Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 120

Lucian Mystery Background

Chapter 109: Lucian Mystery Background

Cameron’s POV

I almost didn’t go.

I sat in the car outside Lucian’s building for eleven minutes, just staring at his building-I know because I watched the clock, with the kind of specific discipline of someone who had thought it through and had decided that counting was preferable to thinking-and I ran through every version of this that ended badly, which was most of them, and I told myself I should drive away and handle it through the proper channels, through HR, through the formal reinstatement process that Durian had confirmed was still available if I moved quickly enough.

I could send an sss. Not to his personal address-I’d decided that was the wrong approach and hadn’t changed my mind-but to the HR department instead, a simple instruction to pause the process, to hold his file, to make no further action until I’d reviewed the circumstances. Clean. Professional. And extremely appropriate given the situation. I could do that from the car.

Hell I could do it right now.

I put the car back into drive and then took it out of drive and sat there for another three minutes before I got out of the car knowing that I wasn’t deceiving anyone and the main reason why I had come here was because I wanted to see him in person.

The building was not what I’d expected, though I had different opinions about what I actually wanted to say about this area. Lucian had been working for me for eighteen months and I knew his work- I had known it with the specific intimacy of someone who relied on it daily, who had come to understand its patterns and quality-and I’d made assumptions from that knowledge about the person who produced it. I had expected the home life should be exactly like his work life, productive, efficient.

The building was in a neighborhood I didn’t spend time in-not poor, exactly, but it was not the kind of area the salary I paid him should have comfortably landed him in.

These had Three stories and there were visible signs of older construction, that made it possible to guess what year the building had been done, but it also showed that this kind of building had been well-maintained rather than renovated. The entryway had a wall of mailboxes with handwritten labels, a rubber mat that had been recently swept, a board with building notices pinned to it in the orderly way of someone who cared about the shared space.

The salary I paid Lucian was not standard for his position. I’d set it above standard deliberately, without telling him, without making it a discussion about it and decided all on my own that he needed an increase.

I’d looked at what he was producing after the first month working under me and rewritten his compensation accordingly, and when HR had queried the discrepancy I’d told them it was within my discretionary authority and to process it.

He should have been in a better building than this.

I found his unit number from the buzzer panel and took the stairs to the second floor. The hallway smelled like something cooking, it was not an unpleasant smell, but it carried that specific warm smell of a house

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<Lucian Mystery Background

that showed it was in the process of being lived in.

t stood in front of the door marked 2C and knocked.

Claim

I had not prepared what I was going to say, which was unlike me. I generally prepared. I’d built a career on the belief that preparation was what separated outcomes you’d designed from outcomes you’d been handed, and I’d applied it to enough situations that it had become reflex. But standing outside this door I’d discovered that I had nothing of the sort prepared like that, only my thoughts that were running wildly and a fear that this might go wrong.

The door opened.

The woman was maybe thirty, who had that specific look of someone who had been interrupted from doing something and yet answered the door because that was what you did.

Dark hair pulled back. A child on her hip-a boy, maybe four years old, who had the kind of attention children did when they were paying complete attention to everything around them.

She was wearing an apron, which suggested the cooking smell was hers, and she had a smear of something on her forearm that suggested she’d been doing something with her hands when the knock

came.

I looked at the child.

The child looked back at me. He had Lucian’s eyes. The dark precision of them. He had Lucian’s mouth. too, and the line of his jaw, everything was identical, like someone had copypasted Lucian face into a much smaller body and if I had not known it was impossible, I would have assumed that this was Lucian himself.

I looked at the woman.

The woman looked at me.

“I’m sorry,” I said, stepping back slightly. “I think I have the wrong-”

“You’re Cameron Preston,” she said. It was not a question. This was the statement of someone who had recognized me well enough to be able to state it clearly.

“Yes,” I said, because denying it seemed both pointless and rude.

“Lucian’s mentioned you.” Her expression was neutral in the way of someone who’d received information about a person and had not yet decided what to do with the information, but who was functional enough to handle the present situation regardless of what she eventually decided. “He’s inside.”

“I don’t want to-if this is a bad time-”

“Lake,” she said, to the child on her hip. “Go get Daddy. Tell him someone’s here.”

The child-Lake-looked at me for one more moment with those eyes that were Lucian’s eyes, and then performed the kind of rapid physical dismount from his mother’s hip that only very small children could execute, gravity apparently being something that applied to everyone else but not him, and ran inside with the total commitment of a person who’d been given a mission and intended to complete it.

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