All Chapters of The Billionaire's Scandalous Fat Wife : Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

Ace's POV The restaurant was still less than ten minutes behind us — the warmth of it, the too-warm bread, two hours of easy, ordinary conversation that had felt, for the first time since this entire disaster began, like something close to a normal life — when I stared at the message for longer than I should have before I showed it to her. The highway unspooled dark and empty past the windows, streetlights strobing across the interior of the car in slow, indifferent intervals, and I read the words again in the glow of my own screen, trying to decide whether showing her was protection or accusation, and hating that I couldn't immediately tell the difference. She's not who you think she is. Ask her what she's really been building behind your back with the board seat you handed her. Twenty four words. No name attached, no evidence offered, nothing that could be traced or verified or disproven outright — just a clean, surgical insinuation dropped into my night with the precision of s

Natasha's POV "Tell me you're not still living on gas station coffee and adrenaline." Priya said it the second she walked through the office door, two paper cups balanced in one hand, a garment bag over her shoulder that turned out to hold, when she finally set it down, three framed prints she'd apparently had made without asking me — old event photos, ones from years back at Bloom & Co. that neither of us had ever gotten proper credit for. "I switched to real coffee yesterday," I said. "Progress." "Barely." She looked around the space with an expression somewhere between pride and disbelief, taking in the exposed brick, the long worktable I'd found secondhand and had refinished myself over a weekend, the single elegant chandelier the previous tenant had left behind that I'd decided, against all reasonable financial sense, was nonnegotiable. "It's real, Natasha. Two weeks ago this was a sketch on a napkin. Now it's — this." "It's real," I agreed, and felt the truth of that s

Noel's POV "Twenty thousand isn't going to feel real to you in six months, Devon. Debt like yours never does. It just becomes the weather." He flinched at that, which was exactly the reaction I wanted — not offense, just the specific, tired flinch of someone hearing an uncomfortable truth said plainly by a stranger who clearly understood his situation better than his own family did. The coffee shop hummed around us, crowded and anonymous in the particular way I'd chosen it for, forty conversations happening at once, the espresso machine hissing every few seconds, everyone around us absorbed in their own laptops and conversations, exactly the kind of crowd I'd chosen the place for. "I don't even know what you actually want me to do," Devon said, low, glancing at the manila folder I'd slid halfway across the table like it might leave fingerprints. "I left Bloom and Co. eight months ago. I don't have current access to anything. They'd have wiped my credentials the day I resigned.

Marcus's POV "You're going to want to sit down for this." Ace didn't sit down. He never did when I said it like that — if anything, saying it made him stand straighter, the particular readiness of a man who preferred to take bad news on his feet. He set his coffee down on the counter without looking at it and folded his arms. "Just tell me, Marcus." "I have someone in place watching Noel MaCarro. Have for a while now." I said it plainly, because there wasn't a version of this conversation where softening the setup helped either of us. "Since the blocked text traced back four blocks from her apartment, I didn't like leaving that as a coincidence. I put a contact on her — nothing invasive, just eyes, in public, wherever she went. Three days ago, that contact was in a coffee shop when Noel sat down with a man named Devon Ackerly. Former Bloom and Co. intern." Ace's jaw shifted, filing the name. "Go on." "He left the company eight months ago. Deep in debt. My contact recorded t

Natasha's POV The smoke alarm went off at seven-forty on a Tuesday, which was how I knew, with total certainty, that Ace Stone had never once in his life attempted to make French toast. "It's fine," he said, waving a dish towel at the ceiling like he was negotiating with it. "It's supposed to do that." "It is not supposed to do that." "Char adds flavor." "Char is not a flavor, Ace, char is a warning." I grabbed the broom from behind the pantry door and jabbed the alarm's button with the handle end, laughing too hard to actually hit it on the first three tries, and he stood there holding a spatula like a man defending a position he already knew was lost, egg-soaked bread smoking gently in the pan behind him. The alarm finally quit. The silence that followed had a ringing quality to it, ears still adjusting, and I looked over at him — genuinely one of the most powerful men in the country, standing in his own kitchen in a T-shirt with a flour handprint on one hip, looking p