Still His Wife. Never Again His Fool

Chapter Ten

Maya’s POV

The touch was small — a collision of fingertips over a scatter of paper — but it landed like an electric verdict. For a moment, the clatter of cutlery and the stink of frying oil vanished; the world narrowed to the hard cut of his jaw and the burn of recognition I shouldn’t have felt.

I gasped.

Soren Stefan. Alive. Real. Standing inches away from me when he was supposed to exist only in the fragments of a life I’d already lost.

Shock rooted me in place for a heartbeat too long. Then instinct surged — smile, composure, a mask pulled on fast enough to smother the truth. I couldn’t tell him. Not that I’d known him before. Not that he had died saving me. Not that we had burned together.

“Middle school,” he said at last, his smile clipped, his eyes unreadable.

My brows knit. “What?”

“We went to the same middle school. You were… nice to me.”

Nice? To him? My mind flinched. In all my memories, the hospital had been the beginning. I would have remembered a boy like Soren Stefan, wouldn’t I?

I forced my confusion into a polite dismissal. “Doesn’t ring a bell. I’m sorry.” Another empty smile slid into place, practiced and sharp. “I should get back to my date.”

Something flickered across his face — confusion, maybe even hurt. He muttered something under his breath, words I couldn’t catch, then straightened as though remembering himself. Without another word, he turned and walked away.

I resisted the pull to glance back. Even so, I felt the heat of his stare burning into my back until I reached my supposed date.

My smile stayed frozen, brittle, as I slid into the seat across from him — my date.

He sat stiffly, a handkerchief folded beneath his palm, his back carefully lifted from the chair as though the cheap upholstery might infect his expensive suit. Years ago, that arrogance would have thrilled me.

“You’re five minutes late,” he said, eyes flicking to his watch before narrowing on me.

“I’m so sorry. A lot of things came up at...”

He raised a finger, silencing me, a single sharp gesture that sliced the words from my throat.

“I don’t care what you do with your time, Maya. But you don’t have the right to waste mine.”

“I’m sorry,” I repeated softly, though what I really wanted was to spit in his face.

“This meeting will be brief. Unlike you, I have important things to do. And why—” his gaze swept the room with contempt, his lip curling, “—why on earth would you drag me to a place like this?” He pulled out sanitizer, sprayed it liberally, wiped his hands as if disinfecting the very air. “It reeks of poverty. Fitting, I suppose. It reeks of you.”

I steadied my smile, though bile burned my throat. “Don’t you remember? This is where we had our first date, back in college. It was raining, your driver couldn’t come, and you suggested we duck in here. You ordered tea.”

His lip curled deeper, disgust twisting his handsome face into something grotesque. “That wasn’t a date. Even if you were the last woman alive, I’d choose celibacy or a she-goat before you. And I didn’t ‘suggest’ anything. You followed me like a pathetic, ugly little puppy. You were never more than a burden.”

The words landed like lashes, sharp and humiliating, but I forced my expression into dreamy eagerness, into the lie that had become my survival. “I just thought… we should get to know each other. Since we’re getting married.”

“We will not be getting married.” His voice cut like a blade, clean and merciless. “I’ll speak to Elena and end this nonsense. I won’t be punished for your madness.”

He rose sharply, the chair screeching across the floor, brushing imaginary dust from his suit with another handkerchief as if even the air here had stained him.

“You’re leaving already?”

“If I hear your voice for another second, I’ll go mad.” He strode away as though my presence seared his skin.

If that was the case, then the feeling was mutual, Aiden Kensington.

Still with the smile nailed to my face, I pushed to my feet and drifted toward the counter. Inside, my chest throbbed with a cocktail of shame and fury, but I swallowed it down, burying it under the mask. I pulled out my phone, needing distraction, needing to breathe. Inevitably, my mind spun back to the only anomaly of the day: Soren Stefan. He wasn’t supposed to be here. Or had I missed some vital piece of the past?

A search brought up what I already knew: Soren Stefan, CEO of ElUnico Systems, the number-one tech industry in the world. Nothing new. Nothing I hadn’t memorized while studying him as a competitor.

Something isn’t right or is this just a coincincidence that i was reading more into?