Loving The Billionaire’s Cold Heart

CHAPTER TWELVE

Nora's POV

Marcus called while I was still in the car.

I let it ring twice, aware of Ethan beside me in the back seat, his shoulder three inches from mine, the Voss meeting still sitting between us like something neither of us had fully put down yet.

"I need to take this," I said.

Ethan nodded and looked out the window.

"You're alive," Marcus said when I answered. "I've been waiting for a debrief since yesterday."

"I'm in the car."

"With him?"

"Yes."

A pause. "Say yes or no. Did something happen?"

"It was a productive meeting."

"That's not what I asked and you know it." I could hear him reading me across the silence the way only Marcus could. "Something happened."

"I'll call you later."

"Nora —"

"Later, Marcus."

I hung up and looked at my hands and felt Ethan watching me from the corner of his eye.

"He worries about you," Ethan said.

"He always has."

"Has he always been the only one?"

I turned to look at him. The question was quiet and without edge but it landed with weight. He was watching me with that focused attention that I was running out of ways to be unaffected by.

"More or less," I said.

Something moved in his jaw. Not quite tension. Something more like recognition of a fact he didn't like.

He looked back out the window and didn't say anything else for the rest of the ride.

*******************

My mother called that evening. Her voice was stronger than last week, which meant the new medication was working, which meant I could breathe for another few days.

We talked for forty minutes. She asked about the Blackwood family with careful neutrality and I gave her careful neutral answers and we both understood what we were doing and loved each other enough not to say so.

"Are you eating?" she asked.

"Ethan told me to eat something last week so I've been making a point of it out of spite," I said.

She laughed. A real one. "He checks?"

"He notices. There's a difference." I paused. "He's not what I expected."

My mother was quiet for a moment. "What did you expect?"

"Someone easier to keep at a distance."

She was quiet for longer this time. Then — "Nora. Be careful with your heart."

"I know."

"Do you?"

I didn't answer that.

*********************

Ethan was in the library when I came looking for a book before bed. He was at the desk with his laptop and three folders open and he looked up when I came in with the expression of someone surfacing from deep water.

"Sorry," I said. "I just need a book."

"You don't need to apologize for using the library."

I went to the shelf and ran my fingers along the spines. Behind me, I heard him close something on his laptop.

"The Voss counter-proposal came through," he said.

"Already?"

"Richard works fast when he's been outmanoeuvred and wants to recover ground." A pause. "The personal condition is gone. He's proposed a clean fifty-fifty with a two-year review clause."

I pulled a book from the shelf and turned. "That's what you wanted."

"That's exactly what you said he'd do." He looked at me steadily. "My father called. He's pleased. He asked who had advised me on the negotiation shift."

"What did you tell him?"

"The truth."

I held the book against my chest and looked at him across the room. The lamp on his desk made the space warm and close and he was watching me with that expression he'd been wearing since we walked out of the Voss meeting — like he was recalculating something fundamental and the new numbers kept coming out unexpectedly.

"Why?" I asked.

"Because you did the work. You deserved the credit."

"It wasn't work. It was just — thinking."

"Nora." He said my name with a patience that felt almost tender. "It was exceptional and you know it. Stop making yourself smaller than you are."

The words arrived quietly and hit somewhere deep and undefended. I looked at him and I could feel my expression doing something I couldn't fully control — something that belonged to the part of me I kept folded away and sealed.

"Nobody has ever said that to me," I said.

"I know." His voice was low. "That's a failure of everyone around you. Not a fact about you."

I didn't move. He didn't move. The room held us both in that stillness and I was aware of every point of space between us and aware that I wanted it closed and aware that wanting it was the most honest thing I had felt in years.

"Ethan," I said carefully.

"I know," he said.

"You don't know what I was going to say."

"You were going to say something sensible about why this is complicated." He closed his laptop. "You're right. It is."

"So we leave it."

He looked at me for a long moment. "Is that what you want?"

I wanted to say yes. The sensible version of me — the one who had learned that survival meant not wanting things you couldn't keep — assembled the word and put it at the front of my mouth.

What came out instead was nothing.

Because I was looking at him and he was looking at me and the silence said everything the sensible version of me was trying to suppress.

He stood up slowly. Crossed the room. Stopped close enough that I would have had to step back to reset the distance and I didn't step back.

"I'm not going to do anything," he said quietly. "I just want to be near you for a minute without a reason."

I looked up at him. "That's a dangerous thing to say."

"I know." His eyes stayed on mine. "I said it anyway."

We stood there in the warm light of the library and neither of us moved and it was the most intimate thing that had happened in this marriage so far.

My heart was not behaving.

I was beginning to think it had decided to stop trying.