The Ceo's Forgotten Wife - A Corporate Enemies to Lovers Novella #999719

She counted the days. One thousand and ninety-four of them.
When Maren Ellison's firm landed the Hale-Cade merger — forty-one million in projected synergies, six months of due diligence, the kind of account that rewrites a career — she said yes before she saw the name on the letterhead.
Julian A. Cade. Chief Executive Officer.
Her ex-husband.

She told her assistant this was Tuesday. That it was a merger, not a second chance meet-cute. That fourteen other people would be in the room and the legal team alone could invade a small nation. She told herself she had spent three years building a self that didn't collapse at the sound of his name, and she was not going to let one line on an executive summary be the exception.
She walked in anyway.

He was already there. Standing at the window. And when he turned around, his face did something raw and unguarded and completely at odds with one thousand and ninety-four days of silence — there and gone so fast she almost convinced herself she'd imagined it.
Stay after, he said, at the break. There's something you need to know before this goes any further.

She had assumed the worst. The truth was worse than her assumption, and better, and more complicated, and it had been sitting in a conference room on the eighteenth floor of a building that had changed all its marble while neither of them was looking, waiting for the right merger to put them both in the same room long enough to finally say it.

✔ An ex-wife who took the case knowing exactly who the client was
✔ One thousand and ninety-four days of silence ending at a conference table
✔ A truth he needed six months of due diligence to create the right conditions to tell
✔ A merger that was never entirely about the merger
✔ Two people who never stopped being excellent at everything except each other
Tone: Sharp, emotionally precise, slow-burning corporate romance
Ending: Standalone complete. The deal closed. So did three years of unfinished business.
She called it Tuesday.
He'd been planning it for six months.
The merger was never entirely about the merger.
Scroll up and start reading.