She Used Me for a Dare… Now I Own Her Mother - Chapter 306: The Stain
Chapter 306: The Stain
The room held its breath.
Jonathan looked down slowly. His eyes moved to her hand resting on his thigh with the unhurried calm of a man who has never once in his life been caught off guard.
He looked up to her face. The confident, predatory smile. The half-lidded eyes. The desperate, calculated angle of her posture designed to showcase the curve of her calf through silk.
Then to Reginald, who sat frozen across the table, every muscle locked with the particular tension of a man who knows exactly what his wife is doing and has no idea how this man will react.
Then to Arthur, whose terror had painted his face the particular gray shade of a man watching something he cannot stop.
Jonathan sighed.
It was a small sound. Quiet. The sigh of a man who had walked into a room hoping for a professional conversation and discovered instead that he was sitting in a circus.
He raised his right hand.
Cassandra’s pulse jumped. Her breath caught.
’Finally,’ some part of her whispered. ’He’s reaching for me.’
The thrill that shot through her spine was electric, forbidden, intoxicating.
A strong man. A worthy man. Claiming her in front of her own husband while Reginald sat there powerless to stop it. The fantasy she had carried in secret for years crystallizing into reality right here, right now…
The thought cut off.
Because Jonathan didn’t reach for her waist. He didn’t reach for her face.
His thumb and forefinger closed around her wrist with clinical precision.
He lifted her hand off his thigh the way one removes a dead insect from expensive fabric… delicate, deliberate, repulsed. He held it suspended in the air for one long, humiliating second, letting the rejection exist in physical space where everyone in the room could see it.
Then he dropped it.
Her hand hit the table with a dull, final sound.
Thud.
Cassandra froze. The sting wasn’t physical. It was the shock. The complete, absolute dismissal of everything she had offered wrapped up in a single gesture.
Jonathan said nothing. He reached into his breast pocket with unhurried movements and withdrew a pristine white silk handkerchief.
He laid it over the spot on his thigh where her hand had been.
And wiped.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
Slowly. Methodically. Scrubbing away the scent of jasmine and dark ambition.
Scrubbing away the warmth her palm had left on the fabric. Erasing her.
When he finished, he folded the handkerchief with the same unhurried care he had used to retrieve it. Then he dropped it onto the table beside her hand.
The room had gone so quiet that Cassandra could hear her own heartbeat hammering in her ears.
Jonathan didn’t look at her.
He turned his attention to Reginald instead, and Cassandra understood with sudden, crushing clarity that she had been erased the moment her hand left his thigh.
“Mr. Vanderbilt.”
His voice was flat. Professional. The tone one uses when addressing someone whose existence has become inconvenient.
He leaned back in his chair, regarding Reginald with the bored patience of a teacher explaining something obvious to a particularly slow student.
“Do you know what my job is?”
Reginald’s mouth opened. Closed. But no sound came out.
Jonathan didn’t wait for an answer he clearly didn’t need.
“My job,” he continued, each word delivered with calm, surgical precision, “is to protect Mr. Blackwood’s interests from distractions.”
He tilted his head slightly.
“I spend my days identifying threats. I spend my nights filtering out traps set by families far more powerful than yours. Families with daughters trained from birth in the art of influence. Families who understand that subtlety is the difference between strategy and desperation.”
His eyes moved to her briefly, then returned to Reginald with the same indifference one shows a piece of irrelevant decoration.
Cassandra felt her skin crawl under that gaze. Every carefully chosen piece of her ensemble… the lowered neckline, the crossed legs, the jasmine perfume… suddenly felt grotesque. Transparent.
She had walked into this room feeling like a weapon. Now she felt like a cheap toy left out in the rain, obvious and pathetic and broken.
The shame was a living thing crawling up her spine, hot and suffocating and inescapable.
She wanted to cover herself. To disappear. To unsay everything, undo everything, go back to before she had ever touched him.
But she couldn’t move. Could only sit there, frozen, while his indifferent eyes cataloged every flaw, every desperate calculation, every failure written across her face and body.
His gaze returned to Reginald as though she had already been dismissed from his thoughts entirely.
“You were not subtle, Mr. Vanderbilt.”
“I have developed,” he said quietly, “a very high tolerance for cheap perfume and cheaper tactics.”
He stood.
The movement was sudden and deliberate, his frame rising to its full height. The Apex pressure that had lifted minutes ago came crashing back down… heavier, colder, more focused than before.
He buttoned his jacket with slow, deliberate movements.
“I came here expecting competence, Mr. Vanderbilt.”
He paused, looking down at Reginald the way one might look at a ledger that doesn’t balance.
“I expected a professional discussion about your family’s position. About timelines. About concrete steps forward.”
His eyes didn’t move toward Cassandra, but the implication was a blade hanging in the air between them.
“Instead…”
He sighed. Another small, disappointed sound.
“You have wasted my time,” he said. His voice carried no heat. No anger. Just the quiet finality of a man delivering a verdict. “And you have insulted my intelligence by assuming I could be bought with something this… pedestrian.”
He checked his watch with the same unhurried calm he had brought to every movement since entering the room.
He picked up the file he had been reading when they entered. Tucked it under his arm. Smoothed the front of his jacket one final time.
“I will see myself out.”
He walked toward the doors without looking back.
His footsteps were measured. Unhurried. The sound of a man who has said everything that needs saying and sees no reason to remain.
He paused at the door, his hand resting on the polished brass handle.
Then he looked back.
“Three days, Mr. Vanderbilt.”
The words were quiet. Final. Delivered with the same flat precision he had used for everything else.
“In three days, Mr. Blackwood himself will come to this office.”
Jonathan’s voice remained flat. Professional. But the words carried the weight of an execution date.
“He will expect to see your CEO seated at this table. He will expect to see a signed agreement in front of her. And he will expect a professional explanation for why his time was wasted today.”
He paused, letting each expectation settle like a stone dropped into still water.
“I suggest you ensure all three are present.”
His eyes held Reginald’s, cold and unblinking.
“Because if they are not…” Jonathan tilted his head slightly, the gesture carrying more threat than any raised voice.
“I suggest you spend the next seventy-two hours wisely.”
He turned the handle.
“Good evening, gentlemen.”
The doors opened.
Closed.
And Jonathan was gone.
The crushing pressure that had been choking the air from their lungs lifted instantly, like a hand releasing a throat. They could breathe again. Move again.
But the weight of what had just happened didn’t lift with it.
If anything, it pressed down harder… heavier, more suffocating than any cultivation technique could produce. Because this weight wasn’t physical. It was shame.
Humiliation.
The cold, creeping certainty that they had just lost something they would never get back.
