She Was Never Just the Billionaire’s Wife (Natasha and Chase) novel Chapter 60

Chapter 60 Safe Harbour

(Natasha)

Mason shows up at my office door at eleven with two coffees and absolutely no intention of leaving quickly.

I can tell by the way he kicks the door shut behind hitu and drops into the chair across from my desk like a man settling in for the afternoon.

“Don’t you have a company to run?” I ask.

“I’m running it from here.” He slides one of the cups across to me.

“My assistant knows where I am.”

I take the coffee.

It’s perfect, obviously. Mason has never in his life handed anyone a bad cup of coffee unless it was intentional.

We start with work because that’s the safe harbor, the place we both know how to navigate without bumping into anything.

He updates me on a separate acquisition his team is closing in Seattle.

I tell him about a meeting I have with Jeffrey Bauer’s tech lead next week regarding the server migration.

We go back and forth with the easy shorthand of two people who think similarly and have long since stopped wasting words explaining themselves to each other.

Somewhere around the second cup, the work talk drifts.

“How’s living at the estate?” he asks.

“Complicated.”

“Sonia still there?”

“Very much so.” I lean back in my squeaky chair.

“She’s performing grief on a rotating schedule. Very moving stuff.”

“And Chase?”

I look at him.

He looks back at me with the expression of a man who asked a casual question.

“Chase is Chase,” I say, which is not really an answer and we both know it.

Mason lets it go, which is one of the things I love most about him.

He never pushes. He plants a question and gives you room to walk past it if you need to.

I’m afraid that over the years I’ve taken advantage of his patience, and he’s never called me on it.

He’s a better friend than I deserve.

“Elias came for dinner Tuesday,” I offer, mostly to fill the space.

“He told Eleanor the dinner was adequate, which apparently counts as high praise. Eleanor looked like she’d been

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handed an Oscar.”

Mason laughs.

“I’d pay good money to watch that man navigate a dinner party. As long as I don’t have to be on the receiving end of his blunt criticism.”

“It’s genuinely a spectacle. He såld approximately nine words all evening and somehow dominated the entire conversation.”

“Must be genetic,” Mason says. “Chase can do that too.”

I open my mouth and close it again.

He grins. “You were about to agree with me.”

“I was about to say something professionally neutral.”

“You were absolutely going to agree with me.”

“Mason.”

“Natasha.”

I throw a pen at him. He catches it without looking, which is annoying, and sets it on the edge of my desk.

“For what it’s worth,” he says, his voice dropping just slightly, “You look good. Really good. Like yourself. And by that I mean healthy, because you never stopped being beautiful.”

“I feel like myself,” I admit.

“Being here helps almost as much as the new meds.”

He nods slowly, watching me in that steady way he has.

Like he has all the time in the world and nowhere better to be.

Mason has never made a secret of how he feels about me.

Even when I felt fat and frumpy and permanently bloated from the hormone medication, he always looked at me with stars in his eyes.

He’s not dramatic about it, doesn’t make speeches or ultimatums.

He just shows up.

Every single time, without fail, he shows up.

With coffee and bad jokes and that utterly reliable presence that I’ve leaned on more times than I can count.

And I know, because I’m not an idiot, that he wants more than this.

I also know, because I’m brutally honest with myself when I have to be, that I can’t give it to him.

Not now

Maybe not ever, and that thought sits in me like a stone.

He deserves someone whose head is clear

Chapter How bout

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Someone who doesn’t lie awake at night thinking about a man she has absolutely no business thinking about.

on’t say any of this because he already knows.

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