Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 107

Chapter 97: Fired

Cameron’s POV

And I could not say that. I could not say any part of that to him, that was against the rules, even personal rules, I could not fire him because I was having issues getting used to the fact that he owed me nothing but loyalty. I could not tell him that I was letting him go because watching him be available to someone else was something I couldn’t manage in addition to everything else I was managing, at the moment because that was not a sentence that could be said from where I was standing to where he was standing without destroying something I’d spent eighteen months building between us.

“You were in my office after hours with someone who had no legitimate reasort to be here,” I said. “In a situation that reflected poorly on your professional judgment. In a role that requires I trust your judgment completely.”

It wasn’t untrue, this indeed happened as well. It just wasn’t the whole truth. But it was the truth that I was determined on giving irrespective of everything else.

Lucian looked at me for a moment. One moment, two, three. Long enough that I was aware of it, aware of him deciding something.

“All right,” he said. His voice was exactly as level as it had been for the whole conversation, cool, not losing his composure and taking it in stride, rather than calling me out on my obvious bullshit. “I’ll collect my things.”

“HR will contact you about the formal process. Your access will be suspended tonight.”

“I understand.” He moved toward the door with the composure that was either genuine composure or fabricated one, but it was so good I could not tell the difference..

He reached the door. Stopped, his hand on the frame, his back to me.

“For what it’s worth,” he said, to the doorframe, “the Singapore summary covers everything for the first three days. You’ll need someone to handle the Meridian call on Wednesday. Chen at the agency will have vetted candidates if you need a temporary.”

He was leaving and he was making sure the transition was covered. I stood at my desk and said nothing. He left.

I stood in my office at ten PM on a Tuesday with completed Singapore files on my desk and the particular smell of Lyra Cheng’s perfume still faintly in the air and the sound of Lucian’s footsteps fading down the corridor, and I stood there for a long time.

Outside the windows, Seattle was doing what Seattle did-rain and lights and the patient ongoing dark of a city that had been here long before any of us and would be here long after.

*You need to find someone and settle down.*

Sedona had said it like it was simple. Like it was a thing you decided to do and then did. Like the person you wanted was someone you could simply choose, from a reasonable field of available options, and say:

1.3

< Fired

this one, and have it be that one.

Clar

She didn’t know. She had no idea, because I hadn’t told anyone, because there was no version of telling anyone that didn’t require saying things I wasn’t prepared to say in a family that had just spent five years finding its way back to each other, in a company where what I felt had no place, about a person who worked for me and was twenty-six and who I’d just let go for reasons I couldn’t say out loud.

I sat down in my chair.

The chair Lucian had been sitting in an hour ago, warm from him, slightly adjusted to a height that wasn’t mine. I didn’t adjust it back. I sat in it as it was and looked at the Singapore summary on my desk and thought about the fact that on Wednesday there was a Meridian call that would need to be handled by someone who didn’t know the account history, who wouldn’t know to ask about the currency hedge discussion from last month, who wouldn’t have pre-prepared the three follow-up scenarios that Lucian would have had ready before the call even started.

And I thought: I just fired the best personal assistant I’d ever had because I couldn’t manage the feeling of watching someone else want him.

*Yeah, I’d said to Sedona. *I should settle down.*

I picked up the Singapore summary and read it from the beginning, having nothing else to do and trying to stop myself from chasing after him to tell him that I was not happy with the way he never looked at me, the same way he looked at others, he was efficient, he was enough but he maintained a huge gap between us, we were not friends, irrespective of what I had done to get him closer to me, to make him feel comfortable.

It was excellent work. Thorough, precise, organized exactly the way I’d have organized it myself if I’d been the one doing it. He’d flagged three potential complications on the second day’s schedule and offered two solutions for each, with his recommendation noted at the bottom of each one and his reasoning laid out in the clean, unpadded way he wrote everything.

At the bottom of the last page, in the margin, in his handwriting-small, precise, the handwriting of someone who wrote everything as if space were limited-a single note: *Check weather forecast for travel day-last year’s Singapore trip delayed 4 hrs due to storm season. Suggest building buffer into departure time.*

He’d looked up last year’s Singapore trip. He’d cross-referenced it against the current booking.

I closed the file.

Sat in the chair that was still set to his height.

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