Hired a Gigolo, Got a Billionaire

Chapter 559 Gwen's POV "You are," I said automatically, desperately. "Stop this, Nick. This isn't funny." But even as I said it, even as the words left my mouth, they didn't feel real. They didn't feel true. There was something fundamentally wrong with them, like trying to force a puzzle piece into the wrong place. You know it doesn't fit, but you keep pushing anyway. Because suddenly, when I tried to find proof, when I searched my memories for evidence of our relationship, our engagement, anything that confirmed what I believed was true about us, I saw something else.

I saw a face that wasn't Nick's. A man with darker hair. Different eyes. A different smile. He was saying something I couldn't hear, but it made my chest tighten with an old, familiar pain. A pain I recognized even without fully understanding where it came from. Then another image layered over it. A pregnancy test in my hand. Two bright pink lines glowing under the bathroom light. I was smiling, showing it to someone standing beside me. And then came another feeling, crushing and suffocating. The decision to never get involved with anyone again.

To build walls so high around my heart that no one could ever climb them. To decide that work was safer, more reliable, more worthy of investment than people. And Nick wasn't there. He wasn't in any of those memories. He wasn't anywhere in my life. The pain exploded in my head like a bomb going off, sharp and violent, my vision blurring at the edges. "It can't be," I murmured, clutching my head, pressing my temples so hard I knew I'd leave marks. "It can't be, it can't be..." "Gwen," Nick's voice sounded too close, too urgent. "Let me explain-" But he couldn't.

made it up," he said finally, and there was so much anguish in his voice it almost hurt to hear it. Your

I managed to open my eyes enough to see him through the pounding pain. He looked shattered. Completely shattered. His face twisted with a level of

your confused brain is telling you to feel." He ran his hands through his hair so hard it looked like he was trying to rip it out, his movements frantic, almost violent with frustration. "I can't give in and sleep with someone who can't truly consent," he said, his voice cracking slightly on he last word. "Someone who believes in a lie I helped

a position to really decide that." His words reached me as if I were underwater, distorted and blurred, losing their meaning somewhere between his mouth and my ears. "And you need to know the truth," he continued, taking a step toward me, his hand reaching out as if to touch my arm before stopping halfway. "You need to know that I-" But I was getting more confused by the second. More lost in a sea of conflicting thoughts. My gaze drifted around the cabin without really seeing