Page 23 of Billionaire Dragon King’s Rejected Mate

He listened as she gave her ideas for the water park in Clearwater. Her presentation was solid and innovative. It was well-structured but he dismantled it anyway. He would find a way to incorporate her suggestions later on.

“The concept lacks vision,” he said with an even voice and an unreadable expression as he stood at the head of the room. He deliberately fixed his eyes on the screen instead of her. “Your projections don’t account for peak-hour variability, and the safety redundancies are optimistic at best.”

The room went quiet.

He could feel the subtle tension as the team registered the criticism and recalibrated their perception in real time based on his assessment.

Randi didn’t speak at first. She didn’t interrupt or defend her presentation, nor did she push back the way she usually would.

And that was what made him look at her just for a second. But that was all the time it took to see the hurt.

Not dramatic or obvious to anyone who didn’t know what to look for, but it was unmistakable in the way her expression froze and the way her grip tightened almost imperceptibly on the edge of the table.

It hit him hard because he had put it there. Something inside him recoiled with a surge of heat and fury that had nothing to do with anyone else in the room and everything to do with the deliberate damage he had just caused.

Idiot.

The word wasn’t spoken aloud, but it rang just as clearly.

And beneath it, his dragon didn’t whisper this time. It roared. A deep, furious sound that tore through the carefully constructed control he relied on, directed straight at him, sharp and condemning and utterly unrelenting.

You did this.

His jaw tightened as the weight of it settled heavy in his chest as the meeting continued around him. Voices blurred into background noise he barely registered.

Because for the first time in a long time, he wasn’t thinking about strategy or even the consequences of crossing lines he had no business crossing. He was thinking about the look in her eyes.

He was already deeper than he had ever intended to go.

And he had just made it worse.

Chapter 10

Randi

Randi had known that public criticism came with the job and that proposals were meant to be tested and questioned. She had seen it happen to others and had even participated in the critiques. Working as a team meant that sometimes things needed to be dismantled for the sake of something stronger.

But nothing, not the late nights or the quiet warnings she had given herself about working under someone like Chance, had prepared her for the surgical precision with which he took hers apart while refusing to even look at her.

It wasn’t just what he said. It was how easily and thoroughly he had said it. He sounded almost vindictive.

He had deliberately kept his gaze fixed anywhere but on her despite his usual style of maintaining eye contact that she had heard others complain of. They considered it an act of intimidation that you’d better have your facts straight. But right now, he acted as if acknowledging her existence required more effort than he was willing to give.

She just sat there at the table with her notes neatly arranged in front of her, her spine straight, and her expression composed through sheer force of will. Meanwhile inside, something twisted tighter and tighter with each clipped observation and no eye contact at all.

“The concept lacks vision.”

Even as she struggled to listen to other topics being discussed, those words haunted her thoughts. The part that really made her shake her head at herself was that she hadn’t even argued. Not because she couldn’t or because she didn’t have answers, or data, or a dozen ways to push back against his points and force the conversation into something more balanced.

But because the moment she opened her mouth, she knew it wouldn’t matter. Not when he was like this, so she stayed quiet.

That was the humiliation. Not just that he had undercut her in front of the entire team, but that he had reduced her to silence in a room where she had fought so hard to have a voice.

By the time the meeting adjourned, the air felt thick with the kind of polite discomfort that no one ever addressed directly. Chairs shifted, papers were gathered, and her coworkers avoided eye contact just enough to pretend nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Randi moved with them and collected her things with steady hands that didn’t quite match the unsteady rhythm of her thoughts.

She didn’t look at him. With absolute will power she refused to. She already knew what she would, or wouldn’t, find in his eyes.

She stepped away from the table and headed toward the door with some part of her hoping that he would call her back. Maybe apologize or at least explain. But there was not a peep as she walked across the room. That absence where acknowledgment told her everything she needed to know.