Chapter 2Married To His Ultimate Boss

"Trending? Claire, you know I don't follow pop culture nonsense..."

He muttered under his breath, clearly annoyed by my demand, but his hand moved toward his desktop keyboard.

A heavy silence descended over the call.

Then, Ollie’s face drained of color. His eyes widened behind his lenses, and his voice cracked with sudden, sharp fury.

"What... what the hell is this?!"

He glared into the camera, his volume rising. "Claire! How did these get out?! Even if your publicist wanted to create buzz for your next project, how could you let something so vulgar be published?!"

A jagged shard of ice drove straight through my heart, stealing the breath from my lungs.

Of all the reactions I had braced for, this was the one he chose.

His first instinct was to accuse me of engineering my own degradation.

"Ollie... is that truly who you think I am?"

He flinched, realizing his blunder, but quickly retreated behind a wall of defensive irritation. "You know what I meant. I'm not good with words. I didn't mean it like that."

"Then what did you mean?" A bitter, hollow laugh escaped my throat, though my eyes remained bone-dry. "My private photo was leaked. I am being harassed, slandered, and crucified by millions of people. And you, my fiancé of seven years, look at that screen and ask why I orchestrated a smear campaign against myself?"

Ollie pinched the bridge of his nose, his voice thick with frustration. "Claire, I’m running on four hours of sleep. I don't have the mental bandwidth to dissect celebrity gossip. If it’s a leak, have your agency release a statement! Issue a denial! Why are you using this as an excuse to derail my work and drag me back to the city?"

Beside him, Bridget leaned into view, her eyes wide with manufactured indignation. "Miss Raye, how could you speak to him like that? Ollie hasn't slept in three days trying to finalize this research for your future together! Besides, a scandal this big... if the university board or the private venture backers see this, it could destroy his chances at tenure."

Ollie’s shoulders relaxed slightly under her defense. Her loyalty was a balm to his bruised ego.

"Bridget's right," Ollie said, his tone turning crisp and authoritative. "Call your PR firm immediately and get those posts scrubbed. Don't cut corners on the legal fees. If our prospective investors pull out because of this association, seven years of my life's work will be flushed down the drain."

The air in my chest felt thin, toxic. I pressed a hand flat against my sternum, willing my heart to steady its erratic, painful rhythm.

"Ollie," I whispered. "We're done. Let's call off the engagement."

On the screen, Ollie froze.

Then, his mouth twisted into a sneer of utter exhaustion. "Claire, you're twenty-eight years old. You aren't a dramatic teenager anymore. I haven't even blamed you for how this circus might impact my career, and you're already threatening me with a breakup?"

He leaned in, shaking his head. "I spend every waking hour in this laboratory—for who? For us! For our home! I told you I'd be back in two weeks. Do you really have to pick this exact moment to play the martyr? Every time we fight, you threaten to leave, and every single time, you come crying back."

A faint, self-mocking smile touched my lips.

He wasn't entirely wrong. I had trained him to believe I would never leave.

I had been so pathetically, desperately in love with him that the memories made my stomach turn. When he offhandedly mentioned craving the specialty pastries from a bakery forty miles away, I had stood in a freezing downpour for three hours just to bring them to his desk, coming down with pneumonia the following morning.

When his initial laboratory faced bankruptcy, I—a woman who had never touched hard liquor—learned how to drink venture capitalists under the table at industry banquets, smiling through the nausea until my stomach ulcer ruptured, just to secure his seed funding.

I had destroyed pieces of myself to keep his dream alive.

And he had looked at my sacrifices and mistaken them for chains that bound me to him forever.

I had nothing left to say.