Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 108

Chapter 98: Out In A Bar

Cameron’s POV

The bar was called Meridian, which was either ironic or the universe being lazy about its symbolism.

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It was the kind of place I’d been coming to since my late twenties-not the loud bars that played obscene music and terrible cocktails, but the quieter variety, wood and low light and bartenders who learned your name after the second visit and didn’t ask questions after the third. I’d found it during a particularly difficult quarter four years ago when the Pacific acquisition had been getting complications faster than I could solve them, and I’d been coming back since then when I needed somewhere to be that wasn’t the office or the apartment or the hospital where my sister was fighting for her life.

I’d called Durian from the car.

He’d answered on the first ring, which was typical-Durian Kwan operated on the assumption that calls worth taking were worth taking immediately, and calls not worth taking should be declined without the theater of letting them ring. He was forty-one, ran Durian Limited with the specific controlled intensity of someone who’d built something from a position that hadn’t predisposed him to succeed and had decided that the gap between where he’d started and where he intended to go was primarily a function of how many hours he was willing to work.

He was also the only person on earth who knew.

I hadn’t told him deliberately. He’d found out in the specific way Durian found most things out, which was by paying attention when other people had decided the situation didn’t require it. We’d been at a company event eight months ago-a quarterly review dinner, the kind that required the full executive team and their plus-ones and a level of professional socializing that I generally managed with the competence of someone who’d been doing it since his early twenties. Lucian had been there in his assistant capacity, managing the logistics of the evening, the same way he always did, with the quiet efficiency that made everything run smoothly, and had somehow become invisible to most people because it was so

consistent.

A woman from the legal team had greeted Lucian at the drinks table where Lucian was getting a drink for me and my colleague who was talking about something about a merge but I was not paying all my attention on her. They’d met before, apparently-she’d kissed his cheek in the particular European way that meant nothing, the social greeting of someone who’d grown up with it as default-and Lucian had gone slightly red in the way he did when physical contact caught him off guard, which was charming and specific and-

I’d broken my glass.

Not dramatically. Not with intent. Just the sudden inappropriate application of pressure from a hand that had made a decision without informing the rest of me, the crack of it, the bartender appearing with a cloth, taking it from my hands, muttering apologies about defective glass.

Durian had been standing three feet away.

He’d looked at my hand. Looked at the pieces of glass. Looked at Lucian across the room, still recovering from the cheek-kiss with the expression of someone filing an interaction away, who had not noticed this

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COut In A Ba

particular incident because the woman was keeping him company and me out of his sight. He looked back at me and said nothing.

Claim

For two weeks, he said nothing, that I had almost given up, thinking maybe he did not know and I was being paranoid for no reason. And then he’d appeared at my office door one afternoon, closed it behind him, sat down in the chair across from my desk, and said: “How long?”

I’d said: “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He’d said: “You broke a glass because someone kissed his cheek. How long?”

I’d looked at him for a long moment, calculating the odds of successful denial, and concluded they were

poor.

“Eighteen months,” I’d said.

He’d exhaled. “Does he know?”

“No.”

“Does anyone else know?”

“No.”

He’d nodded slowly, with the expression of someone processing information that required reorientation. Then: “Are you going to do anything about it?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“He works for me,” I’d said. “He’s twenty nine. And it’s-” I’d stopped. “It’s not something I can do anything about. So I’m not doing anything about it.”

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