The CEO's Rejected Wife And Secret Heir novel Chapter 175

Chapter 175: Chapter 175

His hand pressed slightly at my back. "Thank you."

We turned slowly. Below the railing, Ravenwood spread gold and endless, the city entirely indifferent to the fact that everything had shifted tonight.

"This time it’s real," I said quietly.

He was quiet for a moment. "Yeah," he said finally, his voice low and certain. "This time it’s real."

I rested my cheek against his shoulder and closed my eyes and let myself have it — the music, the lights, the warm air, our son somewhere behind us explaining the concept of babies to Mrs. Dora, the weight of Damien’s hand at my back — all of it.

Damien stiffened slightly beneath my cheek, a barely perceptible tension that I’d learned to read like a language, and when I lifted my head and followed his gaze I saw it — just for a moment, just long enough.

A figure standing in the shadow of the access stairwell door at the far edge of the building’s roofline, someone who had been watching long enough as the door swung slowly shut behind him.

Damien’s jaw was set, his eyes tracking the closed door.

"Who was that?" I said.

He looked down at me, and I could see him deciding — the old Damien would have said nothing and managed it alone and let me find out later. This one held my gaze. "I think," he said carefully, "that we should enjoy the rest of our evening."

"Damien."

"Tomorrow," he said. "Tonight is ours, I promise you — tomorrow."

********

The private villa sat on stilts above water so clear it looked invented. I stood on the deck with my feet bare against warm wood.

"You’re thinking," Damien said from behind me.

"I’m always thinking."

"You’re thinking loudly." He appeared at my shoulder, two glasses of cold water with lime because I was pregnant and flying had been enough without adding champagne on top of it, and set mine in my hand with the easy certainty of a man who had been paying attention. "What is it?"

I looked out at the water. "I keep waiting for something to go wrong."

He was quiet for a moment. Then he set his own glass on the railing and turned me gently by the shoulder until I was facing him. "Nothing is going wrong," he said.

"I know that."

"Do you?"

I looked at him, the way I’d learned to since we’d stopped performing at each other and started actually seeing — and found his face open and certain and entirely present in the way that still occasionally surprised me, this version of Damien who had fought his way through years of being taught that feeling things was failure.

"I’m working on it," I said.

He nodded, accepting this without pushing, and picked his glass back up. We stood together on the deck while the sun began its slow descent.

"Charles," I said eventually, because it had been sitting between us since last night.

Damien exhaled. "Barnes is handling it."

"That’s not an answer."

"It’s the only answer I have right now." He turned to look at me directly. "He was there, he watched. He didn’t approach, didn’t make contact — he stood in a shadow at his own daughter’s wedding and watched from a distance, which tells me he’s building to something rather than acting impulsively." His voice was measured, controlled, the voice that meant he had already thought through every angle. "Barnes has people watching his last known location. We have security in the penthouse. And we are in the Maldives, which he does not know about, and which he could not reach without us knowing."

I absorbed this. "You’re sure."

"I’m sure." He met my eyes. "I am not going to let him ruin this. Not this."

I nodded slowly and turned back to the water. "Okay," I said.

"Okay," he agreed.

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