Page 55 of Adonis: The Cost of a Billionaire's Heart
“You don’t need me anymore,” she said flatly. “The contract is done, and so are we.”
“Fuck the contract.” I stepped closer, lowering my voice. “I need you, Sim.”
A flicker of something like hope mixed with fear crossed her face before she secured it away. “You made your feelings quite clear on the jet, Adonis.”
“I’ve been?tryna?say?goodbye in a million different ways, but I can’t, Sim. I said what I said because I was scared.” The admission cost me, but I paid it gladly. “I’ve spent my life avoiding exactly what you make me feel. I woke up holding you this morning and it felt . . . right. Like I’d finally found something I didn’t know was missing.”
Her arms tightened across her chest. “And that sent you running for the hills.”
“Yes,” I answered, not denying it. “I don’t do vulnerability. I don’t do family. I don’t do love. Or at least, I didn’t. Until you. Until Mason. You don’t know what you’ve done to me, Sim.”
The silence stretched again, weighted with possibility. From around the corner, Mason watched with curious eyes.
“I brought something else,” I stated finally, reaching into my jacket pocket. I pulled out a new envelope. “It’s a different kind of contract.”
She didn’t take it. “I’m done with contracts, Adonis. And billionaires too. I just want to go back to my peaceful, quiet life as a nobody.”
“Just look at it. Please.” I placed it on the small table by the door. “No NDAs. No end date. No terms and conditions except one: that I get to love you. Both of you.”
Her eyes widened slightly.
“I don’t respect assumptions. Tell me we’re good or I’ma lose my mind. Tell me something. Even if you don’t know right now, I’ll wait,” I said, stepping back toward the hallway. “All night if I need to. All week. However long it takes for you to believe me.” I slid down the wall outside her door, sitting on the worn carpet. “I’ll be right here.”
The door closed softly. I heard the whispers of a conversation inside, her gentle voice, the higher pitch of her son’s questions.
I waited, checking emails on my phone, ignoring the crisis messages from my board and PR. None of it mattered if she didn’t open the door again.
Thirty minutes passed. Then an hour. My legs started to cramp. I stretched them, then resumed my position. The hallway light flickered. A neighbor passed, giving me a strange look.
I didn’t move. I wouldn’t give up my place in her heart, no matter the cost.
The new contractsat on my table like a live grenade. I’d been circling it since he laid it there, picking it up, putting it down, all while doing Mason’s bathtime routine as he watched me with puzzled eyes.
“Mommy, why is Mr. H. sitting outside our door?” he asked for the third time as I dried him off with his favorite hooded bath towel.
“He’s . . . waiting for me to make a decision.”
“About what?”
About everything. About tearing down the walls I’d built around us. About letting someone else into our safe little world. About trusting again.
“About whether we want him in our lives,” I answered finally.
My son considered my words with surprising seriousness. “He looked sad.”
Leave it to a child to cut straight to the truth.“He made some mistakes. So did I,” I admitted.
I exhaled, slow and evenly. Both of our secrets were out in the open, and he was waiting on the other side of my door, stripped of his guarded walls, trying to win me back not with the m’s in his bank account, but with authenticity. The question was, would I let him?
“Like when I broke your favorite blue mug and said I didn’t?” Mason inquired.
Despite everything, I smiled. “Sort of. Grown-up mistakes are a little more complicated.”
“Did you say sorry to each other?”
I thought about the intensity in his eyes when he said he needed me. The way he sank down to wait in that hallway, a billionaire CEO sitting on worn carpet that someone had probably pissed on in the past. “Yes.”
“And did you forgive him?”
