She Used Me for a Dare… Now I Own Her Mother - Chapter 369: Heena Sterling
Chapter 369: Heena Sterling
Heena Sterling stared at the same paragraph she’d been reading for the last twenty minutes and realized she hadn’t absorbed a single word.
Her mind was still trapped in the echo of her husband’s voice.
He had stood in the doorway of this very office, adjusting his silk tie with a flourish that felt entirely too rehearsed.
”Heena, darling,” he had purred, his voice wrapped in that careful, rehearsed concern.
“I’ve just had a few urgent departmental matters to attend. Truly tedious stuff. Don’t wait up for me; you know how these ’emergencies’ can spiral.”
He hadn’t even looked her in the eye. He had just offered a dismissive wave and vanished into the corridor, leaving behind only the cloying scent of his expensive cologne.
”Important work, huh?” Heena whispered to the empty room, her voice a jagged, mocking edge.
She wasn’t naive. She knew exactly where he was heading with such sudden urgency.
Years ago, desperation had driven her to follow him. She’d parked two blocks from a dimly lit bistro, her heart hammering against her ribs as she prayed to find him at a mundane faculty meeting.
Instead, she found a slow-motion heartbreak. He was leaning into a woman half his age, his hand resting on the small of her back with a hunger he’d long since denied his wife.
The few times she had summoned the courage to confront him, the aftermath was always the same. He didn’t offer apologies; he offered a masterclass in psychological warfare.
”You’re projecting, Heena,” he would say, his voice calm and patronizing, as if he were explaining a basic concept to a slow student.
“You’re taking your own insecurities and painting them onto me. I’m trying to mentor a junior colleague, and you’re turning it into something sordid. Is that really how little you think of me?”
He always made her the villain of the story. He blamed her anxiety, her age, her overactive imagination. He turned her valid pain into a character flaw until she started to doubt her own eyes.
Lately, however, the mask had slipped entirely. He had stopped bothering with the elaborate lies and the gaslighting.
He didn’t care if she knew anymore. He had become blatant, pursuing the women of her own department with a predatory arrogance that was an open insult to her dignity.
He treated her office as a mere pit stop before he went out to hunt in her own backyard.
’What do they have that I don’t? ’
She was forty-seven. She knew that. But forty-seven wasn’t dead. She still caught her reflection in the bathroom mirror some mornings and saw the woman Sterling had married — the sharp jaw, the high cheekbones, the dark eyes that used to make him stammer through his sentences when they first met.
The years had softened some lines and deepened others, but they hadn’t erased her.
And yet he looked past her like she was furniture.
She didn’t understand it. She had kept herself together… her body, her mind, her career… with a discipline that bordered on defiance.
She dressed well. She carried herself with the quiet authority of a woman who had earned her title through merit, not charm. She was, by every objective measure, more accomplished than half the women Sterling chased.
But accomplishment wasn’t what he was hunting. Youth wasn’t either… some of his targets were her age. What he wanted was the chase. The resistance. The thrill of a woman who hadn’t yet said yes.
And Heena, who had said yes fifteen years ago and meant it, had become invisible to a man who could only see what he hadn’t yet caught.
’So what is it about Tisha Wells?’
That one lingered.
Tisha was beautiful, yes. Younger, yes. But Heena had watched Sterling pursue beautiful, younger women before and fail. Tisha was something else… a locked vault in a building full of open doors.
The kind of woman who didn’t just reject advances; she made men feel foolish for attempting them.
Sterling had been circling her for over a year, and his persistence told Heena something unsettling: he wasn’t just attracted. He was obsessed.
And tonight he had walked out of this office like a man who believed the vault was finally going to open for him.
Heena uncapped her pen. Capped it again.
Part of her hoped Tisha would gut him. Send him back down this corridor with his expensive tie between his legs and his ego in shreds.
”Let’s see if you are truly as untouchable as you claim, my dear Tisha,” Heena thought, her gaze narrowing behind her spectacles. “Or are you just like me? Frozen on the outside to hide the fact that you’re starving for a single look, a single touch that makes you feel like more than just a piece of the furniture.”
Because if even that woman could be broken down by a man like Sterling, then Heena could stop wondering what she lacked.
It wasn’t her. It was just the way men were built… to want what they didn’t have and discard what they did.
She would almost welcome that answer. At least it would end the question.
Knock. Knock.
The knock cut through her spiral like a slap.
Heena flinched, her eyes snapping toward the door.
“Who could it be at this hour?” she murmured, standing up to smooth her skirt. She felt her professional mask sliding into place with practiced ease.
She pulled the door open.
Tisha Wells stood in the corridor, her bag slung over one shoulder, her thick-framed glasses catching the hallway light.
Heena’s stomach dropped.
For one awful second, every worst-case scenario she’d ever rehearsed in the dark hours of her marriage fired at once.
’Had Sterling finally gone too far? Was Tisha here to report him? Was this the moment Tisha filed the harassment claim that would end both their careers and whatever shredded dignity Heena had left?’
The fear was a cold, sharp blade in her gut… until she noticed the expression on Tisha’s face.
Tisha wasn’t trembling with rage; she was glowing. Her lips were curved into a smile that was entirely too bright for this hour, and her eyes held a shimmering, frantic energy that Heena had never seen in a faculty meeting.
“Hello, Heena… I hope we aren’t interrupting,” Tisha said. Her voice was cheerful… dangerously so… and Heena could feel the unmistakable vibration of mischief underneath the words.
Heena felt the tension leave her shoulders in a sudden, dizzying rush. She visibly relaxed, her hand dropping from the doorframe as she let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding.
“Tisha! What a pleasant surprise,” Heena greeted, her professional mask wavering as she tried to reconcile this vibrant woman with the cold colleague she’d known for years. “It’s rare to see you wandering this far into the Finance wing so late. Nice having you here.”
“I could say the same for myself,” Tisha replied, her gaze flicking momentarily to the shadow behind her. “But it turns out there were some… unexpected developments tonight that required a bit of inter-departmental collaboration.”
It was then that Heena noticed the tall, relaxed figure stepping into the light behind Tisha.
Heena watched as the shadow behind Tisha materialized into a tall, broad-shouldered presence. Before she could process the intrusion, the young man stepped forward with an ease that felt entirely too intimate for the sterile office lighting.
“Hello, Mrs. Sterling,” Alex said.
He didn’t just nod; he reached out, his fingers closing around her hand in a greeting that was firm, warm, and lingering. The moment his skin touched hers, a sharp, electric jolt shot up Heena’s arm, settling in the pit of her stomach.
It was a sensation she hadn’t felt in years… a raw, masculine pull that made her breath hitch in a way that felt dangerously unprofessional.
For a heartbeat, Heena froze. She found herself trapped in his gaze, her analytical mind suddenly unable to calculate anything but the sheer, overwhelming heat of his proximity.
Realizing she was staring, she abruptly retracted her hand, her cheeks burning with a sudden, localized fever. She tucked her hair behind her ear, embarrassed to have been rendered speechless by a mere student.
She turned her gaze back to Tisha, her eyes narrowing with a silent, sharp question.
’Why is he here? Why would you bring him to my office at this hour?’
“Ah!” Tisha chirped, noticing the silent interrogation. She leaned against the doorframe, her posture radiating a loose, satisfied energy that was the polar opposite of her usual rigidity.
“This is Alex Hale. He’s my favorite student… and my driver these days. He’s very, very good at it.”
Tisha finished the sentence with a slow, deliberate wink that sent a fresh wave of confusion through Heena.
Every word sounded foreign and strange.
This wasn’t the “Ice Queen” she knew. This was a woman who sounded like she had just shared a delicious, private joke with the world.
Heena stared at her colleague, searching for the cold, guarded woman she had known for years and finding only this vibrant, mischievous stranger.
’A driver?’ Heena’s mind echoed the word, a faint, internal murmur that made her chest tighten.
The irony was suffocating. Sterling was out there making a fool of himself, desperate for a woman who was currently being “driven” by a boy who looked like he could dismantle a woman’s entire world with a single look.
Heena swallowed hard, the silence in the hallway suddenly feeling too small. She stepped back, gesturing toward the interior of her office.
“I… see. Well, come on in, then,” she finally said, her professional mask clinging by a thread. “If you’re here to talk about ’urgent matters,’ I suppose we should get started.”
