Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 304

Chapter 295. Wedding Two.

CAMERON

We had chosen smaller deliberately.

Not less. Not a consolation version of something larger we hadn’t managed to organize but because we were private people and needed less people that genuinely loved us, rather than a large crowd that might not be too open minded seeing two men marry.

Lucian had been clear about this from the beginning of the planning, in the flat, practical way he was clear about most things.

“I don’t need a production,” he’d said. “I need it to be true. Those are different requirements.”

“Agreed,” I’d said.

Lake had, briefly, lobbied for something larger, on the grounds that his binder had already been extensively developed, and it seemed a shame to waste the research. We had thanked him for the binder and kept our plans exactly as they were.

Lily flew in from London where she had gone on a trip after I started coming around on Tuesday trying to make it up to Cameron, she had a degree in tourism and I had helped her start something that she always wanted to do and she had turned it into a blossoming business.

She hugged me at the airport happily. I noticed she was patiently waiting for me for so long.

“You’re shorter than I last remembered. Lucian described you as intimidating and bigger.” She teased as I rolled my eyes in exasperation.

“I am intimidating.” I concur.

“You look very manageable to me,” she said pleasantly, and picked up her own bag before I could reach for

Lake had been given the rings.

This had been his only non-negotiable request. We had given him the role partly because he’d asked, partly because saying no to Lake on something he’d decided mattered had a success rate we’d both learned not to depend on.

Drew caught my eye from the front row, his own expression the fond, patient one he deployed when Lake was being thoroughly Lake, and gave me a small nod that said, clearly: he practiced for weeks, he is ready. everything is fine.

Lake reached the front, stopped with precision, and presented the rings with both hands, like an offering.

“I have the rings,” he announced to everyone who could see this.

“Thank you, Lake,” the officiant said.

“You’re welcome.” Lake said, with great dignity, and stepped to the side.

Lily’s speech came between the ceremony and the dinner.

I had not known what to expect from it. Lucian had simply said, when I’d asked: “She’ll say what she actually thinks. That’s always what Lily does.”

She stood with the ease of someone who had never once been intimidated before by a house. She looked at Lucian, and a smile played on her lips. Then turned and looked at me.

“I want to start by telling you something about my brother that he will absolutely not want me to say in front of thirty people.”

Lucian, who had written his in the same careful, economical way he wrote everything, held my hands and said:

“I spent a long time protecting what I had. I was afraid of what it would cost to lose it. I kept you at a careful distance for longer than I should have – for reasons that made sense at the time, and that you never once held against me. He looked at me steadily.

“You stayed anyway. You showed up every Tuesday, and you didn’t make it a thing, and you sat on a chair that was too small for you in Lake’s bedroom, and you kept coming back, and eventually I ran out of reasons to keep being careful.” A pause. “I don’t want to be careful anymore. I just want to be here, with you and Lake and everything we’ve built, for as long as I possibly can.”

Mine were shorter still, because I had learned, across years of watching Lucian, that the fewest words required to say a true thing were usually the right number.

“You are the best thing I didn’t know I was building toward,” I said.”You and Lake, both. I’m going to spend the rest of my life being glad I went to the right meeting on the right Tuesday and ended up with you.”

Lake, standing to the side with the careful stillness he’d maintained since delivering the rings, the longest sustained stillness I had ever witnessed from him, broke it the moment the officiant said we were married.

“Excellent,” he said, to no one in particular. “This is exactly what the binder projected.”

Laughter broke through the garden, warm and genuine, and Lake looked mildly surprised that this was funny, having clearly intended it as a straightforward factual observation.

Lucian pulled me toward him and kissed me, and I kissed him back, and behind us the thirty people we loved most were on their feet, and somewhere in the noise Lily was laughing, and Jennifer was crying, and Nick was explaining something to Drew with great enthusiasm about the ring-carrying logistics, and Lake was already telling someone about the binder in case they’d missed the reference.

All of it, at once, at the right volume, in the right garden, on the right afternoon.

Exactly where we belonged.