HIS STRIPPER, HIS WIFE novel Chapter 58

Chapter 58

Chapter 58

Bianca

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By the time I stepped out of the building at six, my mind was already three places ahead of where my feet actually were! thinking about dinner, about the report I still needed to finish, about absolutely nothing related to the man standing across the street watching me with his arms folded and a smirk already settling onto his face before I had even fully registered who he was. It was Max.

My stomach dropped the second recognition caught up with my eyes. He had called earlier that day, twice actually, and I had let both calls ring out without answering because some part of me had hoped that ignoring him long enough would make whatever this was simply disappear on its own. Clearly it hadn’t worked. Clearly he had decided that showing up in person was the next logical step.

He crossed the street without waiting for a gap in traffic, just walked straight through it and by the time he reached the pavement in front of me. that smirk had widened into something far too pleased with itself.

“You’ve been hard to reach,” he said, like this was a casual observation and not the opening line of something he had clearly been planning out in his head the entire drive over.

“I’ve been busy.” I said, already walking, already hoping that moving might somehow discourage him from following.

It did not discourage him, he fell into step beside me with the kind of ease that told me he had absolutely no intention of letting this conversation end before he was ready for it to..

“Busy,” he repeated. “Right. Busy ignoring my calls,”

“What do you want, Max.”

He stopped walking, which forced me to stop too if I wanted to keep talking at a normal volume instead of shouting across a widening gap on a public street. When I turned to face him, his expression had shifted into something colder underneath the smirk.

“I have pictures,” he said simply.

“Pictures of what.”

“You. At Velvet. That night you wore the green dress and forgot to be careful about who was watching you dance.” He let that sit there for a second, clearly enjoying the way my face must have shifted, the exact memory landing harder than I wanted it to. “I think your company would find them very interesting. Especially attached to your work email with the right little note explaining who you were with that night and what that says about the kind of employee they’ve got representing them.”

My heart started pounding somewhere up near my throat. “You wouldn’t.”

“I would,” he said, and the casual way he said it scared me more than if he had shouted it. “Unless you start picking up your phone like a reasonable person.”

“This is insane,” I said, my voice rising despite my best effort to keep it level. “You’re threatening to harass my job because I didn’t answer two phone calls?”

Im not threatening anything.” he said, spreading his hands wide like he was the picture of innocence. “I’m simply explaining what happens next if you keep treating me like something you can just delete from your contacts and forget

about

I never asked you to be anything I needed to keep around. Max.”

His jaw tightened slightly at that, finally a real crack in his composure since he crossed the street, and we stood there glaring at each other in the middle of the pavement while people walked around us, none of them slowing down enough to notice

13:56 Thu, Jul 23

Chapter 58

that something genuinely ugly was unfolding in broad daylight right in front of them.

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“You don’t get to decide that I disappear just because it’s convenient for you,” he said, lower now, harder around the edges.

“And you don’t get to decide that threatening my career is a reasonable response to being ignored.

We were close to shouting by then, both of us leaned slightly forward like the argument itself had physical weight pulling us toward each other, and I almost didn’t register the sound of footsteps approaching from behind me until a voice cut directly through whatever Max had been about to say next.

“Is everything good here?”

I knew that voice without needing to turn around, the calm, controlled edge of it. Adrian stepped up beside me, close enough that his shoulder nearly brushed mine, his eyes locked entirely on Max with an expression I had never seen on him

before.

Max’s eyebrows lifted, clearly delighted by the sudden audience. “Wow,” he said, looking between the two of us slowly. “What is it with guys like you, never knowing when to just draw the line and let people handle their own business. Is everything good? If it’s not good, what exactly are you planning to do about it?”

Adrian scoffed, he didn’t answer the question. He didn’t need to, his silence said enough on its own. Max’s attention shifted away from him then, landing back on me with a slightly softer edge to it, though I didn’t trust it for even a second.

“Ma am,” he said, almost gentle now. “Is everything okay?”

I opened my mouth to answer, but before a single word made it out. Max had already turned his focus back toward Adrian. the gentleness gone from his voice as fast as it had.appeared.

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