.“I spent the next five minutes attempting to demonstrate that I was an experienced rider capable of handling a difficult situation under pressure.”I paused.“Unfortunately, what I actually demonstrated was that confidence and competence are not always the same thing.”Frank was already grinning.“Oh no.”“Oh yes.”I pointed toward him.“You know that expression people use when they say somebody was thrown from a horse?”“Yeah.”“Well, it sounds significantly more dignified than what actually happened.”Now everyone was laughing.Including me.“Because the reality is that I was launched.”The word hung in the air.“Not dismounted. Not unseated. Launched.”Frank nearly dropped his drink.Ma

Julian's POVMy gaze remained fixed on the flames.“But when you spend your entire life being introduced through titles, accomplishments, family names, net worth estimates, business articles, and whatever version of yourself people have already constructed before they shake your hand, you start getting used to the fact that most people aren't really meeting you.”The words came more easily now.“They're meeting the idea of you.”The wind moved softly through the trees.“Some people see an investment opportunity. Some people see a business connection. Some people see a billionaire. Some people see a Hawthorne. Some people see a headline. Some people see a collection of assumptions they've already made before you've even opened your mouth.”I shrugged.“And after a while, you stop noticing it because that's simply how the world works.”My eyes drifted toward Evelyn.Only briefly.“Then one day you're lying face-down in the mud after losing an argument with a horse, and a complete strang

Evelyn's POVI sat there with both hands wrapped around my mug of hot chocolate, but my mind was no longer really in the campsite, because with every piece of the story Julian revealed, something buried deep in my memory seemed to shift into place, and fragments of a day I had long ago filed away as insignificant were suddenly returning with startling clarity, while the most shocking part wasn't the realization that I had forgotten Julian—it was the realization that I might have misunderstood the entire situation from the very beginning.“Wait.”The word slipped out before I could stop it.I stared at him across the fire.“So the person who fell off the horse that day was you?”Julian frowned immediately, looking genuinely confused by my reaction, as though the answer had always been obvious.“Of course it was me.”My heart skipped.“Not Sebastian?”This time Julian froze.Frank stopped lifting his beer.Even Maddie lowered her bottle.And as all three of them stared at me, a memory t

Evelyn's POV“Anyway, that's how it happened,” I said quietly, staring into the fire for a moment because even now I wasn't entirely sure how to process what I'd just learned, and the more I replayed the story in my head, the more absurd it became, since from my perspective everything had seemed perfectly logical at the time. “After that, Sebastian started asking me to dinner, started pursuing me, and honestly my reasoning back then was embarrassingly simple, because I thought that if a man cared enough to track me down just to thank me for helping him, then he was probably a decent person, and once I got to know him he seemed charming, considerate, reliable, and genuinely interested in me, so I never once stopped to wonder whether there might be another explanation for how we'd met, because as far as I knew there wasn't one.”The fire burned softly between us while the wind moved through the trees overhead, and when I finally looked up again I found Julian still staring at me with th

Evelyn's POV“There’s something I've wanted to apologize for properly for a long time,” he said quietly, keeping his eyes on the path ahead rather than looking at me, though the seriousness in his voice carried more weight than any direct eye contact could have. “Not over the phone, not in the middle of an argument, and not in one of those conversations where both people are already angry before they start talking, but like this—face to face, with no distractions and no excuses.”The wind stirred the branches overhead.He let out a slow breath.“Seattle was my fault.”There was no hesitation this time.No attempt to soften it.No attempt to justify it.“No matter how many reasons I thought I had, and no matter how jealous I was of Sebastian at the time, I had no right to make that decision for you, and I definitely had no right to push you into a situation like that simply because I believed it would eventually lead you somewhere better.”His voice remained calm, but there was somethi