All Chapters of The Accident Was No Mistake: My CEO Husband Wants Me Back : Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

ROMANA visit to the Ashford estate always meant one of two things.Either the monthly family dinner, performed with the same practiced civility every single time, or a summons from my father to discuss business under the polite fiction that we were only talking as family. As much as it had been my home… the house I grew up in, the halls I could still walk in the dark I never liked going back. The place had a way of unlocking things I had spent years putting under a permanent seal.Memories of my mother.Her death.The letter.The years afterward that nobody in that house ever talked about directly, not even now, not even decades later, like silence itself had become the family’s preferred method of grieving.I gripped the steering wheel harder as the gates opened and the long drive unspooled in front of me, lined with the same trees that had looked enormous when I was a boy and now looked merely old. The estate sat at the end of it like something preserved under glass: stone, symmet

ROMAN“I was surprised you’d actually call to have another dinner with me,” Iris said, already seated when I arrived, “given the way you ended the last one.”Our last dinner had ended with me inventing, under pressure, the least elegant exit of my adult life. Something about an urgent compliance issue that required my immediate attention, which might have been believable if I had not said it while standing up too fast and nearly taking the tablecloth with me. Apparently later had arrived.“I had a work emergency,” I said, taking the chair across from her.“Mm.” She lifted her wine without drinking yet. “Was the emergency the concept of continued conversation?”“It was a real issue.”“I’m sure it was very real and very urgent and required you specifically, personally, at that exact second.” Her mouth curved. “You’re lucky you’re handsome when you’re evasive. It softens the insult.”The private dining room she’d chosen was quiet enough to make avoidance difficult. Dark wood, low light,

VALERIEFor a second I thought I had imagined him.Then Roman Ashford looked back at me from across the restaurant, and the whole evening rearranged itself around that one fact.My hand froze around the water glass.Miles was still talking. The restaurant was still moving. None of it reached me as cleanly as the man sitting two sections away with a woman I had only ever seen in headlines.Iris Belmont.Of course it was her. Of course the first time I saw Roman in a room like this again, it would be with the exact woman the city had always treated as the unfinished sentence of his life. She sat with her back partly turned, ginger hair catching the light, posture easy, as if the table had been waiting for her specifically. Even without seeing her face straight on, I knew. The coat. The angle of her shoulder. The way Roman’s attention had been on her before it snapped across the room and found me.“…which is why I told them the migration had to wait until after the audit,” Miles said.I

VALERIEIris's eyes moved from Roman to me with open interest, like she had just walked into the useful part of the evening."Roman, darling," she said, not actually looking at him anymore, her gaze settled entirely on me with the particular, assessing curiosity of a woman cataloging a stranger's outfit for later commentary, "you didn't mention your little reunion would be happening curbside. How charmingly unceremonious. Is this the famous ex-wife, then? The one everybody's been whispering about for the better part of a year?""Iris." Roman's voice carried a clear warning."I'm simply making an observation." She tilted her head slightly, studying me the way one might study a piece of furniture being considered for a room it didn't quite match. "You're smaller than I expected. The articles always made the whole scandal sound so dramatic. I suppose the camera adds considerable drama where the subject apparently cannot.""Right here," I said, keeping my voice level despite the heat clim

VALERIECat hunting turned out to be the most stressful thing I’d done all week, which was saying something, because the week had already included a supplier delivery that arrived three hours late and upside down, a customer who tried to pay for a twelve-dollar order in loose coins extracted slowly from four different pockets, and one deeply unhelpful dream in which my espresso machine developed opinions and refused to work until I apologized to it. By comparison, choosing a living animal with eyes and needs and the power to judge me for the rest of its life should have been simple.It was not.The actual logistics of cat hunting weren’t the hard part. The shelter was clean, well organized, the volunteers endlessly patient with the particular brand of indecisive chaos I apparently brought to the entire experience. No, the difficult part was that every single time I thought I’d found “the one”,..a calm, unbothered gray tabby who’d blinked at me slowly from his enclosure like he already