Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 195

Chapter 190: The Monster in Lake’s Eyes

Cameron’s POV

I have negotiated hostile takeovers.

Claim

I have sat across tables from men twice my age who were trying to dismantle companies my family had built over decades, and I have looked at them pleasantly and waited until they ran out of leverage and made them walk out of my office heads bowed in shame.

I have managed boardrooms in crisis and delivered news to shareholders that no one wanted to hear and held a company together during a liquidity crunch that lasted four months and nearly took three years off my life.

I had not, until tonight, been assessed and found wanting by a four-year-old.

Lake Park had done it in approximately four sentences. Quietly, through a car partition he didn’t know I could hear around, to his father in the backseat-and I had sat in the front and looked at the road and felt each word land with the accuracy of something being thrown by a very small yet accurate person who had no idea they were throwing it.

*The monster that took your job. He has no children. I like dante. I do not like your boss.*

I kept my eyes on the road. Signaled at the intersection. Made a left, heading to the familiar road that led to Lucian’s apartment.

In the backseat, Lucian was doing what Lucian did-receiving difficult information without flinching, explaining things with the patience of someone who had been doing it for a very long time, and trying his best to change the narrative that he has constructed in his head and held it as fact.

I didn’t interrupt. It wasn’t my conversation to enter.

But I listened.

It had started to unravel in the garden about twenty minutes earlier, while Sedona was still laughing and Lake was declaring brotherhoods with a certainty and confidence that only he could have at a time like this.

Lucian had looked at Lake with the expression of a man who understood that the next twenty minutes were going to require patience he didn’t currently have in reserve. He’d crouched down-Lucian always crouched when talking to Lake, always brought himself to the same altitude-and said, quietly: We’re going to have a conversation in the car.

Lake had said: About the brothers?

Lucian had said: About several things.

Dante had taken Drew inside to get his jacket and bag with the barely-suppressed expression of a man trying not to enjoy himself too obviously but was failing at it.

The Monsamtake’s Eyes

Claim

Sedona had caught my eye over Lake’s head and I’d made the kissing noise-I maintain this was a reasonable response to the evening’s events-and she’d pointed at me, and I’d accepted the consequence of being in the losing round.

Then Drew had come back out with his backpack on and his jacket zipped precisely to the collar, shaken Sedona’s hand like a small diplomat, told her he was glad she was going to be on television, and followed his father to Dante’s car.

And Lake had positioned himself next to Lucian and looked up at me.

Neutral. Evaluating. The look of a child running an assessment that hadn’t completed yet.

I’d said: “Ready to go?”

Lake had said: “Are you driving us?”

“If that’s alright.”

He looked at his father. Lucian had nodded. Lake had apparently decided to allow it, because he walked to my car without further comment and waited for the door.

I should have been paying more attention to the backseat.

My car has a partition. I have never had cause to notice this before tonight. Turns out it is not actually that muffled.

Turns out if you are driving on a quiet suburban road in November at medium speed with the radio off, you can hear a four-year-old in the back seat with relative clarity.

I understood that I should stop listening after the first thirty seconds. I kept listening anyway. I am not proud of this. I’d like to say it was because I needed to know, for practical reasons, how Lake was processing the situation-but that would be dressing it up. The truth was simpler: someone was talking about me, and the someone was four years old, and the verdict was not going in my direction, and I couldn’t look away.

But who then? You said you like both women and men-

Lucian’s voice, patient and careful: Lake.

-and you said this was a man, and you were not certain yet, and then I saw Dante and Drew-

The logic of it was impeccable. I could see every step. Lucian had mentioned someone-carefully, incompletely, in the tentative language of a thing not yet ready to be named.

Lake had done what Lake apparently always did: gathered evidence, identified patterns, arrived at a conclusion. Dante had been present. Drew was there. They went to picnics, to their house, spent time together on Saturdays.

To Lake, who was four and had no reason to think of Cameron Preston when he looked at the assembled pieces: it was obvious. It was Dante.

I thought you wanted me to like Dante before you told me he was the one, Lake said, and there was

23

The Monstertake’s Eyes

Claim

something in his voice-a small injured quality, a child who felt he had done the work and been misled- That made me grip the steering wheel slightly harder. And I like him. So if it is not Dante, who are you seeing?

A pause.

Cameron.

One word. Lucian said it quietly, the way you say something you’ve been carrying and are setting down for the first time.

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