The Billionaire's Bought Bride and Instant Mom Chapter 151

Orion

It took my brain several seconds to process what she'd actually said. When it finally registered, I felt like someone had dumped a bucket of ice water over my head.

*Are you fucking kidding me?*

"Wait," I said, gently but firmly removing her hands from my chest and taking a step back. "Your 'need' tonight is... business research? You drove all the way here, at this hour, to ask me to investigate a company?"

I could feel my expression darkening as the full implications hit me. "And here I thought you actually wanted to see me."

"I did want to see you," Aveline said, but there was something in her tone that immediately put me on guard.

"Right," I said, my voice dripping with sarcasm. "Let me guess—you wanted to see me so we could have a lovely chat about corporate investigations?"

She let out a laugh, but it sounded forced, and I watched her expression shift from playful to something more serious. "Look, Orion, I'm just not in the headspace tonight, okay? I'm completely drained, and honestly..." She paused, a flush creeping up her neck. "After what you did to me the other night, I'm still running on that high."

Despite my irritation, I felt a smug satisfaction at her admission.

But then I caught the genuine exhaustion in her posture, the way her shoulders seemed to carry invisible weight.

"Alright, what's eating at you?" I asked, my tone softening. "You look like you've been through hell today. What happened?"

"That's exactly it," she said, her voice picking up urgency. "Look, you probably don't know this, but Hartwell Industries? That's not just some random company. My grandparents built it from absolutely nothing—blood, sweat, and dreams. It's my grandmother's whole world, and I'll be damned if I let my piece-of-shit stepfather sell it out from under her."

The raw emotion in her voice, the way her hands clenched into fists when she mentioned her stepfather—that was real.

"Well," I said quietly. "When you put it like that... your grandmother's fight is my fight. Let me make some calls."

I started typing out a message to my head of corporate intelligence, my fingers flying across the screen.

"Damn," Aveline said, and when I glanced up, I caught something genuine flickering across her face—a soft smile that looked... touched. "Look at you all intense and commanding. Very... alpha CEO vibes."

"Oh, please," I said, not even bothering to look up from my phone. "Save the fake swooning for someone who buys it. I can practically see you calculating how to work this angle."

She glanced at her phone, then put on an exaggerated expression of thoughtful consideration. "Well, since it's getting so late, I probably shouldn't disturb your work... or your rest. I guess I should... I should just go then."

*Oh, hell no.*

"Really?" I said, setting my phone down and turning to face her fully. "You show up here, get me all worked up with your little performance, and now you're just going to walk away?"

She paused at the door, and I caught a flicker of something—guilt, maybe?—cross her face.

"Look, I'm sorry about that," she said, but she didn't turn around. "I'm just really not in the headspace for anything physical tonight."

I started walking toward her slowly, deliberately. "That's too bad, because watching you squirm when you realized you'd been caught teasing me? That's incredibly hot."

"Orion," she said, and I could hear the warning in her voice as she finally turned to face me. "I haven't showered, I've had a long day, I'm really not—"

But I was already close enough to trap her against the door, my hands braced on either side of her head. The confident woman who'd sauntered into my room twenty minutes ago had vanished, replaced by someone who looked genuinely flustered.

"The panic in your eyes right now is doing things to me," I murmured, close enough that I could see her pupils dilate. "You have no idea how much I want to—"

I cut myself off by kissing her, hard and possessive and with every ounce of frustrated desire she'd stirred up. For a moment she struggled against me, her hands pushing at my chest, but then she melted into the kiss with a soft sound that went straight to my groin.

When I pressed my hips against hers, letting her feel exactly how much she'd affected me, her knees buckled. I had to catch her weight against me, and the feeling of her complete surrender was intoxicating.

"This is what happens when you play games with me," I said against her mouth, enjoying the way she was practically clinging to me now.

"God," she breathed against my mouth.

For a moment, we stayed like that—her clinging to me, both of us breathing hard, the air between us charged with possibility.

Then I stepped back.

"You should go," I said, my voice rougher than I'd intended. "I'll call you when I have information about the company."

Aveline stared at me, her lips swollen and her eyes wide with disbelief. "Are you serious right now?"

"Completely serious," I said, moving back to my desk with what I hoped looked like casual indifference. "You said you weren't in the mood tonight, remember?"

"That was before you—" She gestured helplessly between us. "Before whatever the hell that was!"

"That was me making a point," I said, though we both knew it had been much more than that.

"What point, exactly?"

I looked at her—disheveled and aroused and clearly struggling with whether to be angry or impressed—and felt something warm unfurl in my chest.

"That you can't just manipulate me and expect to walk away unaffected," I said quietly.

She stared at me for a long moment, and I could practically see the internal debate playing out across her face.

"If I leave right now," she said finally, "are you going to be able to sleep tonight? Or are you going to lie there thinking about what we could have been doing instead?"

The question caught me off guard. There was something vulnerable in the way she asked it, something that cut through all our games and posturing.

"Honestly?" I said, abandoning any pretense of casual indifference. "I'll think about you all night. But then again, I think about you most nights anyway."

The words hung in the air between us, more intimate than any physical touch. I watched color bloom across her cheeks, saw her breath catch.

"Jesus," she whispered. "Why does that turn me on so much more than it should?"

Before I could answer, she was moving toward me, her earlier hesitation completely forgotten. When her hands fisted in my shirt, pulling me toward the bed, I didn't resist.

Whatever game we'd been playing, we were both ready to lose.