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.

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.

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?”

Cameron.

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

Silence from Lake.

Then: Your boss?

Yes.

Another silence. Longer.

The monster that took your job?

I stared at the road ahead.

I lost my job for one day,* Lucian said. *I got it back.

*But he took it.* Lake’s voice had gone flat in the way children’s voices go when they have reached a conclusion and it is not a good one.

*And he is so-* He seemed to search for a word. *-not like Dante.*