Olivia stared at him. Just hearing the same words failure and Alexander in the same sentence was enough to silence her.
Tilting her chin up, he pressed a kiss on her cheek. “Good night, Olivia.”
Olivia slid against the leather, her arms and legs boneless as he walked away from her.
She ran a hand over her cheek where he had kissed her, tried to breathe past the fluttering in her stomach. She had always attributed her failures—in anything she had done, to herself, to her own faults and weaknesses.
Alexander’s words turned the assumption on its head. There had been no contempt in his words, no derision. They had rung with belief, even concern, as though it had mattered to him that she see things his way.
In that moment, she wanted to believe him.
The gentleness in his words seeped into every pore of her. She lay back against the leather and closed her eyes, replaying the evening again.
Because, without doubt, it had been the best day of her life.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE NEXT MORNING, Olivia pressed the power button on her laptop for the second time and muttered a curse. She had a few minutes before a conference call with her boss, Nate, and of course, her years-old laptop was messing with her again.
As the blue screen took forever to load, she settled down on the couch just as Alexander slid toward the other end. Her laptop still hadn’t powered on.
He slid a new, glossy laptop, a pink one like her own, but of course, the state-of-art expensive model into her lap. Her mouth wobbled as she struggled to string a coherent sentence together. “What’s this?”
He didn’t look up from his iPad. “I noticed that your laptop takes a while to reboot and thought you might like a replacement. It’s all set up. All you need to do is transfer your files from your old one.”
He extended his hand, palm up, and she stared blindly for a few seconds before she grabbed the flash drive from him.
Not trusting her vocal glands to work past the wedge in her throat, she mumbled something. Or tried to. It was a simple gesture, nothing that would have cost him time or energy. Yet it was more precious than the pendant, or the check he had given her or anything she had ever received in her life. For a minute, she ran her finger over the gleaming surface, fighting the tears prickling behind her eyes.
Clearing her throat, she plugged her headphones in and powered it on, quickly transferring her presentation when her old laptop finally booted up.
She made notes and answered Nate’s questions as he brought her up-to-date. Excitement thrummed through her as he walked her through his notes on her presentation.
But she couldn’t shake off the unease dripping into her when an awkward silence descended on the line. “I’m sorry, Olivia, but—”
Something was clearly wrong, especially because Nate was never one to mince words. Whether praise or criticism, she had always found him to be fair-minded.
The sound of her own breathing curled up dread inside her. “Nate...whatever it is, just tell me.”
Alexander frowned, reading an email from his lawyer. Tightness knotted in his gut as he read on. Isabella had finally set things in motion, even though it was cloaked under a request for an initial hearing to review their visitation rights. He didn’t believe for a second that it would stop there. The rumors weren’t just rumors anymore.
Which meant he needed to strike first.
He needed to plan, he needed to call his lawyer and figure out the best way to handle this. Damn it, he needed his wife by his side.
But not even the pressing email could hold his attention when Olivia’s call took on a strange note next to him. She kept repeating the same words, her face pale.
“I do understand, Nate...No, I get what you mean. It’s just that I’ve...” She swallowed, her words ringing with misery. “Yes, okay.”
Her eyes glittering with tears, she yanked the headphones out. She slid the laptop into the couch, shot to her feet like a coiled spring.
He reached her in a minute, the tears she scrubbed viciously from her face freezing him into inaction. He was so used to thinking of her as defiant and strong that he couldn’t believe that they were tears, that she could be hurt. He gripped her wrists and pulled her closer. “Liv, what’s wrong?”
She shrugged, her mouth a bitter slant. “I’m not going to be working on the pitch to LifeStyle Inc. anymore.”
“Why? I’ve seen how hard you’ve been working on it, the merit of your ideas.”