Chapter 30
Julian
Twenty minutes later…
The sweat was still cooling on our skin, the room heavy with the scent of sex and her perfume. Her head was on my chest, her hair spilling across my ribs, her breathing just beginning to slow. This was the peace I’d bleed for her to have.
I traced the line of her spine. “The divorce will be final in thirty days,” I said into the quiet. “Maybe less.”
She hummed, a contented sound that vibrated against me. “I know. I’m happy.”
That should have been enough. But a question remained... what happened next?
My hand stilled on her back. “So. When do you want to get married?”
The rhythm of her breathing hitched. She lifted her head, propping her chin on my sternum to look at me. In the dim light, her eyes were wide. “What?”
“Married,” I repeated, as if it were the most obvious equation in the world.
She was leaving him. Solution: she belonged to me.
Publicly. Legally. Completely. “The second the judge signs, we file. We can do it quietly or make a spectacle—my mother will want the latter. You don’t have to stop working.
You can stand at my mother’s side and run Esmé.
I’ll be a goddamn house husband if that’s what you need. Just say the word. Give me the date.”
I was babbling. I knew it. She sighed, and the sound made my heart feel funny.
“Julian… it’s… it’s too soon. I haven’t even… I need to breathe.”
“Breathe?” The word felt like a slap. I sat up, facing her. “You’ve been holding your breath for nineteen years. I’m offering you oxygen. Pure, clean air. With me.”
“I know what you’re offering,” she said, her voice gentle. Too gentle. It was the voice you used to calm a wild animal. “And it’s everything. That’s why it shouldn’t be a reaction. It should be its own choice. On its own time.”
“Its own time.” I let out a sharp, humorless laugh. “Elara. Look at us. In this bed.” I grabbed her hand, pressing it flat over the frantic beat of my heart. “I have waited for three years to love you in the open.”
My brain was screaming for me to shut up.
I was doing exactly what had been done to her so many times—using guilt—but my emotions were a tsunami, breaking past the levee of my control.
I kept remembering the night she told me it was over.
She had been so resolute, so cold. What happened if she left again?
My vision blurred. I turned my face away, clenching my jaw against the heat in my eyes.
“Do I need to beg you?” I whispered, the ache in my throat making the words ragged. “There is no ‘just Elara’ for me. You are the axis my world spins on. Without you, the money, the name, the power—it’s just noise in an empty house.”
I saw her own eyes fill with tears, saw the panic I was causing, and it only made the spiral worse.
“I’m here, Julian. I’m not going anywhere. I just need to find myself before I make any more lifelong decisions.”
“You want to find yourself?” I pushed up from the bed, snatching my boxers from the floor. “Fine. Find yourself. See how fucking lonely it is out there.”
“Julian, wait—”
Her voice was a broken plea. It almost stopped me. Almost. I didn't turn back.
“Take all the time you need,” I said, the words cold and hard. “You’ll bend until you almost break for the Ashworths, but you won’t even marry me. Fuck it.”
I walked out, leaving her in the rumpled, cooling sheets.
Five minutes later, the cold air of the living room bit my bare skin. I paced, rage and shame warring in my chest. I’d fucked it up. I’d taken the most perfect, sated moment and poisoned it with my need.
Her words echoed: Too soon. I need to breathe. Find myself.
I stopped pacing and replayed it all. I sank onto the sofa, dropping my head into my hands. I saw it then, with brutal clarity. I was doing to her exactly what the Ashworths had done—dictating the terms of her existence. I was offering a gilded cage of my own making and calling it freedom.
“Selfish bastard,” I muttered into the silence.