Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 27

Chapter 27

Chapter 27

Aurelia’s POV

The copy of a magazine was sitting on my desk when I walked in.

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It had not been there last night. The cleaners did not leave magazines. Petra would not leave a magazine. Someone had walked it into my corner office between yesterday at six and this morning at nine, and they had set it cover-up in the middle of the blotter so that I would see it before I saw anything else.

The headline was in white, across the top, in a font the size of a fist.

‘BILLIONAIRE HEIR ON A DATE. WHO IS THE NEW WOMAN?’

The picture took up the whole bottom half of the cover. Two figures behind a velvet drape. A candle between them. A man with dark messy hair leaning forward in his chair, his hand resting flat on the linen, the line of his jaw clean and pale under the warm light. A woman in deep dark blue with bare shoulders, her hair up, her face turned just slightly away.

Just slightly.

The angle of the shot had caught the corner of my mouth and the line of my throat and the gold chain at my collar. But it had not caught my eyes. It had not caught the bone of my cheek. A reader who did not already know me would not know me.

I sat down very slowly in the leather chair.

I had been on the cover of a magazine before. Three times, with Dawson, in white dresses and white smiles. I had stood next to him on red carpets and let him put a hand at my waist for the cameras and felt nothing at all, because the truth was that those pictures had never been about me. Those pictures had been about the Valerius brand and an arm to put on it.

This picture was different.

This picture had been stolen.

I touched the edge of the cover with one finger.

The candle. The velvet drape. The hand on the linen.

I had thought, last night, that the corner table was hidden. I had thought, last night, that the man at the door who knew Rieck’s name and did not say it was a kind of protection. I had thought that the whole room had

been ours.

But a journalist had stood somewhere on the other side of that drape with a phone in their hand.

I closed the magazine and turned it face down on the desk. Sitting very still, I took deep breaths and tried to decide what I felt.

It wasn’t anger, not yet. The anger would come later. What was sitting in my chest right now was something quieter and stranger.

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Chapter 27

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Rieck had seen it, and I knew because the air on the floor was wrong before I had walked twenty steps from my own door.

Petra was at her desk with her shoulders pulled in. Two analysts in the open bullpen were standing closer to each other than they usually stood, the way office staff stood when they were sharing something they didn’t want a manager to hear. Elara was nowhere in sight, which meant Elara was in his office, and that meant the storm was already inside.

I didn’t go to his door. I learned that lesson three days ago.

I went the long way around, past the printers, past the kitchenette, towards the break room. I needed water. I needed a wall to lean against for thirty seconds. I needed to not look at the magazine that had been sitting on my desk.

I had almost made the break room door when I heard them.

Two voices. Female. Low. Coming from just inside the alcove where the copier lived.

“Did you see his face?”

“He looked like he wanted to kill someone.”

“He always looks like he wants to kill someone.”

There was a soft laugh.

“No, but truly, did you see it? Page three. He is leaning forward. I have worked here for four years and I have never seen him lean forward at anything.”

“It is sweet, actually.”

“It is human. He works himself to the bone. Let the man have one dinner.”

“Whoever she is.”

“Whoever she is. Lucky girl.”

I stopped walking and stood in the corridor with one hand against the wall, and I listened to two women I didn’t know talk about my husband.

I closed my eyes for a moment.

When I opened them, I walked into the break room, poured water from the cooler into a paper cup, drank the cup in one swallow, and walked back out. The two women had not seen me. They were still at the copier. One of them was holding the magazine.

I went back to my corner office, shut the door and sat down behind my desk and did not turn the magazine

over.

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Through the long glass wall of the corridor at the far end of the floor, I could see the door of Rieck’s office. It opened for a second at eleven. Elara walked out, very straight, a folder under her arm, and her expression did not move at all as she went past Petra’s desk.

He did not come out all day.

The penthouse was very quiet when I got home.

He was in the living room when the elevator opened. Sitting on the sofa with his jacket still on, a glass of something amber in his hand. He didn’t look up when I walked in.

I set my bag down on the side table, took my heels off in the hall, and then walked into the living room barefoot on the marble.

“Rieck.”

“Aurelia.”

“You saw it.”

“I saw it.”

I crossed the room and sat down on the arm of the sofa opposite his. I didn’t sit next to him. The space between the two sofas felt like the right distance for what was already in the room.

“It’s not bad,” I said carefully. “My face is not in it.”

He took a slow drink from his glass.

“What did you think?” I asked. “When you saw it.”

“Nothing.”

“Rieck.

“I thought nothing, Aurelia.”

“That’s a lie.”

He set the glass down on the side table without sound.

“It is not a lie. I thought nothing because there was nothing to think about. It happened. It shouldn’t have happened. It will not happen again.”

“It was just a dinner.”

“It was a picture.”

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