All Chapters of THE BILLIONAIRE'S CONTRACT WIFE : Chapter 191 - Chapter 200

Nathan's POV “I never left,” Gerald's voice said through the speaker, calm and almost amused. “I only stopped letting you see me, Nathan.” Marcus found the recording two days later, a voicemail Vanessa had never deleted from three months earlier, buried in a phone she had apparently stopped checking after she blocked the number that left it. We sat in my office listening to it together, Ellie, Sophie, Marcus, and me, the late afternoon light cutting long shadows across the same desk where I had once slid a folded letter toward a stranger and asked her to marry me for a year. Marcus had found it buried three folders deep in a data recovery sweep of Vanessa’s old phone backups, the kind of file most people would never think to check, let alone preserve. I remember thinking, as the recording began to play, that it was strange how something so small, a single unanswered voicemail, could end up carrying the weight of an entire family’s future inside it. “I am not asking you to help me

Nathan's POV“Before the board votes on anything,” Vanessa said, standing at the front of a silent room, “there is something every shareholder here deserves to see.”The ballroom at the Cross Hospitality headquarters had never felt so large, three hundred chairs filled with investors and executives and, near the back, Fiona Reyes sitting perfectly composed in a dark green dress, clearly expecting a very different kind of afternoon than the one about to unfold.I recognized several faces from the wedding two years earlier, board members who had once toasted our marriage with polite, uncertain smiles, clearly unsure whether the arrangement would survive its first year, let alone become whatever it had grown into since. Today none of them were smiling. Today every single one of them understood that whatever happened in the next hour would decide far more than one family’s reputation.Ellie sat beside me in the front row, Margaret at home with Rose for the first time since she was born, a

Nathan's POV“It is not a ring,” I said quickly, watching Ellie's eyes widen. “I mean, it is not only a ring. It is something older than that.”I had carried the small velvet box in my jacket pocket for eleven days, waiting for the right moment through a shareholder meeting, a family scandal, and an uncle who apparently intended to keep fighting a war he had already lost twice, and standing here now, in the exact spot where I had first shaken her grandmother's hand two years ago, felt like the only right moment left.I had rehearsed the words at least a dozen times in my head, in the shower, in the car, in the quiet minutes after Margaret finally fell asleep each night, and every single version had sounded better in my imagination than it felt now, standing here with my heart pounding harder than it had during any board meeting I had ever survived.Ellie's hands were shaking slightly as I opened the box, and inside, resting on faded blue velvet, sat a necklace, delicate silver, an old

Nathan's POVRose's face went white before Ellie even finished reading the message aloud, and in twenty six years of watching people react to bad news across a boardroom table, I had never seen anyone look quite that haunted, quite that instantly transported somewhere far away from the kitchen we were all standing in."Rose," I said gently, crouching beside her chair. "Did Walter have a brother."She lowered herself further into the chair slowly, as if her knees had suddenly forgotten how to hold her up, her hands folding and unfolding in her lap. "He did," she said. "Once. A younger brother named Daniel. Nobody has spoken his name in this family for fifty years.""Why not," Ellie asked, her voice barely above a whisper, crouched now on Rose's other side."Because Daniel was the reason Walter and Margaret's father cut off contact with half this family in the first place," Rose said, each word coming slower than the last, as if she were dragging them up from somewhere deep and unwillin

Nathan's POVGerald's hands were shaking by the time the board meeting began, and I had waited two years to see that particular kind of fear on my uncle's face, two years of watching him move through this company like he already owned it.Vanessa presented her evidence first, methodical and merciless, laying out three months of documented transfers between Gerald and Fiona Hale's old network, proof that he had spent company money trying to buy Daniel Hartman's silence and manufacture a case against my marriage, page after page of dates and figures that left no room for argument."This board has tolerated Gerald Cross's interference for two years," I said, standing at the head of the table for what I hoped would be the last time I ever had to defend this particular fight, my voice steadier than I felt. "Today, that tolerance ends."Daniel spoke next, his voice steadier than it had been on the sidewalk that morning, confirming every transfer, every attempted bribe, every threat Gerald h