Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 140

Chapter 135: Friends in unlikely Places>

Sedona’s POV

“Okay,” I said.

He left through the side gate, not back through the house, which meant he had known about the side gate, which meant he had been here before tonight, looking at the property, and that was information I was going to have to think about carefully.

I stood in the garden after the gate closed and felt the quiet come back in.

Dante turned to look at me. He didn’t ask if I was all right in the way people asked when they wanted reassurance for themselves. He just looked at me with the direct quality he had, checking the facts of the situation.

“I’m fine,” I said, before he asked.

“I know,” he said. “Are you ready to go back in?”

I looked at the garden. The October plants, still holding their color. The stone path under my feet. The muffled sound of forty-three people who loved me on the other side of the door.

“Give me one more minute,” I said.

“Take it,” he said, and stood there quietly while I did.

We went back in through the door together, Dante slightly ahead of me, and the warmth of the house came out to meet us in a wave-the food smell, the sound of several conversations happening at once, the particular quality of a room that had been filled with people who had known each other for years and had relaxed into that knowing.

I had taken my minute. The garden was behind us. Logan was behind us. I was keeping it there for now, not because it didn’t matter but because I had forty-three people who had come here because I was alive, and I owed them the present tense of me rather than the version that was still standing in the garden running calculations.

Lucian found us almost immediately.

He was just inside the door, slightly to the left, and he had his phone out, which was the first thing I noticed. He looked up when we came in and he looked at me with the swift, assessing glance of someone who had registered that something had happened, and then he looked at Dante, and then he looked back at me.

“I have a video,” he said.

I stopped. “What?”

He turned the phone toward me. The screen showed the garden, the angle slightly elevated, which meant he had filmed it from one of the upstairs windows, or possibly from the doorway before he’d decided to stay back. The video was clear enough. Logan’s hand on my arm. Dante stepping in. Logan swinging.

Dante redirecting the arm with a precision that looked, in the footage, almost like choreography.

“I also have a photograph of him arriving through the side gate,” Lucian said, scrolling back. “Timestamped. And thave his face clearly on the video when he grabbed you the first time.” He looked up. “Do you want me to call the police, or would you prefer I get Cameron first?”

“It’s already saved in two places,” Lucian said. He put the phone back in his pocket with the efficiency of someone returning a tool to its place after use. “I can send it to you at any time.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Genuinely.”

He nodded once, the nod of someone who had done a thing and considered it done.

I looked at Cameron across the room, who was talking to two people I recognized distantly as family friends, and I made the decision not to tell him tonight. Tonight was not the night for Cameron to learn that Logan had been in his garden, that Logan had put his hand on my arm, that Logan had taken a swing at someone in our mother’s garden while the caterer was putting the finishing touches on the salmon. Tonight was for the forty-three people and the food and the living. Tomorrow was soon enough for Cameron to know, and Cameron knowing tonight would change the texture of the room in ways that couldn’t be undone.

I would tell him. Just not in the next two hours.

Dante touched my arm lightly, which was different from Logan’s hand on my arm in every way that mattered, the lightness of it, the asking quality, the way it immediately released.

There’s someone I want you to meet,” he said.

I turned.

He was already moving toward the far corner of the sitting room, where the noise was slightly less and there was a clear stretch of floor near the bookshelf. I followed, and as we got closer I saw what he was moving toward.

Two small boys.