38. CHAPTER 35
Orion
By morning I knew I was ruined.
Ruined by her. Ruined for the world.
Sunlight filtered through the sheer curtains in bright streaks, painting her skin in a wash of gold.
She was sprawled half on top of me, one thigh thrown over my hip, her hand flat over my heart as if she were trying to keep it from leaping out of my chest. My sheets smelled of vanilla and her, of skin and sex and felt dangerously close to home.
I should’ve been satisfied. Instead I felt… restless. Stripped. Vulnerable.
The second time we’d come together had been slower, rawer, less about staying in control and more about the greedy, clumsy truth of wanting her.
It had felt inevitable, like every argument, every lingering look, and every almost-touch we’d survived had been building toward that singular collision.
I had gone into this marriage thinking I could keep everything compartmentalised.
Business. Legacy. Sex. Feelings, if any, all quarantined at a safe distance.
But one night with her in my bed, and the walls I’d lived behind my entire life felt… wrong. Too tight. Like something tailored for a man I no longer was.
She murmured something in her sleep and burrowed closer, her nose pressing into the hollow of my chest. Her leg moved, dragging a slow heat along mine. My arm clenched around her on reflex, pulling her in when I should have been finding the exit.
Fuck.
This was the problem. It was easy to promise restraint when she was across a table or down a hallway. With her wrapped around me like this—pliant, trusting, and utterly unaware of the havoc she’d wreaked on my psyche—my instincts split clean down the middle.
Half of me wanted to stay like this until the sun went down. To skip the office, cancel scheduled meetings, lock the door, and keep her here until she forgot anyone else had ever touched her life before me.
The other half of me raised on cold strategy and the necessity of survival, knew exactly what this meant.
It meant losing ground.
I watched her face, studied the tiny line between her brows, the faint shadows under her eyes. She looked younger here, less guarded. Léa, not Mrs Kade. The woman who had succeeded in turning my world upside down.
The thought made my chest ache with a feeling I couldn't rationalize.
So, yes. Confirmed. Ruined. Because I didn’t just want her body anymore. I wanted things I had no business touching—her trust, her gentleness, her defiance, her future. I wanted every version of her tied irrevocably to me.
That was a dangerous type of need for a man like me.
Careful not to wake her, I eased my arm from under her shoulders and slipped out of bed. She made a soft sound of protest, rolling into the warm patch I’d left behind. I stood there for a while, watching her reach for me in her sleep, her fingers closing on empty air.
It almost dragged me back under the covers.
Instead, I forced myself into motion. Shower, clothes. White shirt, cufflinks, watch. By the time I buttoned my cuffs, Orion Kade—heir, CEO, dutiful son—was back on, every vulnerable edge smoothed away.
I crossed back to the bed, bent, and brushed a kiss on her temple. She didn’t wake, just sighed and relaxed, her lips hinting at a smile.
“I’ll be back,” I whispered, to her or to myself, I wasn’t sure.
Then I slipped out.
I didn’t come home until after midnight.
It wasn't a plan to avoid her, just instinct. I buried myself in the day—back-to-back meetings, a logistical emergency in Singapore, two board members testing my patience and positioning themselves around my father's slowing heartbeat. Every time my mind drifted back to her, to the way she’d clutched at me, her whispers, the way she’d tasted, I forced the thought into a cage and slammed the door.
If I kept moving, maybe I wouldn’t have to look directly at what was happening to me.
By the time the driver pulled up to the estate, our wing of the estate was silent. My phone showed her ring tracker in her own room, not mine. An intense relief hit me first, followed immediately by a hollow ache of disappointment that tasted like ash.
I stood outside her door for a full minute, my hand on the handle, my pulse thudding like a panicked idiot teenager’s.
Open it. Go in. Tell her… what?
That she’d scared me? That I didn’t know how to be whatever she deserved? That I wanted to crawl into her bed and never leave?
Pathetic. The word was a lash, meant to wake the real Orion back up. I dropped my hand and walked away.
The next morning, an actual crisis hit. The usual high-stakes catastrophe that used to be my lifeblood. A logistics issue in Singapore that demanded I be on the ground immediately.
I told myself it was a reprieve. Space. A chance to recalibrate my old self before everything fell apart completely.
On my way out, I found Mrs Lewis in the kitchen.
“Is she in her studio?” I asked, my voice was tight.
“Yes, sir. She’s been there since breakfast.”
I almost went to her. Almost walked up the stairs to tell her myself. In the end, I did the cowardly thing—I delegated the heart of the matter.
“If she asks, tell her I’ve been called away to Singapore. I’ll be gone a week.”
“Yes, Monsieur Kade.”
In the back of the car, watching the estate shrink in the rearview mirror, I texted her. Even my cowardice had limits; I owed her that much.
Me: I’ve been pulled into an urgent trip. Leaving right now. I’ll be back in a week. Be safe, ma déraison.
The typing dots blinked for a long, agonizing minute. Then her reply came.
My Léa: Okay. Safe travels.
Just that. No heart, no question, no extra sentence. Her “okay” sat too neatly on the screen, as if she’d ironed every ounce of feeling out of the words before hitting send.
I stared at the screen long after the car had reached the tarmac. Even after I’d boarded the jet and the engines began their low, powerful whir, I couldn't look away from it. Temptation crept up to text her back, to tell her something at least—anything. I pushed it down.
“We’re ready for taxi, sir,” the flight attendant informed, hovering near my seat. “Will you be needing anything before we’re airborne?”
I didn't look up. I tapped the phone into airplane mode and watched the screen go dark, feeling like I’d just made the biggest tactical error of my life.
One week stretched into almost three.
Every time we fixed one issue on-site, another arose. Supply chain disasters, port delays, a factory fire that smelled of sabotage. Logistically, I couldn’t leave. Strategically, I shouldn’t have been thinking about it at all.
Emotionally, I… didn’t know where the hell to fucking stand.
We spoke twice. Short phone calls, polite conversations choreographed around time zones and meetings.
She told me about work, about how far the collaboration with Céleste was going, about a dinner with Isolde; I gave her dry updates on humidity and cargo schedules.
I didn’t mention that at night, alone in a hotel room that cost more than most people earned in a year, I could still feel the phantom heat of her body under mine.
I didn't tell her that the scent of the hotel’s expensive soap was an insult because nothing… absolutely nothing smelled like her.
The rest of the time, I watched her to ease the ache in my heart that had built up.
I followed her ring’s digital tracker across Paris.
Her studio, estate, Céleste's studio, and occasionally the Fernández mansion. We’d pulled the surveillance from her father’s house months ago; it was no longer my concern.
So when she crossed that threshold, all I had was a static GPS dot and the agonizing silence of what was happening behind those walls. I hated the blindness of it.
Back at our own estate, the cameras told a story she’d never tell me.
She laughed with Mrs Lewis in the kitchen, streaks of flour on her apron, while I watched her smile as though everything was fine.
I saw her pace the library at three in the morning, a book forgotten in her hand as she stared at nothing. I saw her sit by the pool, her feet dangling in the water, her shoulders bent as if something was weighing heavily on her.
Once, she stood in the doorway of my bedroom. She didn't go in. She just gripped the frame, staring at the empty bed where we’d been ruined together, then turned and walked back to the safety of her own room.
I watched that replay until the image burned into my retinas.
“I miss you so much it borders on madness,” I muttered into the hollow silence of my suite, my thumb tracing the small, digital version of her on the screen.
I was a man built for crisis. I could handle enemies, board coups, negotiations, my mother’s cold expectations, and the slow, painful decline of my father. All of that had rules. Logic.
I didn't know how to handle a woman who now possessed my body, my secrets, and more of my heart than I’d ever intended to give, and I certainly didn't know how to trust myself not to crush her with the weight of my own brokenness.
By the end of the third week, watching her sit on the library sofa with a sketchpad in her lap, staring at nothing with eyes that looked entirely too lonely. The fear of hurting her finally became smaller than the fear of losing her.
I closed the app, stared at the ceiling of yet another anonymous suite, and finally admitted what I’d been avoiding since that first morning: I couldn't keep running. At some point I had to stop, for her, and definitely for myself.