My Husband Chose His Ex I Became His Regret novel Chapter 81

Chapter XI

Chapter 81

Lila

I wake up. For exactly one half second I do not know where I am.

The light feels wrong, it is gold and too soft falling across a ceiling that does not have the one the lights I am used to.

This ceiling is white and flawless.

The sound underneath everything is the ocean, which means the ocean is close which means I am in the villa above the ocean with Aidan Storm on the first morning of our marriage.

He breathes beside me. I remember everything.

Aidan Storm’s arm is across my waist, heavy, warm and completely unconscious the arm of a man deep in sleep who reached for me before he was even awake.

I lie still. Let myself feel the weight of Aidan Storm’s arm across my body.

I am in a villa above the ocean on the first morning of our marriage with Aidan Storm.

I wait for the panic. It does not come.

That more than anything is what undoes me.

I study Aidan Storm while I can before he opens his eyes and becomes himself again that contained deliberate version he shows the world.

Like this Aidan Storm looks younger and softer.

There is a line pressed into his cheek from the pillow. His jaw is unshaved and his mouth is slightly open.

Wow. I married Aidan Storm, this specific complicated impossible man.

I married Aidan Storm on purpose. Because I love him and he loves me and shows it.

My left hand is resting on the sheet. I lift it slightly just enough to catch the light on the ring and something moves through my chest that I do not have a word for, not joy exactly something more like recognition like: oh there it is, the thing I did not know I was waiting to feel.

The ring on my wedding morning felt like a lock but this one feels like proof.

Aidan Storm. His arm tightens across my waist before his eyes open that instinctive pull and I feel it everywhere.

Then he blinks, once twice. Finds my face and the thing that happens to his expression in those first two seconds before he fixes it is something I plan to spend the rest of my life trying to deserve, complete unguarded relief.

“You are still here.” He says smiling.

Chapter Si

His voice is rough with sleep scraped down to something

“Where else would I be?” I roll my eyes and laugh.

53 vouchers

Aidan Storm is quiet for a moment and his thumb moves once against my ribs, a unconscious thing.

“Nowhere, that is the point.”

I should say something. I don’t. I just look at Aidan Storm in the gold morning light until he blinks again and smiles and then we are both looking at the ceiling like two people who have run out of words and do not mind at all.

We are not people who run out of words that is the thing, Aidan Storm and I talk we have always talked, even before we were married over office dinners and early morning strategy calls and the long evenings that turned into something else.

Conversation has always been our currency but this silence is different it does not need filling it sits between us like the person in the room comfortable, familiar like it has always lived here and we are only just noticing.

I check myself the way I always check myself, habit, old damage.

Lila are you taking up much space, Lila is this real, Lila do you have permission to be this happy.

The voices are quieter than they used to be, not gone I don’t think they ever fully go, but quieter like a radio turned all the way down.

I can hear them if I try. I choose not to try.

I get up to find coffee, the villa kitchen is all marble and open air the wall facing the ocean completely open to the breeze.

I stand at the counter for a moment just breathing in the salt and the warm and the impossible blue of the water outside.

Behind me Aidan appears in the kitchen doorway, he has put on a t-shirt and a bit rumpled but definitely

sexy.

Aidan looks at ne, then the coffee machine and at me again and says, “Sit. I’ll make breakfast.”

I sit immediately, just because I want to see what he is capable of. I take my coffee to the deck and dangle my bare feet over the edge above the water and watch Aidan through the open wall.

Aidan opens the cupboard first then the right one, he stands in front of the stove like he is negotiating a contract, very still, very focused.

Aidan cracks an egg directly onto the, counter stares at it for a moment and then produces a sound under his breath that I am fairly certain no one has ever heard him make in a boardroom.

I press my hand over my mouth. Aidan finally makes the eggs, they take fifteen minutes and arrive on the deck slightly overcooked assembled on a plate with the particular aggressive presentation of a man who will not be acknowledging that anything went wrong.

Aidan Storm says, “Eggs,” and sets the plate in front of me.

Chapter 81

65 vouchers

“Incredible.” Aidan sits across from me and picks up his coffee and looks at the water with the expression of someone who has successfully completed a very important task.

I take a bite, the eggs are almost rubbery.

“These are wonderful.” Aidan makes a sound that means obviously.

I laugh, really laugh, the kind that starts in my stomach and comes out before I can think about whether I should, whether it is too loud whether it takes up much room it just comes.

Aidan looks at me with one eyebrow slightly raised and the corner of his mouth doing the thing it does when he is trying not to smile.

“The eggs are funny?”

“The eggs are perfect you are perfect.”

Aidan smiles then turns back to the water. I eat every bite.

Later we sit on the deck in the kind of silence that has graduated to something comfortable and ours.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify