Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 103

Chapter 94: A Secret Crush

Cameron POV

I made it to the elevator before I stopped walking.

The corridor outside Sedona’s room was quiet at this hour visiting hours winding down, the particular hush of a hospital settling into its nighttime rhythms, the nurses moving with the practiced quiet of people who’d learned to be loud enough to be heard and soft enough not to disturb. I stood at the elevator bank and looked at the illuminated button I’d pressed and waited for the doors to open and thought about what Sedona had said.

*You need to find someone and settle down.*

Yeah. I should.

The elevator arrived. I got in. Pressed the lobby button, watched the doors close, watched the floor numbers descend on the small screen above the door.

The thing about Sedona was that she said things that landed, even when she was aiming them lightly. She’d always had that-the ability to say something casual that hit something specific, some nerve that hadn’t been expecting contact. She’d done it our whole lives, usually without knowing she was doing it, which somehow made it more effective than if she’d been trying.

*You need to find someone and settle down and direct all of this energy toward your own life instead of narrating mine.*.

She wasn’t wrong. She was rarely wrong about things that mattered, which was one of the more inconvenient facts about having Sedona Preston as a sister.

The lobby was quieter than during visiting hours, the daytime traffic of families and patients and consultants replaced by the skeleton crew of an institution that never fully closed but ran leaner after eight. I crossed it without stopping, pushed through the automatic doors into the Seattle night.

The rain had arrived while I’d been upstairs-the particular Seattle variety, unhurried and total, the kind that didn’t announce itself with thunder or urgency but simply began and continued as if it had always been there. I stood under the hospital overhang and looked at the wet pavement and the blurred lights of the parking structure and thought about what I was doing.

I’d told Sedona I was going to the company. Something at the company, I’d said, the deflection so automatic I’d reached for it before I’d consciously decided to. There probably was something at the company-there was always something at the company, that was the nature of running a company, the inbox never fully emptied, the decisions never fully resolved. But the something I’d told her was an excuse and she’d known it was an excuse, and the look she’d given me before our mother had come through the door was the look she’d been giving me since we were children when she knew I was running from something and was cataloguing it for later.

There was no later with Sedona. There was only the next conversation, and the one after that, and eventually the conversation where she’d ask the question directly and I’d have to decide whether to answer it honestly.

1/3

A Secret CuMT–

wasn’t ready for that conversation.

Claim

+ pulled out my phone, called my driver, and stood in the rain-smell of the Seattle evening and thought

about the thing I’d been not thinking about for long enough that not-thinking about it had become its own kind of exhaustion.

Sedona had said: *is theré someone?*

And I’d said: *no*.

Which was true. There was no someone in the sense she meant-no relationship, no mutual understanding, no person who was mine in any reciprocal way. There was no someone the way Enzo was Rachel’s someone, the way Frank Mitchell had said Sedona’s body was fighting for itself.

What there was, instead, was a person who existed in my life in a specific and daily way, and who I had been watching for two years with the particular helpless attention of someone who’d noticed something they hadn’t meant to notice and couldn’t unnotice.

That was different from having someone.

That was, in fact, the precise opposite of having someone.

The driver arrived, and I got in, and I said the company’s address because I’d said I was going there and because the alternative was the empty apartment that had been more empty than usual lately, more quieter, the space where I lived my life between being places that required me to be functional.

The drive took twenty-two minutes. I spent them looking out the window at Seattle in the rain-the city I’d grown up in and never quite left, the streets that were familiar in the specific way of places you knew before you had the language to describe knowing-and I let myself think about the thing I generally didn’t let myself think about.

Lucian Park had come to work for me eighteen months ago.

He’d been referred through a recruitment agency with a list of credentials that were, on paper, entirely unremarkable for the position. Good schools, competent references, experience that demonstrated the baseline requirements for a personal assistant to someone who ran a company the size of Preston Investments Pacific. There had been twelve candidates. I’d interviewed all of them, because I interviewed all of them-I’d had enough experience with personal assistants who looked right on paper and were wrong in practice to know that the interview was the only way to find out which category someone fell into.

Lucian had come in last, which was partly logistics and partly that his file had been the thinnest and I’d been working through them in order of apparent promise.

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