HIS STRIPPER, HIS WIFE novel Chapter 53

Chapter 53

Chapter 53

Bianca

“What do you think.” he said again, and I realized he wasn’t going to let it go just because I tried to slide past it.

“I think.” I said slowly, “that a man like you should have better things to do on a Friday night than doing that.”

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He laughed loudly, and it caught him off guard as much as it caught me. I sat there staring a little longer than I should have because I had never actually seen him laugh like that before not in all the months I had worked under him/

“Fair,” he said, still smiling as he reached for his glass. “I go because it’s quiet in a loud way. Nobody expects anything from you there except to lose yourself gracefully.”

“That’s depressing.”

“It’s honest.”

After that the conversation drifted somewhere easier, away from clubs and contracts and whatever tension had been sitting between us since the day before. We ended up talking about cooking, of all things, because he made some comment about the food in front of us being too seasoned for his taste and I told him that was the most ungrateful thing I had heard all week.

“You don’t even know how to season chicken properly.” I said.

“And you do.”

“I season chicken like my life depends on it.”

He raised an eyebrow at that, genuinely amused, and asked me to prove it sometime, which I brushed off with a wave of my hand because I had no plans of cooking for my boss, no matter how good my chicken was.

We went back and forth a bit longer, him insisting plain food was underrated, me insisting he had clearly never eaten food cooked with actual love, and somewhere in the middle of all that nonsense he laughed again. Twice in one lunch, I was starting to feel like I had unlocked something rare.

Then, like it happened without him even deciding to say it, he started talking about his father’s company. His voice changed slightly when he got into it, like he was choosing each word before letting it out.

“My father built his legacy from almost nothing,” he said. “And by the time I was old enough to understand what that meant, half of what he built had already started slipping through his fingers because he trusted the wrong people with it.”

“And you’re rebuilding it,” I said quietly.

“I’m rebuilding the name.” he corrected. “Not just the company. There’s a difference.”

I nodded slowly, letting him keep going. “People look at what you’ve built and they want the result,” he said, his eyes somewhere past me now, somewhere distant. “They don’t want the years it took to get there or the mistakes that almost ruined it halfway through. They just want to walk in at the end and take their seat at the table like they earned it.”

He didn’t say her name but I could feel someone sitting right behind those words, somebody he wasn’t ready to name at a lunch table with his assistant sitting across from him.

I almost told him about Max right then, the words were sitting right there at the back of my throat but I caught myself just before it came out, because telling Adrian about Max felt like opening a door I wasn’t ready to walk through with him. not yet, maybe not ever.

I stopped talking mid sentence instead, staring at nothing for a second too long.

13:56 Thu, Jul 23 đ ở

Chapter 53

“What?” he asked.

“Nothing.” I said, shaking my head a little. “You have a nice laugh.”

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It came out before I could decide whether it was the right thing to say, and the second it left my mouth I felt heat climb up the back of my neck. He looked at me and I picked up my fork again, trying to act like I hadn’t just said something embarrassingly soft out loud.and continued whatever story I had been telling before

I suddenly felt his knee, pressing gently against mine under the table. I kept talking, I didn’t move my leg away. It wasnt an accident, I just knew that he understood what he was doing.

I finished my sentence about my sister’s burnt rice and reached for my wine, my hand steadier than I expected it to be considering what was happening below the table where nobody else could see.

His knee stayed exactly where it was then his hand found my knee instead, settling there with no urgency at all, just resting warm through the thin fabric of my skirt. I kept talking, finishing the rest of my story about Christmas, my voice somehow staying level even though my whole body had gone strangely aware of every single point where his skin met mine. /

When I finished the story, his thumb moved. One slow circle against the inside of my knee.

1 set my wine glass down very carefully, “Sir… Adrian,” I corrected.

“Mm.” he answered, not even pretending to be innocent about it.

“We’re in a restaurant.”

“I know.”

“People can see us from the shoulders up.”

“I know.” he said again, his voice low and completely unbothered, and his thumb traced another slow circle right after he said it, like the warning meant absolutely nothing to him.

I crossed my legs out of instinct, some last desperate attempt at self preservation, except all that did was trap his hand exactly where it already was, locked between my knees with nowhere to go. He looked at me across the table with a wide smile on his face, he was clearly enjoying this.

A waiter appeared out of nowhere with the dessert menu, sliding it gently onto the table between us but neither of us looked at it.

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