Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 135

11:03 Wed, Aug 5

Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

Chp 135: What She Could Not Block.

The doctor said the words Charlotte had waited all week to hear.

The baby was healthy, she was healthy, everything was exactly as it should be.

For the length of one bright hospital hallway she let herself believe her life had finally gone quiet.

Then her phone rang, and the quiet broke.

She had always liked these appointments. There was something in the cool hush of that room, the cold gel on her belly and the small quick heartbeat filling the little speaker, that made her feel for a few minutes like a woman who had gotten something right.

In that room, for a handful of minutes, she wasn’t the woman who lied for a living. She was only somebody’s mother.

The doctor had smiled and called the baby strong, and Charlotte had laid a hand over the curve of her stomach and smiled back and, for once, meant every part of it.

Then she stepped into the corridor, and her phone came on with a number she didn’t know, and something cold moved through her before she even lifted it to her ear.

She shouldn’t have answered. She knew the voice the second it spoke.

“Charlie. Please. Don’t hang up.”

It was Adrian.

“I know what I promised you in that garage,” he said, the words spilling out. “I know what I agreed to. But I can’t do it. I can’t stand back and see you raise our baby in that man’s house and let him put his name on it. I want my child, Charlie. I have a right to my own child, and you know it, and I…”

Charlotte ended the call.

She stood very still for a moment with the phone in her palm. Then she opened it, found the number, and blocked it with a thumb that refused to shake.

Her heart was pounding hard enough to hurt. But the face she put on was smooth and lovely and gave nothing away.

Which was a mercy, because Dawson was standing ten feet down the hallway.

He had come to drive her home. He waited by the tall windows at the end of the corridor with his hands buried in the pockets of his pale coat, watching her the way he watched everything lately, patient and unblinking.

“All right?” he asked. “You’ve gone white.”

“I’m fine.” She went to him and made herself smile. “The doctor says he is perfect.”

“So I heard. He didn’t return the smile. “Who was that on the phone?”

“My mother.” The lie came out smoothly, the way her best ones always did. ‘She frets. You know how she is about the baby.”

There had been a time, not very long ago, when lying to Dawson had been the simplest thing in her life. He had never looked closely. He had never cared enough to.

That man was gone now. This one held her eyes a beat longer than the answer called for.

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11:03 Wed, Aug 5

Billionaires Betrayal a contracted revenge

Back at the apartment she tried to put the whole thing out of her mind.

She ran a bath she didn’t climb into. She made a tea she didn’t drink. She told herself Adrian was a coward and a fool, that a blocked number was a shut door, and for a little while she nearly believed it.

She lay down on the long couch by the window with a cushion at the small of her back and let her eyes fall closed, and for a while the apartment was quiet and only hers.

Then the baby moved.

It was faint at first, a flutter low in her belly, and then it came again, harder, a small press against the inside of her hand.

Her eyes opened. She spread her fingers wide over the curve of her stomach and waited, and it came a third time, this tiny stubborn proof of life pushing back at her palm.

Something in her went soft that almost never went soft.

Whatever else was true, whatever ugly knot the grown people around this child had tied out of their own wanting, the baby knew none of it.

He wasn’t a scheme, or a bargain, or a lie told across a dinner table. He was just a small new person waiting to be born, innocent of every wrong that had ever been done in his name, and of every wrong still to come.

For half a breath, unbidden, she thought of a slow unhurried smile in a cold parking garage, and a voice that had called her Charlie as though it were something precious, and she made herself let go of the memory before it could overwhelm her.

She had done ugly things to reach this couch, and she knew it. She had turned her back on a man who loved her and stayed instead the man who could keep them both safe, and given the same choice again tomorrow she would make it the same

way.

Not for herself. For this. For the small life pressing at her palm, which deserved a soft place to land in a very hard world.

“It’s all right, she whispered, to her stomach, to the small kicking thing, to herself. “I’ve got you. Whatever it takes, I’ve got you.”

And for one quiet moment on that couch, with her hand full of her child’s small life, Charlotte was almost at peace.

It didn’t last though. It never did.

That evening she left the phone on the bed and stepped into the shower, letting the hot water pour over her shoulders until the whole long day rinsed off her skin.

When she came back into the bedroom wrapped in a towel, her hair dripping down her spine, the screen was glowing in the dark.

A message. A number she didn’t know.

She picked it up, and the cold came flooding back.

“The child will always be mine.”

Five words. Charlotte read them until they blurred.

A new number, not the one she had blocked that morning, which meant he had bought a new one, and he wasn’t going to stop.

Not for money. Not for a goodbye. Not for anything she had it in her to give him.

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