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.

struggling for words, tripping over them as if each one weighed a ton and he didn't have the strength to carry them all at once. " "You made it up," he said finally, and there was so much anguish in his voice it

I had to let your memory come back naturally, in its own time." 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 real suffering that went far beyond anything that could be faked. "But I can't keep doing

it out, his movements frantic, almost violent with frustration. "I can't give in and sleep with someone who can't truly consent,"

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