Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 223

Chapter 218: Introducing His Boyfriend

CAMERON

Clam

I had run this in my head approximately forty times, not the whole of this evening but just the first ten minutes. My parents officially meeting Lucian, him coming here with us, being something my parents had taken notice of and had appreciated him temporarily uprooting his life.

This seemed like the introduction was going to go well, but I was still filled with anxiety.

Lucian was in his room, a guest room, where he was staying with Lake for the long extended stay and was arranging their personal belongings.

I knocked first and after getting permission from inside, I opened the door. He looked at me. I looked at him. We had approximately one second of private acknowledgment before my mother appeared behind

She looked at Lucian the way she looked at things she was deciding about. Two seconds. Maybe three.

“Come down, the food is ready and you haven’t eaten,” she said jokingly but it wasn’t a question.

Twenty minutes later my dad had brought a plate of food for him that he hadn’t asked for. And my mother was standing at the counter watching him eat with the focused satisfaction of a woman whose opinions formed through feeding people.

He thanked her. She waved it off.

“How old is Lake?” she asked.

“Four,” Lucian said.

“And he’s in school?”

“Kindergarten. He has strong opinions about the curriculum.”

My mother’s mouth moved. Not quite a smile, something warmer than a smile, the expression she got when a person had said exactly the right thing without knowing they were being assessed. “What kind of opinions?”

“He told his teacher the alphabet song had poor pacing,” Lucian said. “She agreed with him. Which made things worse.”

My mother laughed. Properly, the real one, not the polite version. She pulled out the stool across from him and sat down, and I understood that the first question had been Lake, and the answer had passed, and now she would ask the rest.

“How long have you known Cameron?” she said.

I was at the kitchen doorway. I stayed there.

“Eighteen months professionally,” Lucian said. “More recently, personally.” He said it with the steadiness he

(introducing His Boyfnend

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brought to things he had decided to stand behind. “The distinction matters to him. I think it matters to me Too.

My mother looked at him

Then she picked up her tea and said: “Good.”

That was it. That was the whole of it. Thad run this forty times in my head trying to figure out how this would turn out and none of the forty had been this simple, and Sedona had told me it would be simple, and I had not believed her, and she had been right, as she usually was about the things I most wanted to be complicated.

My father took longer.

He shook Lucian’s hand in the hallway properly, the full grip, eye contact held for the precise amount of time that communicated assessment rather than aggression. Lucian met it. He didn’t shift or smile too quickly or do any of the things people did when my father’s attention landed on them unexpectedly.

My father asked about the company.

Not generally. Specifically, the Pacific Rim restructuring from eighteen months ago, the Singapore portfolio, the interest rate exposure my father had read about in the quarterly and had questions about. Lucian answered each one without deflecting and without performing. He disagreed with my father on the Singapore position, mildly and with evidence, and my father listened to the disagreement with the expression he had when someone had given him something worth thinking about.

I stood near the bookshelf and watched this happen and thought: Sedona knew. She had told me at the breakfast table in November that Dad would need to find something to disagree with first. That was how he got comfortable. She had been twenty-eight years right about our father, and I had spent thirty-four years slightly surprised by the same information.

By eight o’clock they were in the sitting room.

My father and Lucian, side by side on the sofa, with the Lagos property market between them like a shared project. My father was talking. Lucian was listening with the quality of attention he gave to things he found genuinely interesting, and occasionally redirecting with a question that opened the conversation further rather than closing it, and my father – who did not open easily, who had a threshold for new people that usually required months rather than evenings, was talking the way he talked with men he had decided were worth talking to.

I stood in the doorway and watched my father decide.

It happened quietly. No announcement. No visible moment of declaration. It was just that at some point in the Lagos conversation my father’s posture shifted, a fraction, barely measurable, from the managed openness of someone who was being fair into the settled ease of someone who had stopped managing.

He had decided.

Sedona appeared and drew close to me noiselessly. We didn’t look at each other. We looked at the sitting room together, my father leaning forward, Lucian listening, the Lagos property market doing the work of two people finding out they were going to get along.

Then she made the noise. The kissing noise. Tight and small, the one she saved for moments she’d

23

Introducing Hrs Boytrend

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