Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 133

Chapter 122: Maintain A Professional Relationship By All Means…..

Cameron POV

Lucian had been back for a week.

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Professionally, this was a good thing. The Singapore trip was fully scheduled, the Meridian relationship was intact after a call that had gone better than it had any right given the last week’s disruptions.

Caroline had been fine during the week that Lucian was gone. I’d told her so when I thanked her on her last day, and I meant it genuinely-she was organized, professional, competent, but she wasn’t Lucian. But she hadn’t put notes in margins about weather patterns for me to see.

She hadn’t pre-sorted the morning briefing by the criteria I was used to, and she hadn’t known to flag the Hendricks account that required a specific contract clause changed because of something that had happened three months ago in a meeting she hadn’t attended.

Lucjan knew these things because he paid attention, and he was back, and the office worked again in the way it worked when he was in it.

This was the professional situation. It was clear, functional and restored.

The personal situation with Lucian was something I was navigating with less success.

Monday, the first day back, I’d decided on an approach.

The approach was: nothing changes between us professionally, and nothing is expected personally, because he was not here to please me, the disclosure I’d made on the phone was mine to carry and not his to manage, and I would demonstrate this through my behavior by creating every possible form of ambient space for him to work well without feeling the invincible weight on his shoulders about what I had confessed to him.

This was considerate and expected of me. I was certain it was considerate. I’d thought it through with the thoroughness I applied to most things, had examined it from multiple angles to make sure that I wasn’t trying to do the wrong thing and mask it as the right thing, and had arrived at the conclusion that a man who’d just returned to a workplace where his employer had disclosed something significant needed the opposite of pressure-needed room, needed the absence of expectation, needed to be able to do his work without wondering whether any interaction was being read as something it hadn’t intended to be.

What this looked like in practice was: I left doors open.

It was symbolic as much as practical. An open door was a visible signal of unconstrained exit, of an environment where no one was contained, where leaving was a possibility, without him having to fear for his safety in a closed door. I wasn’t stupid, Lucian was straight, he had a kid, and he had never been friendly or looked at the same gender with anything other than acknowledgment and friendship. I wasn’t blind, and I knew it the same way as women feared being in a closed door with a male because of harassment was also the same fear that Lucian would be feeling at this point.

Maintain & Professional Relationship By All Means

Lucian could come and go freely. There was no closed room between us.

+ left my office door open on Monday morning.

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This was unusual. typically worked with the door closed for the first two hours of the day-this was the time when I processed the morning briefing and did the thinking that required quiet, before the day’s meetings and calls began. The staff knew this. It was part of the office’s established rhythm.

On Monday morning I left’it open.

Lucian arrived at eight forty-seven, which was thirteen minutes earlier than his standard time, and put the briefing on my desk, with the kind of efficiency that I had missed when Caroline was working, and looked at the open door with a slight adjustment of expression that I registered and interpreted as: good, the environment is relaxed, there’s no tension in the space.

This interpretation made sense to me. I filed it as confirmation that the approach was working.

The first incident happened on Tuesday morning.

Lucian had brought the preliminary Singapore itinerary for review-printed, which he did when something required an annotation rather than just reading through it, this was a distinction he’d developed and that I’d come to understand as information about how he categorized the task.

He set it on the desk and stood beside the desk to walk me through the three points that needed my input before the travel office could finalize the bookings.

This was a normal occurrence. We’d done it hundreds of times across eighteen months-him standing at the edge of the desk, me at my chair, the document between us as a shared reference point. The proximity was professional, the established proximity of two people who worked closely and had calibrated a comfortable distance.

He pointed to the third item on the itinerary, which was the dinner reservation question, and his hand came close to mine where I’d placed it on the desk.

Not touching. Close, just resting, a subconscious thing that he wasn’t paying attention to and was probably trusting that I would be in control of m feelings not to use it as an opportunity to get close to him or brush his hand. I had noted this instantly.

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I moved my hand.

Not subtly-I meant it to be subtle, had intended a smooth shift of a few inches that would establish distance without drawing attention to the distance.

What happened instead was that my elbow caught the coffee cup at the edge of the desk, which tipped, and I caught it before it fell but not before a quantity of coffee had left the cup and distributed itself across the corner of the itinerary.

Lucian took the itinerary back with the reflexes of someone accustomed to managing logistics under pressure. “I’ll reprint it,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

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