Marry Ex's Billionaire Uncle After Divorce (Aurora and Jasper) novel Chapter 165

Chapter 130: Is That Offer Still on the Table?

(Aurora’s POV)

He pulled out a small knife and cut through the rope at my wrists. My hands dropped forward and I couldn’t feel them at first, just the returning ache of circulation. He put his hands on my arms and steadied me, and then he drew me in against his chest, slowly, like he was giving me the option to pull back.

I didn’t pull back.

He held me, and his voice was very low and very steady when he spoke.

“I’m here. You’re safe.”

I believed him.

The treatment room at the urgent care clinic smelled like antiseptic and recycled air. A nurse cleaned the shallow mark the knife’s spine had left along my cheekbone, applied antiseptic, and gave me a tetanus shot. The needle barely registered.

I sat on the edge of the examination bed and stared at the ceiling.

The damage Jasper had done to me over the years – the long cold indifference, the slow erosion of being

invisible in my own marriage – that was something I could name. I had words for it. I knew its shape.

This was different. I didn’t have a framework for it yet.

My mother had handed me over. She had stood in that room and watched my biological father prepare to

assault me, and she had held her phone up.

I didn’t decide to cry. It just happened – tears running down my face without any particular drama, without

sobbing. Phineas, sitting beside me on the bed, reached over and wiped them away. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t try to offer a reason why it wasn’t as bad as it seemed.

I looked at him. His jaw was still tight. There was something compressed behind his eyes, something he

was holding back.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Neil got away.” The words came out flat and controlled, but I could hear the anger underneath them. “My

team wasn’t fast enough. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

“It’s not.” He paused. “The police have been notified. My security team is pulling traffic camera footage and cell tower records for a five–mile radius. He won’t get far.”

I nodded.

6 Chapter 1 * Is That Offer Still on the Table?

He looked at me. “Martha. What do you want to do?”

I was quiet for a moment.

Leo’s college applications were in progress. Financial aid forms, scholarship essays, enrollment paperwork all of it was still pending. A criminal record attached to a family member could complicate his eligibility in ways that would take months to untangle, and Leo had already had enough untangled from under him.

“Can you give me some time?” I asked. “Before anything goes through official channels. I just need her held somewhere. I need to know she can’t disappear.”

“Already arranged.”

The room went quiet. The fluorescent light hummed above us. Through the window, I could see the park ng lot, the ordinary gray afternoon, cars pulling in and out.

I turned and looked at Phineas. Really looked at him – the set of his shoulders, the way he’d come through that door, the way he’d held me without asking for anything in return.

I had been turning something over in my mind since the boat, since Professor Walsh’s study, since every

small thing Phineas had done that he hadn’t needed to do.

I had a good reason not to. I knew that. Professor Walsh had said it plainly, and he wasn’t wrong about any

of the specific facts – Phineas was complicated, the situation was complicated, and I had already spent

years in a marriage that cost me more than I’d had to give.

But I also knew what it felt like to be in that room with my wrists tied, and I knew whose voice I had heard

when the door came down.

I kept my voice careful and steady.

“That offer you made before,” I said. “Is it still on the table?”

(Author’s POV)

The crack in Phineas’s composure was small, but it was there.

He went very still. Then he lowered his voice, and something in his expression shifted – just slightly, just

enough.

“Say that again.”

Aurora blinked. Of all the responses she’d prepared for, that wasn’t one of them. She felt heat crawl up the

back of her neck and forced herself to hold his gaze.

“I said – the arrangement you mentioned before. The contract marriage.” She kept her voice steady. “Is that still something you’d consider?”

Phineas heard exactly one word out of that sentence.

Marriage.

Chapter 330 1 that of 30 on the 1.able”

She was agreeing. To marry him.

He’d spent years building a reputation for being unreadable, and he called on every bit of it now. He pressed his lips together, kept his expression neutral, and told himself not to smile like an idiot in a hospital treatment room.

“I’ve been waiting for you to say yes,” he said.

Clerm

A flush crept up Aurora’s neck. She looked down at her hands for a moment, then back up. “Alright. When you have time, have a prenuptial agreement drafted. We confirm the details and then we can go register. Is that workable?”

His throat moved. “Done.”

He stood, straightened his jacket, and walked out.

Aurora stared at the door after it closed. Then she pressed both palms against her cheeks, which were considerably warmer than they had any right to be. She sat there for a moment, turning the conversation

over in her head.

Had she been too direct? Too clinical? She’d essentially handed him a checklist and a timeline.

She was still working through that thought when the door opened again.

Ten minutes. He’d been gone exactly ten minutes.

Phineas walked back in carrying a document – clean pages, already formatted, his lawyer’s firm letterhead

at the top. He set it on the bed beside her.

“Remote draft,” he said. “Read it.”

She picked it up and read carefully.

The first clause was straightforward: all assets she held prior to the marriage remained exclusively hers.

Standard. Fine.

The second clause stopped her.

She read it twice to make sure she understood it correctly. Upon marriage, Phineas’s assets would be split

equally between them – half to each party.

Aurora frowned and shook her head.

“This isn’t right,” she said.

2

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