The CEO's Rejected Wife And Secret Heir novel Chapter 157

Chapter 157: Chapter 157:

Aria pov

"Watching you command that boardroom. Seeing you handle those reporters without flinching. Standing beside you as an equal partner." He pulled me close, his hands settling on my waist with a kind of restrained deliberateness — like a man exercising the very last of his considerable willpower. "You’re magnificent. Powerful and brilliant and so goddamn sexy when you’re in CEO mode that I could barely think straight."

"Damien"

"I need you to know something." His voice dropped, low and rough at the edges in a way that did things to my ability to think coherently. "I have been good, Aria. Remarkably, historically, painfully good these past months. I courted you. Properly. Flowers and dinners and taking cold showers like a man who has completely lost his mind."

I pressed my lips together. "You have been very... disciplined."

His jaw tightened. "Don’t."

"Don’t what?"

"That." His eyes darkened. "That tone. The one you use when you’re wearing that particular expression and you know exactly what you’re doing to me." His hands flexed slightly at my waist. "Do you have any idea, any idea at all, what these past months have been like? Watching you walk around in those suits. The way you laugh at Noah’s terrible jokes. The way you look at me sometimes when you think I’m not watching" He exhaled sharply through his nose. "And then you lean over my desk to review a contract and your hair falls forward and I am standing there like a man possessed, holding myself together through sheer force of will."

"Sheer force of will," I repeated, biting the inside of my cheek.

"Aria." His voice came out pained. "I am thirty-one years old. I run a multi-billion dollar empire. I have faced hostile takeovers and board coups and my father without blinking." A pause. "Nothing in my life has been as difficult as watching you reach up to adjust your earring and doing absolutely nothing about it."

A laugh escaped me before I could stop it — warm and genuine and surprised out of me completely. "Damien Blackwood. Are you telling me the Ice King of Corporate America has been suffering?"

"I am telling you," he said, with great dignity, "that I am a man at the very end of his considerable patience, and that I arranged a sleepover for our son with the housekeeper’s nephew days in advance specifically because I am done being disciplined."

I looked up at him. The laughter was fading into something warmer, softer, more serious. This man who had spent months learning how to court me, learning how to slow down, how to earn rather than demand standing here confessing his carefully maintained restraint with something almost like vulnerability behind his eyes.

"You planned ahead," I said softly.

"I always plan ahead because I wanted to be thorough."

I reached up and straightened his lapel, smoothing it slowly, watching his throat move as he swallowed. "And all those months of flowers and dinners and cold showers..." 𝑓𝘳𝘦𝑒𝑤𝑒𝘣𝘯ℴ𝘷𝘦𝓁.𝑐𝑜𝑚

"Were entirely worth it," he said firmly. "And I would do them again. But Aria" His hands tightened at my waist. "I have been thinking about this all day. About getting you alone. About celebrating properly. About showing you exactly how much I love and want and respect you. And if you look at me like that for one more second"

"Like what?"

"Like that." His voice had gone rough. "Like you’re not immune to me either."

I was quiet for a moment. Then: "I never said I was immune to you."

Something shifted in his expression of relief and heat and something achingly tender all at once. "Our building," he said, his lips brushing my ear, his voice dropping to something that skipped my brain entirely and went straight to my nerve endings. "Our company. Our life. And tonight, Aria, I want to take my co-CEO, my partner, my fiancée home and worship her the way I’ve been thinking about for months. Can we please do that?"

"Yes." The word came out in a breath. "God, yes."

He pulled back, his eyes dark and certain and so full of everything he’d learned to say out loud over these past months. "Then let’s go home. Because I have been waiting, and I am done waiting, and if Lucas makes one more comment I may actually fire him."

"You can’t fire Lucas, he doesn’t work for you."

"I’ll find a way." He steered me toward the lobby doors. "I’m very motivated."

I laughed that free, unguarded laugh that still sometimes surprised me by how easily it came now and let him lead me. "Then stop talking." I pulled him down for a brief kiss that was all heat and promise and months of accumulated patience finally, finally releasing. "And take me home."

His laugh was low and rough against my mouth. "Yes, ma’am. Anything for my partner."

*******

The drive across the city was its own kind of torture. Damien drove instead of calling the car service, which should have told me everything. He wanted us alone, no partition, no polite pretense. The city lights blurred past the windows and he kept one hand on the wheel and one resting on my knee warm, deliberate, barely moving as though the restraint was costing him something.

"You’re doing that on purpose," I said.

"Doing what?" He didn’t look at me.

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