All Chapters of THE CEO's REGRET : Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

NAOMI POV:I didn’t expect his name to knock the wind out of me before I even saw his face.The elevator doors opened on the forty-second floor, and there it was. “HALE INDUSTRIES”, those bold black letters carved into white marble like they owned the whole damn building. Like they still owned a piece of me.Sixteen years ago, that same name had stood at an altar and picked someone else while I was three months pregnant, biting my lip so hard it bled just so no one would see me cry.I stood there frozen for two painful heartbeats, throat squeezing tight. Then I pulled myself together, walked up to the receptionist, and gave her the best smile I could fake.“Ms. Reed. They’re ready for you.”I’d practiced that smile in the bathroom mirror that morning while my coffee went cold on the sink. *You’re here for the contract, not him. You’re not that girl anymore.*My reflection just stared back at me with eyes that had never been any good at lying.Charcoal blazer, hair pinned back tight, l

I’d spent sixteen years making damn sure Sebastian Hale would never find me, and now someone was helping him look.That thought ate at me all night. I sat at the kitchen table until after midnight, eyes stinging from the laptop screen. The blurry photo of that guy in the dark jacket stared back at me while I tried every reverse image search I could think of. Nothing came up. No name, no social media, no work history, nothing.Normal people always leave some kind of trace online. This guy didn’t. That scared me more than anything.I wrote down every little detail I could remember from the two times I’d spotted him outside my building, the rough dates, the time of day, what he was wearing, even how he stood with his weight on his back foot.I wasn’t a detective, but I knew one thing for sure: if you write the details down, they stay real. The ones you don’t can twist on you later when you need them most.By 1 a.m. I finally gave up, closed the laptop, and went to bed. I lay there in th

Sebastian Hale hadn’t just found me. He’d been watching my company grow for over a year, making sure I would come back, and I walked right into his trap like it was the best business decision I’d ever made.I checked it the next morning.It took forty minutes, one old contact at a corporate filing service, and the kind of cold patience I’d learned after sixteen years of hiding. The paperwork was right there in his internal files, standing instructions set up fourteen months earlier under some boring “events” heading.My company name had been flagged for the first big contract that came along. He hadn’t stumbled across me, he had been waiting and planning. Making it look completely normal.I sat at my kitchen table at seven in the morning, staring at the screen until my coffee went cold. Anger would’ve been easy and clean, but what I felt was colder and sharper, like a block of ice settling deep in my stomach and twisting everything I thought I knew.A man who was surprised to see me w

My daughter found his photo and didn’t say a single word. She just set her phone down on the kitchen table, the screen still glowing with those sharp grey eyes, and looked right at me.That silence hit like a slap.I stared back. The moment stretched… and stretched. My pulse hammered so loud I was sure she could hear it echoing between us.“You must be hungry,” I said, my voice cracking just a little. “There’s food in the fridge.”Isla held my gaze for two full seconds. Those grey eyes…steady, patient, way too knowing for sixteen, never blinked. They cut straight through every wall I’d tried to keep between us.Then, without a word, she picked up her phone. The case clicked softly as she slipped it into her pocket. She turned, opened the fridge. The hinge creaked loud in the quiet kitchen, and a rush of cold air brushed my arms like a warning I couldn’t ignore.She didn’t push, She never did. She had this quiet, heartbreaking way of standing just outside a closed door, waiting anyway.

Sebastian stood outside my building like something pulled straight out of a life I had already buried. The moment I saw him, my stomach dropped, a sharp, instinctive reaction I couldn’t control no matter how much time had passed. I gave myself exactly three seconds, just enough to take in the details I didn’t want to notice, his hands hanging loosely at his sides, the faint grey threading through his hair, the way his shoulders seemed weighed down by something I couldn’t see but could somehow feel. Then I shut it all down, forcing everything back into place before it could surface, and walked straight toward him.I stopped about four feet away, close enough to catch the familiar trace of his cologne, a scent I hadn’t realized I still remembered, and far enough to hold onto what little control I had left. His jaw was tight, a muscle flickering under the skin, and when his eyes met mine, there was nothing guarded there. No distance, no practiced composure, just exhaustion and regret