All Chapters of Mr CEO,I’ll be your fiancée : Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

Leon’s POVNickie didn’t say much in the car on the way back.That was how I knew it had shaken her. She always had something to say. In the three days since she had moved into my penthouse I had learned that silence from Nickie Chen meant something was wrong in a way she hadn’t decided how to carry yet.I let her have it.When we got back she went straight to her room and I went to my office and called my mother.She picked up on the first ring which meant she had been expecting it.“That was unnecessary,” I said.“I don’t know what you’re referring to,” she said.“The clothing store Victoria.”A small pause. Just long enough to tell me she was pleased I knew about it. “I simply ran into your wife and introduced myself properly. Something you denied me in the boardroom.”“You threatened her.”“I had a conversation with her. There’s a difference.” Her voice was smooth and unbothered. “She seems like a smart girl Leon. I think she understood me perfectly.”“I need you to stop.”“I need

Nickie's POVThe hospital at midnight was a different place.Quieter. Emptier. The kind of quiet that makes every sound too loud, shoes on the floor, the distant beep of a monitor, the low hum of the elevator. I had been in this building so many times in the last six weeks that I knew which elevator was fastest and which corridor smelled like the cleaning product they used on Tuesdays.Tonight it felt like somewhere I had never been.Leon walked beside me through the main corridor and nobody stopped us because he had called ahead and there were two people from his medical team already there when we arrived, a doctor I didn't know and a woman with a tablet who spoke in the low careful voice of someone delivering information they knew was going to land badly.I didn't listen to her. I walked straight to my dad's room.He was asleep.I stood in the doorway and looked at him for a moment. The monitors were doing what they always did, the steady lines and numbers that I had learned to read

Leon's POVWalsh read the email twice.I watched him do it. The first time fast, the way you read something that surprises you. The second time slow, the way you read something you're trying to find a hole in.Then he looked up at me and I held his gaze and said nothing because I had learned a long time ago that the person who speaks first in a silence like this one loses it.Walsh looked at Nickie.She was standing beside me with her hand in mine and her face completely composed and I knew what it was costing her because I had watched her hold herself together in a hospital room at two in the morning and I knew exactly what her composed face looked like from the inside out."This came from the same person who sent the first text," Walsh said. Not a question."I believe so," I said."And your position on its contents.""My position is that my lawyer has documentation that tells a different story and you'll have it before nine tomorrow morning." I looked at him steadily. "I'm asking fo

Leon's POVI didn't sleep.Not because of Cole or the email or the board or any of the things that should have been keeping me up. Those I could work with. Those had solutions and timelines and steps I could take in a specific order.I didn't sleep because of fifteen seconds in a hallway and a woman straightening my collar like it was something she had always done.I got up at five and went to my office and pulled everything I had on Cole Knight.His full name was Coleman James Knight. Twenty nine years old. His mother was my father's second wife, a woman named Patricia who had been twenty four when she married a fifty year old man and had lasted seven years before the money ran out and the lawyers came in. Cole had grown up between London and New York, educated at the kind of schools my father bought his way into, and had spent the last four years working in private equity under a firm that I now noticed was partially funded by my father's holding company.I had known Cole existed. I

Leon's POVMy father called at four.I let it ring.He called again at four fifteen. I watched the screen until it stopped and then I put the phone face down on my desk and looked at the city through the window and thought about a man I hadn't spoken to in three years calling twice in twenty minutes because his plan had just collapsed in a boardroom and he needed to manage the damage.He called a third time at four thirty.I picked up.Silence on both ends for a moment. The particular silence of two people who have a great deal to say and no language built between them to say it in."Leon." His voice was older than I remembered. That was the first thing."Richard," I said. I hadn't called him dad in fifteen years. He had stopped deserving the word around the time he packed a bag on a Tuesday and left two boys in a house with a woman who responded to abandonment by gripping everything harder."I want to explain—""I don't need an explanation," I said. "I need you to instruct your lawye