Marry Ex's Billionaire Uncle After Divorce (Aurora and Jasper) novel Chapter 143

Chapter 107 Shy

Chapter 107: Shy

(Aurora’s POV)

Phineas got back in the car and set his phone face-down on the console.

The door clicked shut. He didn’t start the engine right away.

+28 Peints

“Tonight was a failure on my end,” he said. “A management failure. I’ll have a clear answer for you before

you

walk into work tomorrow morning.”

*

I looked at him. His jaw was tight, the anger in him carefully contained but visible in the set of his shoulders, in the way his hand rested on the steering wheel without moving. Like a man who had already decided something and was simply waiting for the appropriate moment to act on it.

“What actually happened?” I asked. “To the door, I mean.”

He was quiet for a beat.

“Someone jammed a piece of cardstock into the lock cylinder.” He said it flatly, the way you describe something that has already moved past the category of surprising. “Folded, inserted from the outside. It wouldn’t have been visible unless you were looking for it.”

I stared at him.

I thought about last night. “I thought it was broken,” I said. “I thought I was -” I stopped.

“You weren’t doing anything wrong.” His voice was even, but there was something underneath it. “The door was working exactly as someone intended it to.”

The dark hallway. The grey smudge on his cuff when he’d finally come. The way he’d looked at the lock for just a moment too long before he’d shouldered the door open.

That wasn’t an accident. I’d already suspected it the moment! woke up and saw his expression in the early morning light – not the relief of someone who’d found a solution, but the controlled stillness of someone who’d found an answer he didn’t like.

“I think you already know who it is.” I said. “When you came. You already knew.”

He didn’t deny it. “I had a strong suspicion.”

“And now?”

“Now I have confirmation.” He glanced down at his phone, still face-down on the console, and something in his expression hardened almost imperceptibly.

“It’s fine,” I said.

“It’s not.”

“I mean – I’m fine. I slept. It wasn’t the worst night I’ve had.” I paused, watching the side of his face. “You

Chapter 107 Shy

don’t need to be this angry about it.”

He glanced over at me then. “I’m not just angry about what happened to you.”

I waited.

“I’m angry,” he said, “that someone thinks my company is their personal playground. That someone looked at the resources available to them – resources I gave them and decided to use them for this. He stopped. His hand tightened once on the steering wheel, then released. “That’s a different category of problem.”

He didn’t say the name. I didn’t ask him to. I already had a shape in my mind – the kind of person who would know which floor I was on, who would have access to that corridor, who would have both the motive and the specific, petty creativity to choose this particular method.

I didn’t need him to say it out loud.

“Nobody can pull that kind of thing twice,” I said. “Not with you looking.”

Something shifted in his expression. Not softened, exactly – but the sharpest edge of it eased, just slightly. like a door settling back into its frame.

He didn’t answer. He pulled out of the parking space and drove.

The city was quiet at this hour. We didn’t talk. I leaned back against the headrest and let the tiredness I’d been holding off finally settle in – the kind of tiredness that lives in your shoulders, behind your eyes, in the particular heaviness of a night that went wrong and then got complicated. The lights of the highway slid past the window in long, slow streaks, orange and white and gone.

By the time we reached the apartment building, it was past midnight.

He pulled into the underground garage and stopped the car. The engine went quiet. “Go up and rest.”

I reached for my bag, then hesitated.

“Aren’t you going up?”I want to ask, but I’m afraid I’ll invade his privacy.I swallowed it.

“Thank you,” I said instead. “That’s two I owe you now.”

He turned his head and looked at me. A real look – steady and unhurried, the kind that doesn’t announce itself – and for a moment I had the unsettling sense that he was seeing something I hadn’t meant to leave visible.

“You don’t owe me anything,” he said. “This is what I’m supposed to do.”

*This is what I’m supposed to do.*

I didn’t know why those words landed the way they did. There was nothing in them, on the surface. It was a perfectly ordinary thing to say. Responsible. Appropriate. The kind of thing you said when you wanted to make someone feel less indebted without making a production of it.

Chapter 107 Shy

But he was still looking at me when he said it, and I was suddenly very aware of how quiet the garage was, and how close, and how the tiredness I’d finally let in had apparently also let in several other things I’d been more careful about.

My heart did something it had no business doing.

I looked down at my bag. I said good night. I got out of the car before my face could finish whatever it had

started.

The elevator doors were already open when I crossed the garage waiting, like they’d been expecting me. I stepped in and pressed the button for my floor and watched the doors slide closed in front of me.

I didn’t look back.

I didn’t let myself look back.

The elevator began to rise, and I stood very still in the middle of it, staring at my own reflection in the polished metal doors. I recalled the sensation of his arms around me on the staircase, and I saw my face flush red.

“Good grief, Aurora, what are you thinking?” I groaned inwardly.

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