How To Tame The Ruthless Billionaire

I Know What Page This Is

Cael Dominic Holt was, to be entirely objective about it, not what she had expected.

She had expected the manuscript version — the carefully described physical perfection that she had, in her professional capacity, trimmed back considerably because no one needed four paragraphs about a man's jaw. But she had still formed a mental image, the way you always did with characters you spent time with, and the reality did something complicated to that image immediately.

He was tall — she had known that. Dark-haired, sharp-featured — she had known that too. What the manuscript had not conveyed, what no amount of careful prose could quite capture, was the quality of stillness he carried. He stood in the doorway of the kitchen in a charcoal suit that had probably been put on at six a.m. and had not developed a single wrinkle since, and he looked at her with grey eyes that were not cold exactly — cold implied an absence of temperature, and these eyes were not absent of anything. They were simply controlled. Every reading of him contained and returned to himself before it could be used against him.

He was holding a manila envelope.

She recognized it.

He crossed the kitchen without greeting her — another manuscript detail she had noted as characterization: he does not acknowledge her presence in a room until he decides to — and placed the envelope on the island beside her coffee cup. Then he stepped back. Folded his hands behind his back. Looked at her with that particular quality of waiting that suggested he had already decided how this conversation would go.

"The documents are straightforward," he said. His voice was lower than she had imagined it. "The settlement terms are on page three. I've been more than fair."

Lena looked at the envelope. Then she looked at him. Then she picked up her coffee cup and took a long, deliberate sip.

"Good morning," she said.

Something shifted in his expression. Barely — a fractional adjustment, a slight recalibration. She filed it away.

"The documents—"

"Are still in the envelope," she agreed pleasantly. "Where they'll stay until I've spoken to a lawyer." She set her coffee down. "I'd also like to finish my breakfast first. Would you like some coffee? I made a full pot."

The silence that followed had a particular texture. She had heard of silences that could be cut with a knife — the expression had always struck her as imprecise — but this one had genuine density. Cael Holt stood in his own kitchen and looked at his wife as though she had said something in a language he did not speak.

In the manuscript, this was the part where Olivia's hands had shaken. Where she had reached for the envelope with the expression of someone accepting a verdict she had been dreading for months.

Lena's hands were perfectly steady.

"You need to sign those today," he said. The pleasantness had left his voice. Something cooler had replaced it — not anger, not quite, but the warning note of a man who was not accustomed to obstacles in matters he had already decided.

"I don't, actually," she said. "Our marriage contract includes a ninety-day review clause before either party can finalize a dissolution. Article seven, subsection C. I'd like to invoke it."

She watched his jaw tighten. Just slightly.

"You've never read the marriage contract," he said.

"I read it last night." She had not, technically. She had edited a manuscript in which it featured prominently, which was close enough for current purposes. "It's quite thorough. Your grandfather's lawyers were very meticulous."

Another silence. This one had a different quality — less density, more edge. She could feel him revising his model of this conversation in real time and taking no pleasure in the process.

"What do you want?" he asked. The question was direct and without warmth, but she heard something under it that the manuscript had never captured: a genuine, almost bewildered attempt to understand a situation he could not immediately solve.

Lena considered the question honestly.

What did she want? She wanted to not be dead, which may or may not have been on the table. She wanted to understand what had happened to her and whether it was reversible and what her responsibilities were to a woman whose body she was currently inhabiting. She wanted, if she was being entirely candid with herself, to figure out whether Cael Holt was actually the flattened villain of the manuscript or something more complicated, because the way he was standing right now — controlled and still and faintly, almost invisibly thrown — suggested the latter.

What she said was: "Ninety days. That's all."

He looked at her for a long moment. Those grey eyes moved over her face with methodical attention, looking for the angle, the calculation, the thing she was after. She held his gaze without flinching, because she was, whatever else was true of her current situation, a woman who had spent four years telling other people's stories and she knew exactly what this scene was. She knew how it was supposed to go. And she had already decided it was going somewhere else.

"Ninety days," he repeated. The two words had the quality of something being entered into the ledger.

"Ninety days," she confirmed. She picked up her coffee. "And Cael?"

He had already turned to leave. He stopped at his name — or at her use of it, casual and unasked-for, which in eleven months of marriage the original Olivia had apparently never once deployed. He did not turn around, but he stopped.

"Next time," she said, "maybe lead with good morning."

She heard him exhale — barely, through his nose — and then the sound of expensive shoes on marble, and then silence.

Lena set down her coffee cup and looked at the manila envelope on the island in front of her.

She had just bought herself ninety days inside a story she had edited from the outside. Ninety days in Manhattan. Ninety days in a penthouse that was not hers, in a body that was not hers, in a life that had been abandoned by its original occupant before she'd had a chance to live it properly.

She thought about Olivia — the real Olivia, the quiet woman in the manuscript who had loved him and never said so, who had reached for the envelope with shaking hands because she had already given up.

Lena was not her.

But she was here, in her place, in her life, and she had exactly ninety days to figure out what that meant.

She reached out and moved the manila envelope to the other side of the island, out of her eyeline.

Then she made herself another cup of coffee, sat back down, and started paying attention.