The CEO's Unwanted Bride

What She Left Behind

Chapter 12 —

He told her that night.

They were side by side on the kitchen counter — she'd started preferring the island to the formal dining table, and somewhere along the way so had he — and he told her about Sophia the way you tell someone about an old scar. Not with drama. Just with the quiet fact of it.

"We were engaged for eight months," he said. "She ended it three weeks before the wedding."

"Why?"

A long pause. "She said I wasn't present. That I was physically there but that she could never reach me. That loving me was like — " he stopped. "Like shouting into a room with no echo."

Mia was quiet for a moment.

"Was she right?" she asked carefully.

He considered it seriously, which she appreciated more than a quick denial.

"Probably," he said. "I'd spent so long building walls that I'd forgotten there was supposed to be something on the other side of them."

"And now?"

He turned to look at her. The kitchen was warm, the city dark outside the windows.

"Now," he said, "I can hear the echo."

Mia felt the words settle somewhere deep.

"She came back for a reason," Mia said. "People like Sophia don't make social calls."

"She wants to re-enter the business world. She'll need alliances." He reached past her for his glass. "She won't get them from me."

"Because of the past?"

"Because of the present." He met her eyes. "Because of you."

It was such a simple sentence. He said it so quietly, without performance or flourish.

Mia looked down at her hands around her mug.

"You know," she said softly, "for a man who claims he doesn't know how to do this — you're doing remarkably well."

He was quiet for a moment.

"I have good material to work with," he said.

She looked up. He wasn't smiling — not quite — but his eyes were warm in a way she was still getting used to.

She thought: I am in so much trouble.

She thou

ght: I don't mind at all.