Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 131

Chapter 131

Chapter 131

Charlotte had picked the place.

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A half-empty parking structure four neighbourhoods away from anywhere Dawson’s people ever bothered to look, because the one thing she couldn’t afford today was to be seen.

She waited on the third level with the engine off and the envelope in her lap, one manicured hand resting on the curve of her belly out of a habit she hadn’t quite meant to form.

Then a pair of headlights swung up the ramp, and Adrian’s old sedan rolled to a stop beside her.

He got into the passenger seat the way he always had, easy and unhurried, folding his long frame in beside

her as though no time at all had passed between them. He looked at her for a moment, then down at the swell under her coat, and something soft and terrible moved across his face.

“You look beautiful,” he said.

“Don’t.” She pushed the envelope at him before she could lose her nerve. “It’s all there. The rest of it, every dollar we agreed on.” She made her voice bright and final, the voice she kept for closing doors. “This is the last one, Adrian. After today we are done. No more calls. No more meetings. No more anything at all.”

He didn’t take the envelope.

“I don’t want the money, Charlie.”

Nobody had called her Charlie in years, and she hated how the small ordinary name landed in her chest.

“I never wanted the money,” he went on, his voice low. “I took it because it was the only way you would keep seeing me. But I’m done pretending that is what this is.” He reached out and covered her hand where it rested on her belly, and she let him, which was the first of her mistakes that afternoon. “I love you. I have loved you since before he ever once looked at you. I want you, and I want this baby, and I don’t care whose it is or what his name happens to be. Leave him. Come with me, and I will spend the rest of my life making you happy.”

For one dangerous moment, Charlotte let herself want it.

She thought about how simple he was, how caring, how he had never once in his life made her feel like something bought and locked in a drawer. She thought about a small bright apartment and a loud happy life and a man who looked at her the way Adrian was looking at her right now.

Then she made herself think about the rest of it.

The doctor’s bills and the school fees and the long grey years ahead. She thought about the Valerius name and everything on this earth that it could buy for her son.

“I do still feel it,” she admitted, and to her horror her eyes started to sting. “That’s the worst part of all of this. I do. But feelings never paid for anything, Adrian. They never have and they never will.” She folded his fingers gently closed around the envelope and pressed his hand back towards him. “Dawson can give my son a life the two of us could never even dream of. I won’t take that away from him for the sake of a feeling.”

“Charlie”

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Chapter 131

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“Goodbye.” Her voice broke on the word, and she hated herself for it. “Don’t call me again. Don’t write to me. Whatever this was, it’s over now. Please. For both of us. Let it be over.”

He sat there for a long moment. Then he took the envelope at last, and opened the door and was gone into the dark of the garage.

comogconsucesos

By the time she let herself into the apartment that evening she had put her face back on, the smooth and pretty face that never once slipped in public.

She was already planning a long bath and an early night.

She hadn’t planned on the lights being on.

Dawson sat in the white armchair by the window with a glass of scotch balanced on his knee, his jacket off and his sleeves rolled back, staring at the door as though he had been staring at it for a very long time.

“You’re home,” Charlotte said, and heard the tiny catch in her own voice half a second too late to stop it.

“I’m home.” He didn’t smile. The room felt colder than it had any right to be, a chill she could never quite explain whenever he went this still, as though some part of him she had never been introduced to was sitting quietly behind his eyes and taking notes. “You’re late.”

“Am I?” She set down her bag and crossed to kiss his cheek, and the smell of scotch and cigarette smoke folded around her. “I lost all track of the afternoon. You know how it gets.”

“Where were you?”

He asked it lightly, almost bored, the way another man might ask about the weather, and that was exactly what frightened her.

Dawson bored was Dawson at his most dangerous.

“With a friend,” she said, and smiled, and let one hand drift to the curve of her belly, her oldest and most. reliable defense. “Just girl things. A little lunch, a little shopping, a lot of complaining about our men.” She laughed softly. “Nothing that would interest you in the slightest, darling.”

Dawson looked at her.

He looked at her for a long, unhurried moment, those shattered graphite eyes moving across her face the way a man reads a page he already suspects is hiding a lie somewhere in the middle of it.

Charlotte held the smile. She had built her entire life on holding the smile.

Then he raised his glass, drank, and turned his gaze back towards the window.

“Get some rest,” he said. “You look tired.”

And that was all of it.

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Chapter 131

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No accusation, no warmth, nothing at all that she could take hold of and read.

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