After My Fiancé Humiliated Me, I Ruined Him novel · Chapter 5 of 24

Chapter 5: Fourteen Million

Julien went very still.

"What contract?"

Ashton buttoned his blazer as he stood. "Ask your sister. Oh, wait. She doesn't read things. She just signs where I point."

"Get out," Julien said.

"I'm going." Ashton picked up his brochure. He leaned down toward me on the way past, close enough that I smelled his cologne. It was the one I'd bought him for his birthday.

"Nice trick, babe," he said softly. "You still lose. You'll be begging to buy this thing by June."

He walked out whistling.

Julien looked at me across the glass table for a long time.

Then he walked out too, without a word.

At nine that night my phone rang with a French number.

"You owe me a conversation," Julien said. "Come to the shop. Use the side door."

The side door was in a cobbled courtyard behind the building. It led to a narrow staircase that smelled of jasmine and old wood.

Three floors up, his kitchen door was open.

He was at the stove with his back to me, in a gray T-shirt, a dish towel over one shoulder.

Something with onions and wine was going in a cast-iron pot.

"Sit," he said without turning around.

"I didn't come to eat."

"Nobody comes to eat. They eat anyway. Sit."

I sat at a wooden table scarred with knife marks and wine rings.

He put a bowl in front of me. Beef, carrots, a dark sauce. A piece of bread torn off a loaf by hand.

I hadn't eaten since the plane.

I ate the whole thing before either of us said a word.

He watched me do it, leaning against the counter with his arms folded.

"My grandmother was right," he said. "You were starving."

"Your grandmother is terrifying."

"Yes." He sat down across from me. "So are you. You sat in my shop and let me call you a chain-store buyer."

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