Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 197

Chapter 192: A Vow

Cameron’s POV

He smiled at that-just briefly, the real smile, not the professional one. The one I’d spent eighteen months cataloguing before I admitted what I was doing.

I stepped closer. He didn’t step back. I put a hand against the side of his face, which was something I was still getting used to being allowed to do, and he leaned into it slightly in the way he did-not dramatically, just a small gravitational lean, like a plant toward light.

“He’s right about one thing,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“I should have told him sooner. Or you should have-I understand why you didn’t, but. He made a very reasonable alternative narrative because the actual one wasn’t available.”

Lucian looked at me for a moment. “We’re keeping it quiet because of your parents. And Sedona.”

“Sedona knows. Or she suspects.”

“Your parents don’t.”

I held that. He was right. My parents didn’t know. I had not told them, not because I was ashamed-I wasn’t, not of this, not of Lucian-but because telling them meant making it real in the Preston household, meant navigating my father’s particular register of emotion that expressed itself as prolonged silence and eventual acceptance, meant my mother asking seventeen questions at once and then feeding Lucian for three consecutive meals as her primary form of processing.

It hadn’t felt like the right time. Sedona was still recovering, the custody case was ongoing, there was enough happening without adding another thing to the household atmosphere.

But Lake had told his kindergarten class that Lucian was seeing Dante Wells.

Perhaps the information containment strategy required revision.

“I’ll tell them,” I said. “Soon.”

Lucian looked at me steadily. Not pushing. Not asking for a timeline. That was something about him I’d noticed early and catalogued without understanding its significance-he never pushed. He received information and worked with what he had. He was extraordinarily patient for someone who’d clearly been sitting with a great deal for a long time.

“You should do it when you’re ready,” he said.

“I’m ready. I just need to find the right-” I stopped. Heard myself. Recognized the shape of the sentence. *Find the right moment.**When the time is right.* The architecture of delay wearing the clothing of strategy. “No,” I said. “I’ll do it soon. This week.”

Lucian looked at me for a moment longer, and then he nodded.

I kissed him. Briefly, in the hallway with Lake asleep ten feet away and the building quiet around us-just a kiss, just the particular reality of it.

“Lake is going to tell everyone he has a CEO dad,” I said, when I pulled back.

Lucian looked pained. “Please don’t say that where he can hear you.”

“Think of it as a correction to the existing narrative.”

“He is going to have opinions about what kind of CEO.”

“Tell him I run a large investment firm and that we occasionally have very good snacks in the boardroom.”

“He’s going to want to see the boardroom.”

“Fine.”

Lucian blinked. “You’re serious.”

“I have a very good view. Drew would probably enjoy cataloguing the birds.” I paused. “Lake would probably announce himself to all four hundred employees.”

A helpless expression crossed Lucian’s face-the losing battle look, the one that meant laughter was coming whether he wanted it to or not. “He would absolutely do that.”

“Then we let him.” I kissed him once more, shorter than the last. “Get some sleep. Tell Lake I’m not a

Claim

+ didn’t have an answer for that that didn’t sound like more than I intended, so I just nodded, and he nodded back, and took the elevator down and walked to my car in the cold November air and sat in the driver’s seat for a moment before starting it.

Lake’s words had rearranged themselves slightly in the past half hour. They still sat, but differently. *I like Dante. He is good.*

The thing was: so did I, actually. Dante was good, I’d spent six months being grateful for what he’d been doing for Sedona-arriving with soup when I couldn’t be there, being present in the ways I couldn’t manage from a boardroom, watching her walk herself back to strength. I hadn’t examined that gratitude too carefully, but I felt it. Dante Wells was one of the better people I’d encountered in a long time.

Lake’s standard was just and I didn’t quite meet it yet.

The question was whether I could.

Not by competing. Not by one-upping-which I’d made the kissing-noise version of a joke about in the garden tonight, and which had gotten the laugh, but which I was now, in the cold and the quiet, examining more seriously. Not by offering a boardroom visit as a corrective to a tennis career. Not by trying to outmaneuver a four-year-old’s loyalty as though it were a market position.

By showing up. In the way that Dante showed up for Sedona: consistently, without performance, without needing the credit for it immediately.

I was not, historically, excellent at that.

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