Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 157

Chp 157; What He Wants.

Aurelia’s POV

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Four days into my second stay at Ridgeline, and I had stopped counting the small ways Kaelen made the place comfortable to live in.

There was always tea waiting when I woke up. A fire lit in my room before the mountain cold could reach the sheets. Sonia checking on me not because I was ill but just because someone here had decided that I was worth checking on.

It should have felt like… too much. But somehow it only felt like the first time in my life anyone had bothered to know what I needed before I had to ask.

“You are staring at your cup,” Kaelen said, dropping into the chair across from me on the terrace. “Something wrong with the tea?”

“No.” I turned it slowly between my hands. “I’m only trying to work out why you do all this.”

“All what?”

“This. Any of it.” I gestured at the tray, the fire still smoking faintly through the open door behind us, the whole welcoming machinery of a household that had clearly rearranged itself around one guest. “You didn’t have to make any of this comfortable for me. Most men wouldn’t bother, twice, for a married woman who keeps running back to a husband she claims to be leaving.”

“I am not most men.”

“That’s not an answer either. You do this constantly, you know. You answer a question with a fact about yourself and expect me to mistake it for an explanation.”

“Do I?” He looked genuinely pleased to be caught. “No one has ever bothered to notice that before.”

“That’s because no one else has spent this many hours trying to work out what you actually want.”

He smiled, but for just a second, and half hidden behind it, something moved in his eyes that wasn’t comfortable at all.

“Some things I want just because I want them,” he said. “You will have to learn to accept that about me eventually.”

“And if what you want is not entirely what it looks like?”

“Then you will find that out when you find it out.” His eyes held mine a beat too long. “I have never once lied to you about wanting something, little thing. I have only occasionally been slow to say why.”

“That’s a very convenient distinction for a man who never gets caught in the lie.”

“I’m not lying to you now.” He held my eyes, and for once there was nothing playful in it at all. “Ask me the real question, Aurelia. Whatever it is you are actually afraid to ask.”

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16:54 Mon, Aug 31

Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

I didn’t ask it. I wasn’t ready to hear whatever answer waited on the other side of it.

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So I let it go, because pushing at Kaelen when he didn’t want to be pushed was like pushing at stone, but the look stayed with me for a long time.

I found Elena in the stone corridor outside the kitchens, arms crossed, waiting like she had known I would pass that way.

“Well.” Her mouth curled, not kind. “The bitch is back.”

“Excuse me?”

“I see the way he looks at you.” She stepped closer, and something cold rolled off her that had nothing to do with the mountain air. “You waltz in here twice now, half drowned both times, and he falls over himself. Years I have stood in this house. Years. And he has never once looked at me the way he looks at you.”

“I didn’t ask him to look at me.”

“No.” Her smile went thin and vicious. “You never have to ask, do you? That’s the trick of women like you.”

“I’m not trying to trick anyone, Elena.”

“Everyone tries. Some of you are just better at it than others.” She looked me over, slowly, the way you inspect something you hate on principle. “Do you even know what you are to him? Really? Or has he been too busy showing you the spring and the horses to explain the rest of it.”

“The rest of what?”

Something flickered across her face, quick and almost satisfied, as though she had landed exactly the blow she

meant to.

“Ask him,” she said. “If he ever gives you a straight answer, I will eat my own words.”

“Elena!”

Kaelen’s voice cut down the corridor before I even saw him, low and final.

Elena’s spine went rigid.

“Enough,” he said, closing the distance between us. “Whatever quarrel you carry, it doesn’t touch her. Ever.”

“Of course, my king.” She dropped a mocking half bow, eyes still fixed on me over the curve of it. “Whatever the lady wants.”

Elena held my eyes a moment longer, mocking and unbothered even under his warning, a small tilt of her chin that said this wasn’t over, not by half.

Then she turned and walked away without another word, and Kaelen’s hand found the small of my back, steering me down the hallway in the opposite direction.

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16:54 Mon, Aug 31

Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

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“What was that?” I asked, once his door had shut behind us.

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