43. CHAPTER 40 #2
She sat in her usual chair, the weight of a leather-bound book in her lap. My father’s eyes were half-closed, his breathing a shallow, rhythmic rattle of a clock winding down. I leaned against the doorframe, a voyeur to a grace I didn’t deserve.
“—and then he said, “Someday this world will belong to you. I need you to see it now while your heart is still soft enough to care,” she read. She paused, looking at my father’s still form.
“I think he was an idiot, personally. No offense, Monsieur Kade. Soft hearts aren’t a liability. They’re just… heavy to carry.”
My father’s fingers twitched. She squeezed them, her voice dropping to a murmur. “I know. Your son is learning that the hard way.”
Heat rose in my throat, thick and suffocating.
In two months, I’d learned more than that.
I’d learned that her soft heart was heavy because I had helped make it that way.
Every tenderness she’d given me, every mercy I didn’t deserve, ruined me even more than her anger and her distance.
Most devastating of all, she still held on to her gentleness, even after everything.
The floorboard creaked as I shifted. She looked up, her expression shuttering instantly.
“Oh,” she said, her voice going flat. “I didn’t hear you.”
“I didn’t want to interrupt,” I said, stepping into the room. “Would you like me to stay?”
It was a stupid question. A desperate one. She shrugged, looking away. “If you want to.”
Trespassing. That was the only word for it. Her indifference was a cold front that made a mess of my resolve. I took the chair on the other side of the bed. I sat. I watched.
She continued reading, letting the words fill the space between us. Occasionally, she’d glance at me over the top of the book, as if checking to see if I was a hallucination or perhaps a figment of her imagination, not truly present in the room.
I made it to every reading session after that. It was the only time I was allowed into her space without a logical reason, asides from the dinner table. It was another tether.
It was the ninth week, still no reconciliation in sight for us.
But it was the week of her show and I’d provided stealth security.
I also sent over white roses—bouquets so large they were practically an apology in bloom.
She never thanked me. She never acknowledged them.
I wasn’t sure if she liked or hated them. I didn’t ask either.
The week ended and the following week came by fast.
I was in the kitchen hunting for water, and so was she, hunting for a late night snack. The entire staff had gone to bed and the kitchen was dark, except for the light trailing in from the corridor.
I found her standing on tiptoe, reaching for a jar on the top shelf, her t-shirt riding up to expose a sliver of skin at her waist. Perfection as always.
I tried to look the other way but I’m not a saint. It didn’t help that I craved her like a beast, aching just to touch her again.
“Need help?” I asked, hiding the strain in my voice and stepping close. I didn't touch her, but I was so close that the heat of my chest brushed her back. My veins lit up like a fucking christmas tree. I braced a hand against the counter to keep from closing the distance completely.
“No,” she grunted, her fingers straining. “I’ve got it.”
She didn’t have it. The jar slipped. I moved before it hit the counter, my hand closing over hers and the glass in one smooth motion. The impact carried her back into me. My chest touched her back, and my cock kicked to life like it hadn’t spent ten weeks learning any better.
She yelped, startled by the proximity, and then… she laughed. A short, genuine burst of sound that seemed to shock her as much as it did me.
I froze, my hand still over hers, electricity crackling in my bloodstream from a single touch.
She clapped her free hand over her mouth, looking as if she’d just accidentally leaked a secret. “Sorry,” she muttered.
“Don’t be,” I said, my voice dropping into a raspy, raw register I couldn't control. I let my hand stay over hers on the jar, my gaze dragging from her eyes to where her fingers still covered her mouth.
“Do it again.”
Had to be weeks of starvation moving through me tonight.
Her eyes met mine. For a split second, the hurt was gone, replaced by a spark of the old mischief—the girl who used to push hard just to see if I’d crack.
“Make me,” she whispered. Then she slipped out of my hold with the jar secure, and vanished into the hall.
I stood there like an idiot, smiling into the dark, my body rigid and thrumming from the encounter. Ten weeks of hell, and one laugh had convinced me not everything was lost.
In those weeks, I learned that groveling is humiliating, but there’s a strange kind of joy in it too.
It’s the gratitude you feel for one more word at breakfast than you got yesterday.
It’s the way your heart stops when she finally asks, “How was your meeting?” and actually waits for the answer.
And the way her shoulder brushes yours in the hall and she doesn't immediately recoil as if you're a toxic thing she has to escape.
I loved her stubbornness. I loved that she didn't forgive easily or quickly. If she had fallen back into my bed the moment I signed those papers, I wouldn't have trusted it. I would have wondered what else she’d accept.
Her resistance told me she valued herself more than my power. It made me want to be a man worthy of that value instead of the man who had exploited it. And for her I’ll see it through to the last detail.
So I watched. I waited. I tried. Over and over…and over again.
Weeks had passed, the board had their oversight, my mother had her warning, and my empire looked significantly less invincible on paper.
And everytime I walked through my front door and heard her laughter carry from the studio unforced and alive. My chest eased and my world felt sane.
I’ve always had my life centered in control. Turns out, the most important thing I’d ever do was learn how to let go of it.