40. CHAPTER 37
Orion
I’d spent three weeks proving I could be both brilliant and pathetic at once.
On paper, I’d been productive. Signed off on three major logistics agreements, renegotiated a Singapore port contract, smoothed panic surrounding a shipment issue with DOUKAS, and forced a French minister to eat his words in a session he’d clearly thought I was too distracted to win.
In practice, I’d been miserable.
Every night I let Stephen drive me back to some hotel, and every morning when I woke with my hand fisted in a sheet that didn’t smell like her, it got worse. The distance didn’t calm anything, it only escalated it.
Missing her wasn’t even the right word. I craved her with a hunger that I was sure would eventually kill me, if left unfed.
It wasn’t just her body I craved—though my cock had never been so unforgiving—it was all of her.
Her laugh when she forgot to be guarded. The subtle ways she left pieces of herself in every room when she walked around the house. Her voice reading to my father. Her scent on my pillow, on my shirt, in my veins for fuck sake.
And the more I stayed away, the surer it felt that I was going insane.
I’d been taught since childhood that affection was a chink in the armour. Love was a liability men like my father couldn't afford. Women were leverage or legacy. Nothing in between.
So I did what I’d always done, I tried to turn it into what I thought it should be—strategy.
Convinced myself that night happened because I needed it to. Because of the clause. That once she was pregnant, the alliance terms locked in, and everything moved as planned. I’d have control over the Fernández-Moreaux empire and a Kade heir. The board. The merger. Everything lined up…neatly.
Except nothing inside me felt neat.And it felt even messier every time I checked the tracker and found her in the studio, or in my father’s wing, or in her bed alone at night.
I missed my wife, and it was new for me—to want someone so bad that nothing else made sense.
I was sitting at my desk, staring blindly at daily reports from my assistants, trying to decide if I could live with being this insane for the rest of my life, when the door opened without a knock.
I looked up, and air left my lungs.
She walked in like a storm.
Denim shorts that showed off every inch of those tempting long legs, a silk slip tank that highlighted the color of her eyes, her hair loose around her shoulders, lips plum and tempting. Fury lived in every line of her body, but it didn’t dim a thing. If anything, it made her more devastating.
My first thought wasn’t why is she angry. It was I’d crawl if she asked me to.
If only she knew how much power she had over—
“I should have known,” she said, her voice low and shaking. “That’s all I am to you. Just a vessel to push out your babies.”
The words landed like a punch to my gut.
My throat closed. Every explanation I’d rehearsed in my head over the past weeks evaporated. Trite, self-serving lines about timing and business and bad logistics. None of them fit that hurt in her eyes.
“Léa—”
“You have nothing to say?” she cut in, stepping closer. Even angry, she moved with that effortless grace of hers, pulling my attention without trying. “Nothing to say for your precious clause?”
She dropped something on my desk.
No, not something. All the somethings.
A rain of white boxes and plastic wrappers—pregnancy tests scattering over my documents, clattering on my wrist, one of them hitting my chest and bouncing to the floor.
She’d brought every single one of them.
I stared down at the mess, stunned. I’d expected her to take one. Maybe two. Not… this. Not a pile of untouched tests thrown like evidence.
“I—”
“Don’t.” Her voice cracked. “Don’t you dare try to rationalize this.”
Her pain was louder than her anger now. I could hear it in every word, see it in the way her hands shook as she pushed her hair back.
“Léa,” I tried again, softer. “The tests were—”
“A convenience?” she retorted. “A courtesy? For your breeder?”
“Don’t call yourself that,” I bit out, the sound harsh even to my own ears.
“That’s what your clause says I am.” She laughed then, but there was nothing humorous in it; it was cold and broken, and it terrified me.
“All Fernández-Moreaux businesses are expected to move under your control the moment I give you a child,” She lets out a shaky breath, then continued.
“So, you fucked me, disappeared, and came back with a sweet little gift basket and a stack of sticks for me to pee on. And you think I won’t connect the dots? ”
She knew.
I felt my heart beat restlessly in my rib cage, and the blood drain from my face. I hadn’t meant to hide it forever. I just hadn't found a way to tell her that wouldn't make me look like the monster she currently thought I was.
“What did you hear?”
“Oh, now you care what I know?” Her eyes blazed. “Laurent told me everything. The clause. The transfer of power. The part where I become ‘useless’ if I can’t give you an heir.” Her jaw trembled. “You negotiated my body before you ever touched it.”
I swallowed hard. “The clause was written before our engagement, Léa. Before I really knew you.”
It was the truth. The original clause was written by my father and his lawyers, I only sharpened the wording to give me control over the Fernández businesses. Still that doesn’t excuse the fact that it was written mostly for my benefit.
“And you didn’t think to mention it after you decided to put your head between my legs?”
There was no fucking way around it.
She was right to be furious. Right to feel used.
I had negotiated the clause before she meant anything real to me. Before I knew the real her—the woman with a sharp mouth and honest eyes attached to the word that could tear down my walls. Back when she was a chess piece and not the woman who haunted my dreams.
“I should have told you,” I said. The admission felt like grinding glass between my teeth. “I won’t insult you by pretending otherwise. But this marriage was always a merger as well as—” I gestured between us. “Us.”
“Don’t you dare put us and your calculations in the same sentence.”
I forced myself to hold her gaze. “I wanted control of your family’s interests.
I won’t lie about that. Your father would rather burn it all down than hand it to your brothers.
He’d trade your future to the Beaumonts or any of the other influential families for another inch of power, if it meant his interests were secured. With the clause, I can protect—”
“Protect?” she cut me off, her voice rising. “You call that protection?”
“If something happens to him, everything goes through me,” I said, heat rising in my own chest now, not at her, but at the way this was all twisted. “Not your brothers. Not their debts. Not their impulses. I can keep the scavengers out, and keep you out of the line of fire.”
She stared, her eyes wide with furious tears. “And my womb in your line of succession.”
I winced. I wanted to say no, but I’d be lying. At the start, that was exactly the plan, but I couldn’t tell her when that changed. I couldn't put a timestamp on the moment she stopped being a chess piece and started being my pulse.
“Good thing I’m not pregnant,” she spat. “You disgust me.”
That hit me straight in the heart—hard. I’d spent years being called worse things by better men. Ruthless. Cold. Calculated. I’d worn those like a badge of honor.
But you disgust me, from her mouth? That slipped under everything.
“I didn’t sleep with you because of a clause,” I said, the words scraping their way out. “I’ve always wanted you… I’ve always wanted to take care of you, to make you happy.”
“Make me happy,” She mumbled and laughed again, hoarsely. “Yet you used me. You disappeared. You made me feel stupid for—” she stopped herself, exhaled and continued. “I was so foolish thinking you cared. That you—” She cut herself off, biting down on the word.
Loved me?
My chest squeezed so tight I had to brace my hand on the desk.
“I’m not good at this,” I confessed. Which was the stupidest understatement of my life. “I’ve never had to… explain myself. To anyone.”
“Congratulations,” she snapped. “Here’s your first and last opportunity.”
I could feel it slipping. The fragile, complicated thing we’d been building.
I recalled the way she’d looked at me that night in that bathtub. We’d stayed up half of the night whispering things to eachother.
How could I tell her that everything in me had changed and I’d been too much of a coward to come home and stand in it?
“How long have you been planning this?” she asked, her voice suddenly small. “Did you decide that night? Before? After? When did you look at me and think: ah, this will be the night to secure the clause nicely?”
My silence answered for me.
Her face crumpled.
“You’ll never touch me again,” she said, her voice had gone cold in that terrifying way that sounded like she was closing multiple doors inside herself. “I’ll never let you.”
“Léa.” A trace of panic slipped into my voice before I reined it in. “Don’t say that.”
“Why? You don’t like hearing the word no when it’s not convenient for you?”
“I have never touched you without asking,” I gritted. “Never pushed. Never forced.”
“And that’s the bare minimum.” Her eyes shone. “It doesn’t erase the fact that you are still using me.”
“Everything I’ve done,” I ground out, “—has been for you. To protect you, to see a smile on your face. To make sure you never have to shed a single tear…ever again.”
Threatening your brothers, teaching your family a lesson on your behalf, saving fucking Yves… The list goes on and on.
“How hard is it for you to trust me, just this once?”
Her chin trembled.
“I trusted you, Orion,” she whispered. “And I should never have. It should have registered that even though I married you, I was still a Fernández. I’m still your enemy.”
I stepped toward her. “You are not my enemy.”
She stepped back. “Tell that to your mother and to your future mistress she openly paraded when she dragged me to that luncheon two days ago.”
My blood iced. “What mistress?”