The CEO's Rejected Wife And Secret Heir novel Chapter 172

Chapter 172: Chapter 172 – The Wedding

Damien’s POV

I was ready an hour early.

This should not have surprised anyone who knew me — I had spent my entire adult life arriving before I was expected, controlling things when I could. But standing in the hotel suite in my morning suit, hair done, shoes polished, nothing left to adjust, with fifty-three minutes still remaining before I needed to leave, I was forced to confront the fact that I had entirely run out of things to manage and would now have to simply wait.

I was not good at waiting, so I straightened my cufflinks twice. Checked my phone In anticipation then put it down.

Lucas texted: Don’t pass out at the altar. Pro tip: fix your eyes on her and just breathe. He’d apparently done extensive research into wedding day anxiety for someone who was only engaged and not yet married, which I chose to find helpful rather than irritating.

I put the phone down again. Noah was being brought by Mrs. Dora, suited up in the smallest formal outfit that had ever been created — I’d seen the photographs from the fitting and they had done something thoroughly embarrassing to me — carrying the rings in a small velvet box he’d been practicing with for weeks. He had explained the practice to me at length over breakfast a few days ago: walk slowly, look serious, don’t run even if you want to, hold it in both hands.

I’d told him that was exactly right. He’d looked at me with great gravity and said: I know, Daddy. I’ve been doing research. 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝔀𝓮𝒃𝙣𝓸𝒗𝒆𝒍.𝙘𝒐𝒎

The thought of it now was a bit amusing.

I sat on the edge of the bed, which immediately felt wrong, so I stood again. Went to the window. Ravenwood spread below me in the late morning light, familiar and sharp and entirely indifferent to the fact that today I was getting married in the specific, real, chosen way I had not managed to do the first time.

Don’t be nervous, I told myself but I was quite nervous.

Not the kind that came from doubt — there was no doubt anywhere in me about this. Not a shadow of it. This was the other kind, the kind that came from wanting something so much that the wanting itself became almost unbearable, the fear not that something would go wrong but that it would go right and you would have to figure out how to hold that.

I picked up my phone again and then put it down because I was absolutely not texting her on her wedding morning.

Forty-one minutes. I thought about her face in that hospital room, looking at me with the ring on her finger and the IV still in her arm, proposing we shift the wedding date forward, in a hospital gown with the absolute certainty of a woman who had decided and was not going to be talked out of it.

I thought about the first time I’d really looked at her — not the contract-wife, not the convenient arrangement, but her, the real person who’d been in my house for months while I looked through her — and how long it had taken me to understand what I’d had.

I thought about Noah on the kitchen floor with his dinosaurs, looking up at me with my own eyes in a face that didn’t deserve any of the chaos I’d contributed to bringing him into.

I thought about the choice she had made to trust me again, knowing everything, having been through everything, and how the weight of that trust had quietly changed what I thought I was capable of being.

You were a broken man who broke her, I’d written in my vows, because I’d needed to say it in front of witnesses, to let it stand in the room and be heard and then move past it together.

She made you whole.

I said it quietly in the hotel room, testing the words.

They were true, all the way down.

The car arrived at the curb downstairs.

It was time.

**********

The rooftop ceremony space was twelve rows of chairs in a loose half-circle, draped in white and ivory, surrounded by the low planters that were usually empty of anything but formal arrangements and today held real flowers — white roses, greenery, the small touches the planner had described as intimate rather than elaborate, which was exactly what Aria had asked for.

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