Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 205

Chapter 200: Telling Lucian The Good News

CAMERON POV

I called Lucian at eight-seventeen, after breakfast had concluded and my mother had started making sounds about dinner planning-actual dinner planning, for the hypothetical future dinner-and my father had retrieved his newspaper and returned to it with the air of a man who had received good news and was allowing himself to sit quietly in the warmth of it.

Lucian picked up on the second ring.

“Good morning,” he said. The ‘professional version first-he always started with the professional version until he confirmed what register we were in.

“I told them,” I said.

A pause.

“This morning?” he said.

“Breakfast.”

Another pause-longer. I could hear him recalibrating. “Cameron-”

“They’d like to have dinner. Properly. With you.” I paused. “And with Lake, when he’s ready.”

Silence.

“Lucian.”

“I’m here.” His voice had changed registers. The careful one, now-the one he used when something had surprised him and he was deciding how to receive it. “You told them this morning.”

“I said I would.”

“I know. I just-” A breath. “I didn’t expect it to be this morning.”

“I told you this week.”

“You did.” A pause. “How did they-”

“My mother is already counting grandchildren.”

Silence. Then, very quietly: “What?”

“Nick, Lake, and Drew. She’s done the arithmetic. She’s also started planning a dinner with a specificity that suggests she’s been waiting for an occasion.”

“Cameron.” His voice was doing something I recognized but hadn’t heard often-a loosening, like something being settled down gently.

“Your parents are-”

Telling Lugar the Good News

“A lot,” I said. “I know.”

“I was going to say generous.”

“Also that.” I looked out the window at the Preston garden. The Japanese maple stood in the corner, its branches bare now in November, showing their actual shape without the coverage of leaves. “They want to meet you properly. Not as Preston Investments event Lucian. As-the other thing.”

“The person you’re seeing.”

“Yes.”

A pause.

“Lake had akara for breakfast,” Lucian said, which wasn’t an answer to anything I’d said but was the kind of thing he said when he was processing something and needed to say something ordinary while he did it. “He was quiet. He usually narrates breakfast.”

“Still upset?”

“Still processing. He went to school with his thinking face on.” A pause. “Drew was at the gate when I dropped him. That helped, I think.”

“He’ll come around,” I said, and heard Sedona’s voice in it, and my own from the night before, and realized we were all saying the same thing to each other in rotation and hoping it became true through repetition.

“It took less than I thought,” I said. And this was true. The thing I’d been bracing for-the weight of it, the potential for it to go badly-had dissolved in the kitchen light between my parents’ faces. What remained was something much simpler. Relief with a depth I hadn’t measured correctly in advance.

“Your mother is counting grandchildren,” Lucian said. There was something in his voice I couldn’t name precisely-something between bewilderment and something warmer than bewilderment.

“She does arithmetic when she’s happy,” I said. “It’s her version of celebrating.”

A pause. Then, quietly: “Nick, Lake, and Drew.”

“In that order,” I said. “She was very specific.”

Lucian was quiet for a moment. When he spoke his voice had the particular quality it got when something had gotten through the careful outer layer and landed directly. “That’s-” He stopped. Started again. “That’s a lot.”

“Yes,” I said.

“She included Lake.”

“Without hesitation.”

A breath. Not quite steady. “Cameron-”

“I know,” I said. Because I did know. Because Lake had been included not as a conditional or a complication but as simple arithmetic-this is who you are, this is who comes with you, all of it is welcome. My mother had not paused at Lake’s name. She had counted it and moved forward.

I thought about what it would mean to him-maybe not now, maybe not for months-that somewhere in a Preston kitchen, a woman he hadn’t met had counted him in a list of grandchildren without being asked.

He didn’t know yet.

He would, eventually.

“We’ll do dinner,” I said. “When you’re both ready. No pressure on the timeline.”

“Soon,” Lucian said. Quietly. “I think soon.”

“Good”