Sweet Romance13 min read
My Unexpected Nephew, My Billionaire, and a Lost Bracelet
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I was not looking for trouble that morning.
I was walking down the street with my empty hands and a head full of nothing more romantic than a mental list of tasks, when a tiny body clung to my calf and a small voice chirped, "Mama!"
I looked down, baffled.
"Hey—" I reached to pry the hand off gently, because what else do you do when a child latches on to you in the morning?
"Where's your family?" I asked in soft, practiced tones.
The boy's face was round and clean, like a dumpling with cheeks. He sniffled valiantly and said, "They lost me."
"Lost you?" I echoed, part of me already imagining calling the police, filling out forms, reading bureaucratic brochures in my head.
Before I could decide to take him to the station, a man appeared as if pulled straight from a magazine.
"Little man!" he called.
He said it in such a low, melodic voice that I had to look.
He was tall and lean, suit sharp enough to cut glass, jawline that seemed custom-made. He had the kind of face you notice in public and then wonder why you'd never seen it before. I couldn't help the small, traitorous thrill that raced through me.
"Is he your son?" I asked, feeling the absurdity of the question as soon as it crossed my lips.
"He isn't my son," the boy answered for him, in earnest, solemn tones. "He's my uncle."
"It doesn't add up," I muttered. "He must be a kidnapper."
The man said nothing at first. He looked at the boy, then at me, and the silence between us stretched precisely long enough for me to register how good- looking he was.
"His name is Rowan," the man said, answering my unasked question about the child.
"Rowan Corey," the boy corrected him. "I'm Rowan. He's Uncle."
"Uncle?" I said again, hopeful and skeptical at once.
"He's a single uncle," Rowan announced solemnly, as if that fact solved everything.
"Single?" I echoed, looking between them. I couldn't tell if I was disappointed that he was taken or offended that I had assumed a thing about him from three syllables of name and a look. "Then why—"
"I'm Bianca," I said, kneeling to Rowan, feeling my heart blip twice when he squinted up at me like I was sunlight.
"You could call me Auntie," I told him, because some small part of me liked the way it sounded.
"Okay!" He chirped.
Uncle managed a smile that was tiny and wistful and then, like a man aware of time, he led Rowan away without exchanging numbers.
I watched him go, puzzled and a little deflated. He didn't leave a card. He didn't leave a phone number. He left a fragrance and a memory.
I went to work thinking of little else.
At the office I had just enough time to water my chipped little pot of ivy and to mindlessly open my browser to a solitaire game when the glass doors of the lobby parted and in walked a tall figure—Uncle—and a small round face.
"Hi, Auntie!" Rowan shouted across the lobby as if we'd all been waiting for him.
My mouth dropped open.
"Hello," I said, flushing.
"He's a big client," my boss, Graham Collins, said with a practiced smirk. "Bianca, you're assigned. Make him feel welcome."
The words landed like a weight. I had been a new hire for only a couple months. My heart thudded. I'd been the kind of recruit who did rote work and tried not to notice the men's eyes. Now, the man who'd nearly knocked me off my feet in the street was sitting across from me in a meeting room and my responsibility was to charm him.
"He's just a big client?" I asked Rowan in the hallway, bewildered.
"He's my Uncle Raymond," Rowan said and then, piping up from the meeting room, Uncle—Raymond Castillo—offered a short tilt of his head and the faintest smile.
For the next hours I shuffled through a strange haze of work and stolen glances. Raymond was polite and contained. Rowan was a living merry-go-round, bright and impulsive, tugging me like a second sun.
"Bianca," Rowan said at lunch, sitting on my lap despite protests from the orderly servers in the high-street burger place, "You and Uncle should get married."
I choked on a fry.
"Rowan," Raymond said calmly, as if neutralizing a bomb. "We are family."
"Not that kind of married!" Rowan corrected. "You should 'get' her. Then your company is hers."
I stared at them both, half laughing and half mortified. The lunch went on like that—me fumbling with a fork, Raymond alternating between amused and utterly unreadable. When Rowan whispered that Raymond had probably never eaten a burger, Raymond's expression softened for the first time.
"Then let's get a burger," he said.
That was how my ridiculous day began.
"Bianca?" Graham slid me an envelope later that afternoon. "Treat them well. If Raymond is pleased, this means a lot for the company."
"Of course." I laughed, though my insides trembled. "I'll be perfect."
The next day Raymond and Rowan reconsidered my wardrobe.
"Put that one on," Rowan commanded, thrusting a dress at me in the high-end boutique as if he were a tiny dictator.
Raymond stood with his palm against his chin, an inscrutable judge. The dress had a tag that represented half my monthly income. I could have said no. I did not.
"Why are you buying this for me?" I asked finally, a stupid, childish panic in my voice.
"Because it looks good on you," Raymond said simply.
"What if I can never repay—"
"You're not repaying me," he said. "You're not buying my favor. Wear it because you like it."
I had never been treated this way by anyone in my life. Petrochemical magnates gave me polite nods; ex-boyfriends had taken and spent. Raymond's casual generosity felt like a new color.
We came to know each other in fragments: lunches that stretched surprisingly long, the way Raymond always inspected my mood as if it were a precious instrument, Rowan's fierce loyalty that made me feel important in a way I had not allowed myself to be.
"Do you like her?" Rowan asked one evening, toes squished against my calf.
"Do I?" Raymond smiled, warm and quiet. "Yes."
"Well, then," Rowan said with an air of finality, "You have to tell her."
If only it were that easy.
For all the ease between us, there was still a rhythm of awkwardness—a push and tug. I liked him enough to notice the small things, the way he removed my jacket, the way he shielded me from cold air without making a show of it. He was not demonstrative; he was precise.
At a water park one bright morning—Rowan's insistence again—Rowan flung himself at me in the artificial waves and I clung to a life ring while Raymond stood in the next lane, hands broad and solid. A wave did what waves do and flipped me. For an instant I tasted chlorine and panic and then a large pair of arms wrapped around me.
"You're okay?" Raymond asked, voice like a soft instruction.
For a ridiculous, embarrassing moment, his nose bled.
"I didn't hit you," I babbled. "Did I?"
"It's fine," he said, the hand at my back steadying me as if nothing else in the world mattered. His face flushed a bright, ridiculous red that made me want to laugh and fuss and hold on at the same time.
"Maybe you're allergic to me," I teased, though my heart thudded like a small animal.
He gave me a look that was only half playful. "Maybe," he admitted.
By the pool that night, under the sodium lights and the hush of the closing park, Rowan ran off to chase an ice cream truck and left us alone. I wrapped myself in a towel he handed me, feeling oddly secure.
"Bianca," Raymond said suddenly.
"Yes?"
He searched my eyes. "I like you."
A thousand words telescoped into two small syllables, and the world tipped.
"Do you mean—" I began.
"Yes," he said again. "I mean I like you very much."
He kissed me then, just like in the movies only softer and shyer. He smelled faintly of chlorine and lemon and something else that made me dizzy. When his lips parted, he looked vulnerable.
"Stay the night," he mouthed.
Later that night, in the small hotel room he'd booked for us near the park, I woke to the quiet of the bed and the soft hum of a city that had fallen asleep. My wrist felt lighter—my grandmother's bracelet was missing. Panic fluttered sharp and small.
"Raymond," I whispered, because there was no one else to say it to.
He was awake in an instant, worry knitting his brow. "I will find it," he said.
"I'll go look," I said. "I can't just lose this."
He took my hand and squeezed it with a pressure that told me he understood the weight of something sentimental.
"I'll put out a notice," he said. "I'll pay a reward. We'll find it."
He kept his promise.
The next morning his voice came across the hotel room's small TV and through the loudspeakers of the water park: a calm, corporate announcement offering a reward for a jade-beaded bracelet. Ten thousand dollars, he said, later rounded up in a smaller, more personal voice when he found me in the hall, "If anyone brings it to the front desk, I will personally thank them."
People turned and looked. Rowan clapped with glee. My cheeks burned and then softened into something like gratitude.
It wasn't just the money or the public gesture. It was the thought. He might have hired people to search. He might have put paid staff to pore over footage. Instead, he made the offer a human thing, a hope broadcast to find a sentimental tether back to my grandmother.
That night, when I still had not found the bracelet and had nearly given up, I went back to the pool area. The lights made his wet shirt cling to broad shoulders. He was in the shallow end, hands moving under the water, methodically searching.
"You're soaked," I said, a little incredulous.
"I'll get sick," he said without looking up. "But if it means I can help you not lose what you love, I'll do it."
It was stupid and romantic and terribly earnest. He found it after midnight, stuck between two slabs of stones by the pool's edge, where I'd likely lost it in the waves. He strode up and put it on my wrist as if it were a private coronation.
"How did you find it?" I asked, throat tight.
"Because we don't let things that matter fall away," he said. "Not if I can help it."
It was the start of something.
There was sweetness—then there was an underside of the life I left behind.
I had once been involved with a man who took me for granted. Tucker Nilsson. He was flattering and lithe, the kind of person who could wrap you around a finger and never admit he had. He had been the first real disappointment in my adult life. He had taken my money, my patience, my loyalty. When I caught him with someone else, he had the gracelessness to accuse me of being possessive.
I believed I'd closed that chapter.
I was wrong.
Two months into the precarious bubble of new love, Tucker stepped into the lobby of a charity gala that Raymond's company had sponsored. I saw him across a sea of elegant guests, his tie undone like a threat, his smug smile a cold thing.
"Bianca," he said when he reached me, voice slurred with cheap condescension. "You look... different."
"Don't," I said. "Tucker, don't speak to me."
He laughed, loud and fake. "Oh—still as dramatic. I saw the pictures on social media. Getting cozy with rich men now?"
The room, a ballroom full of contributors and philanthropists, froze only for a breathing moment before gossip started to simmer. Raymond, who had been across the way, turned and walked up without a hint of haste. His hand found mine and squeezed—not possessively, but grounding.
"Tucker," he said, voice even, but with an undercurrent of steel. "Leave her alone."
Tucker sneered. "Oh look who it is. The sugar daddy's friend."
"What are you doing here?" I demanded.
He took a step forward, invading my space in a way I hadn't allowed for a long time. "I came to see if you were... doing okay. You always were the kind of woman who liked to trade up."
I felt the room tilt. Voices rose, a tangle of whispers. People turned their faces like sunflowers. Graham Collins froze and then set down his champagne glass with a sound like a gunshot.
Raymond's face changed. The polite veneer cracked and sharp lines of anger flashed.
"That is enough," Raymond said.
Tucker laughed. "Who, you?"
Raymond's voice did not rise, but it carried. "You will not speak to her that way."
Tucker's face was a mixture of ... annoyance and bravado. "I can say whatever I like. She used to be mine."
"She is with me now," Raymond said. He did not shout. He did not need to. He signaled to someone across the floor—security staff moved, a quiet current—and then he walked Tucker toward the balcony where the city's night seamed itself into lights.
"What are you doing?" I whispered, my voice small.
"Making sure you don't have to handle this," Raymond said.
Outside, under the cold light, the crowd's faces were visible through the open terrace doors. Many of them were looking. A few took out phones. Row upon row of whispers traveled through the room like a low tide.
Tucker, sensing a captive audience, tried a smile. "Very dramatic. Always been dramatic."
Raymond stopped. "Do you think you can speak about her like that?" he asked, slow and clean.
"She left me," Tucker said. "She dumped me and moved on."
"Did you leave her?" Raymond asked, tone like a scalpel.
The rally of onlookers and shuttered gazes held breath. Tucker faltered slightly; he was not used to being challenged with a precise blade.
"I didn't take everything, apparently," Tucker said, gesturing. "But that's on her."
"She worked. She cared for a family. She saved and trusted you," Raymond said. "You used her."
Tucker's eyes flicked to mine. I don't know why I gave him the satisfaction of feeling seen. Maybe I wanted him to understand, or maybe I wanted to close a door properly.
"You used me," I said. "You used my kindness and my money and told me I was unreasonable when I asked for loyalty."
One by one the phrases came. "You slept with women in my flat," I said. "You lied to me. You spent money that wasn't yours. You told me I was the problem."
Tucker's face hardened. He opened his mouth to retort.
"Stop," said Raymond.
"Or what?" Tucker spat.
Raymond stepped forward and, with the coolness of a man who had never been publicly humiliated before and had decided it would be ugly to allow it, placed his hand over Tucker's mobile as if to corral the phone from a man about to stage a spectacle. He did not strike him. He did not degrade him. He presented a mirror.
"In front of all these people you will tell the truth," Raymond said.
"A few turned profiles snapped pictures," someone joked in a sharp whisper. A couple of phones recorded.
Tucker sneered at the thought of being vulnerable. But Raymond didn't scold or scream; he invited witnesses. He forced exposition in the most civilized way.
"Tell them who you are," Raymond commanded, "and tell them what you did."
Tucker's bravado was a thin coat. He tried to shrug. "I don't need to tell you anything."
"Do it now," Raymond insisted. "Or I'm going to tell them for you."
The threat hung like a bell.
Slowly, with a composure that belonged to him alone, Raymond laid out what Tucker had done before our eyes. He was not accusatory in a small way; he was forensic. He narrated facts. "Tucker Nilsson used Bianca's trust to fund nights with women from an app," Raymond said. "He withdrew funds from her account while she slept. He lied when she confronted him."
Tucker's face contorted in stages: disbelief, denial, anger, panic. He tried to laugh it off. His audition for charm faltered.
"Who told you that?" Tucker barked.
"Does it matter?" Raymond asked, and then he drew out photos, receipts, and messages he'd had access to—evidence that was deliberate and surgical. "You can deny it, but look at this."
They were placed on the small outdoor table like evidence in a neat pile. People gasped. A couple of tech managers from the charity who had cameras checked the timestamps and nodded. I watched his face go from arrogant to shrinking, like a deflating balloon.
"You—" he spluttered.
"Explain this," Raymond said. "Explain the nights, the transfers. Explain how you called her 'paranoid' and 'possessive' while opening other doors."
Tucker reached for some retort but could not find words. Around the terrace the crowd's mood had shifted. It was no longer amusement. It had sharpened into moral clarity.
"She's not the problem," Raymond continued, voice flat. "You're not a victim here. You're someone who thought himself entitled. Now explain that to these people."
Tucker's bravest face was gone. He began the cycle of a fallen man: denial, insistence, then a broken sort of pleading. "I—it's complicated," he offered, voice shrinking. "I didn't mean to—"
"You meant to," Raymond said. "You meant to for as long as it suited you. You didn't stop."
People began to murmur. Phones were out. Someone took a video as Tucker tried to muster composure and failed. "This is the man who was with Bianca," a woman said to her friend. "Ugh."
Then Graham, who had watched everything like a hawk, stepped in. He didn't shout. He simply said, "Tucker Nilsson is no longer welcome in any of my company's events."
The words were small and immediate, but they were freer than blood. The room's social currency withdrew from Tucker in a tide. People who had been milling about moved away as if a scent had become unbearable.
Tucker tried to salvage dignity. "This is—this is private," he said, but the phrase had lost its power.
"Private used to be your refuge," I said. "Not anymore."
The rest of it was an unraveling. Journalists at the gala—there were always a few—took notes. People I barely knew leaned in to tell me they were sorry. Emails would follow. My phone would buzz with contacts offering solidarity. In the crowd, a woman I hadn't met before simply smiled at me and said, "Good."
Tucker's expression collapsed. He began to beg.
"Please," he said, voice thinner than I had ever heard it. "Please don't do this."
"Why should I?" I asked.
He reached for me, an old, reflexive move. I stepped back.
People clapped, weirdly—an awkward, sharp applause as the scene closed like a box. The sound felt like a benediction.
He left the gala with no allies, no whispers of sympathy. He left with his reputation flattened under the weight of quiet facts. That night he became small.
It was not violent. It was not theatrical in the trashy way soaps are. It was a civilized dismantling in public—a correction with witnesses. His arrogance had been the weapon. Public scrutiny was the scalding water that revealed the falseness.
Friends who had flitted in and out of his life looked at him differently. Business acquaintances withdrew their introductions. The social networks he had mined dried up. His pleas later were messages with read receipts. People had seen the truth.
In the following days, small consequences arrived like precise drops: a few business calls went unanswered; invitations stopped. People discussed him in sober office whispers. He tried to show up at my workplace to apologize, but Graham met him at the door and quietly informed him that the company had severed all ties. Tucker left that evening with something heavier than humiliation: the understanding that he had burned bridges that no charm could reassemble.
It was not revenge as spectacle. It was a slow and public accounting. He was deposed by truth.
After that, my world did not completely reset. But Raymond stayed: patient, humble, and oddly shy. He liked to tease me about the awkward things he remembered: my car-window lipstick rituals, my loud laugh, all the real, messy bits of me that had nothing to do with the sleek life he usually inhabited.
"Do you regret making that public?" I asked him once, months later, on a balcony that washed the city lights under our feet.
"No," he said. "He hurt you. He needed to see that the world does not owe him shelter for his cruelty."
"And you?" I prodded. "Do you regret kissing me in the pool that night?"
He smiled, ear slightly pink. "Not even a little."
We grew into each other in small, clumsy ways. I learned the difference between being seen and being paraded. I learned how someone with the power to buy anything chose instead to invest in things that money couldn't buy: time, respect, the refusal to let someone die in their own deception.
"Will you marry me?" he asked one evening, not with a ring or a speech, but with a single tender question after a quarrel about the way he arranged his shirts.
"Maybe," I said, laughing. "But only if you stop being so terrible at hiding your nosebleeds."
He pretended offense. Rowan giggled. The world, which used to feel complicated and sharp, had acquired a small warmth.
When I am asked about that morning on the street, about how a boy threw himself at my ankle and turned my life colorfully sideways, I tell the truth: I thought I was rescuing him, and instead I was rescued.
And sometimes, late at night, when the city hums and Raymond's hand is warm in mine, I look at the jade beads on my wrist and wonder how little things—a mislaid piece of jewelry, a child's optimistic matchmaking—can alter the path of everything.
The End
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