Loving The Billionaire’s Cold Heart

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Nora's POV

We walked back to the car slowly, not because the distance required it….the restaurant was three blocks from where Daniel had dropped the car, but because neither of us moved with any urgency and the night was cool and the city was doing its quiet late-evening thing and I didn't want the dinner to end yet.

That was new. Wanting something to continue rather than managing my way through it until it was over.

Ethan walked beside me with his hands in his pockets and we talked about nothing consequential, the restaurant, a book he had read recently that connected to something I'd said over dinner, whether Marcus had ever actually finished a dessert without taking half of someone else's. Easy conversation. The kind that didn't announce itself as important and somehow was.

"He sounds like someone I should meet properly," Ethan said.

I glanced at him. "Marcus?"

"You reference him the way people reference the most honest relationship in their life. I'm curious about anyone who knows you that well."

The observation landed quietly. He was right, Marcus was exactly that, and the fact that Ethan had mapped it from dinner conversation meant he had been paying the particular kind of attention that sees structure rather than surface.

"He'll interrogate you," I said.

"I'd expect nothing less."

"He already has opinions."

"Also expected." He looked at me sideways. "Are they recoverable opinions?"

"He's watching to see if you mean it." I paused. "That's what Marcus does. He waits until the initial behaviour has run out and sees what's underneath."

"And now?"

"He thinks you might mean it." I held his gaze for a moment. "He's still watching."

"Fair," Ethan said simply.

We reached the car. Daniel was not there, Ethan had given him the evening, which I had noticed and not commented on because the noticing of it said enough. He opened my door himself and I got in and he came around and we pulled into the city traffic and the comfortable quiet of the car settled around us.

"Wolfe called me today," I said.

Ethan's hands stayed relaxed on the wheel. "When?"

"While you were finishing your call before dinner. He has my number from the foundation event — I didn't give it to him, which means someone provided it."

"What did he say?"

"He said he'd heard we were looking at the secondary holding structure and he wanted to suggest we were reading it incorrectly. That the amended articles were a standard governance update." I looked at the city passing by. "He was nervous. He framed it as professional courtesy but the call itself was damage control."

"He knows we found it."

"He knows someone did." I paused. "I didn't tell him it was me."

Ethan was quiet for a moment. "What did you tell him?"

"That I'd pass on his concerns to the legal team and they'd be in touch." I paused. "He asked if we could meet privately. Just the two of us."

The car was very quiet.

"What did you say?" Ethan's voice was even. Controlled in a way that meant something was moving underneath it.

"I said I didn't take private meetings with people who manufactured the circumstances that put me in a contract marriage." I kept my voice neutral. "And then I ended the call."

Ethan said nothing for a full block.

Then…. "You said that directly to him."

"He needed to know I knew. Leaving him uncertain about what I had wasn't useful anymore." I turned to look at Ethan. "Was that the wrong call?"

"No." His voice had something in it I felt in my chest. "It was exactly right."

"He'll go to the ground now. Regroup."

"Let him. Daniel found two minority stakeholders in the holding company by the end of day. One of them has an existing dispute with Wolfe over a different project. He'll talk." Ethan glanced at me. "It's over for him. He just doesn't know it yet."

We got home at nine thirty.

The apartment was quiet in the way it got late in the evening, the city noise dropping to something ambient, the lights of the building creating warmth against the dark. I had come to love this time of night here in a way I hadn't expected. The building had felt cold in the first weeks. It didn't anymore.

I was in the kitchen getting water when Ethan came and stood in the doorway.

"Thank you for tonight," he said.

"You said that after the family dinner."

"I mean it differently now." He came in. "Then I was thanking you for handling my family. Now I'm thanking you for dinner. For the restaurant. For letting it be easy."

I turned and leaned against the counter and looked at him. "Was it easy for you?"

"Easier than anything has been in years." He said it simply, without the managed weight of someone making a declaration. Just a fact. "I keep waiting for the part where it gets complicated."

"It is complicated."

"You know what I mean."

I did. He meant the particular ease between us that existed independently of the legal situation and the family politics and the manufactured debt and all the structural weight of how this started. He meant the thing that happened in the space between us that had nothing to do with any of it.

"I know what you mean," I said.

He crossed the kitchen and stopped in front of me — close, inside all the careful distance that had governed the early weeks, which felt like a different life now.

He lifted his hand and pushed my hair back from my face the way he had done Sunday morning. Slow and deliberate. His fingers brushed my jaw and stayed there and I let him tip my face up and I looked at him with everything open.

"Nora." My name in his mouth at that register did what it always did.

"Yes," I said.

Not an answer to a question. Just yes.

He kissed me, not urgently, careful and certain, and warm, the way he did everything when he had decided he meant it. His hand cradled my jaw and I reached up and held his wrist, not to stop him, just to hold on, and he kissed me like he had thought about it for a long time and was in absolutely no hurry now that it was real.

When he pulled back he stayed close. His forehead against mine.

"Finally," he said quietly.

I laughed. A real one, surprised me.

"Finally," I agreed.

He kissed me again, softer this time, and I felt it settle into everything.