Billionaire Brothers 2 : Love Has A Name (51 page)

Bundling my damp hair into a stringy mess atop my head, I sank down in the chair around my desk, leaned back and stared over at Nicole expectantly.

She gave a tentative smile. “You have a very nice office.”

“Gracias,” I said, voice clipped.

“You could do well with a vista view, though.”

Bitch.

“If I’d wanted a view, I would’ve paid someone to knock the walls out and put glass in instead. There’s nothing hard in it. And it’s most definitely not out of my reach.”

Silence stretched as I waited for the woman sitting across from me to skip the chit-chat and say whatever the hell she came here to say. But her eyes kept shifting from here to there without a word. In fact, she seemed nervous. I made her nervous? This woman was dressed to the ninth and here I was, as bland as they came, with messy damp hair, tank top and shorts, and
I
made her unnerved? She’s the one who’s got the guy. She won. I lost. What did she have to be nervous about?

On an anxiety-striated laugh, she said, “You’re not very friendly, are you?”

What in the … ? “Are you
serious
? Look, lady, you need to kill the damn tongue wagging an —”

“I broke up with Ty,” she blurted.

Ty … Ty … ah, Lovello. “And you came all the way here to tell
me
this because … ?”

“I just thought that since we’re not together anymore that —”

“I could collect his sorry ass now that you’re done with him?”

Nicole licked her lips and shifted in her seat, her fingers moving restlessly over her bedazzled purse. “Well, not really. I, ah, well, um … I came to be honest with you.”

“Honest with me about
what
exactly?”

Nicole’s golden eyes made a nervous sweep around the room again before landing back on me. “Ty never cheated on you.”

A blink was all I could afford at that.

When she saw that I was waiting for elucidation, she continued. “I’ve always told myself that Ty was mine. I’ve always loved him. But I’m sure you’ve heard how horrible his father had been to me. So I ran. Truth is, my break-up with him wasn’t
entirely
because of his father. It was also because Ty was in love with who he
thought
I was.”

Her tongue made a swift pass over her lips again as she flicked her eyes to mine. “He likes being taken care of. He’s slovenly. Likes to be comforted, and reads his Bible way too damn much. The thing is, I like being taken care of, too. I’m slovenly. I like to be comforted. And I kind of had to be the opposite of that to cater to him. Don’t get me wrong, he
did
take care of me, gave me comfort and indulged me. But, I didn’t enjoy the job of playing that wifely role for him. I was too young and I just wanted the millionaire that he was, at that time, to pamper me. I didn’t want to play the 50/50 two-way game. I guess that’s what people call being selfish?”

She heaved a heavy sigh. “You might imagine when I went to his home and heard his father utter the words ‘marriage’ and ‘wife’ — not like he was approving of me to be those things — but I got scared. Even though Ty wasn’t proposing as such, if I’d stayed with him, he probably would’ve one day done so, and I couldn’t see myself being a boring wife, cooking dinner every day and cleaning up after a man’s mess. Me, I like to shop. A lot. I like to party and eat out at restaurants, wearing the latest fashion. So you can see, I kinda got a panic attack and just left Ty.”

Nicole uncrossed her legs, then crossed them back again as she took brief respite from her tale. Maybe she was expecting me to say something, but what on earth would that be?

“Armand, my ex-fiancé, I met him a year after Ty. I didn’t love him or anything, but he gave me the pampering lifestyle that I needed, and he didn’t request anything of me but to be an attractive rose on his arm.” She snorted. “Well, that’s what I
thought
. I later discovered he was cheating on me with some average girl who cooked and did all that shit for him. He’d spend most of his evenings at her house before he came home to me. And then I thought, men seem to enjoy women who
are
women. So why not be a woman for the man whom I
do
love? As a result, I broke off the engagement with Armand and moved back here to try rekindling things with Ty; it wouldn’t be that hard. He loved me. He’d never entered another serious relationship after me, so I thought he was never over me. Except I was wrong. Again. Because I only came to find that he had a
girlfriend
.”

Shaking her head, she laughed aloud. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard Ty use that word before. He always used to refer to me by name.”

“Could you just stop calling him ‘Ty’, please?” I bit out. “It’s annoying the
shit
outta me.”

Nicole smiled. “I call him that becau —”

“I don’t care to know why you call him that,” I snapped. “Just use ‘Lovello’ here.”

Her smile faltered, and she seemed a bit daunted. “Okay, um … yeah.” Glancing at me uncertainly, she continued. “When I realized that ‘rekindling’ was almost improbable, seeing that every next word he uttered from his mouth was ‘Axia’ — Axia this, Axia that — I figured that getting him back was going to take a fight. That led to me befriending Carla. I made her plant a condom packet with missing ones in his wallet. Knowing the slipshod that he is, there’s no way you wouldn’t find them. And the way he went on about you, I knew you guys couldn’t possibly be having protected sex,” she said, raising a brow that asked for my confirmation.

All she received from me was an impassive stare, so she shrugged and carried on. “I listened out for some argument or big break-up over the condoms, but never heard Lovello speak of a fight. So I knew we had to come up with something else. That’s when I remembered his biting habits. Carla and I set up everything with those pictures, Axia. And what better time to take them than when we’re out shopping together?”

“So, you both just hooked up the minute we broke up? Is that what you’re trying to tell me? That in the very minute he learned that I was at his restaurant with someone else, he just said, ‘you know what, Nicole, we should get back together. Let’s stick our tongues down each other’s throat and rekindle our love’?” I laughed out at the hilarity of this woman’s story. “Do you expect me to believe that? Did he send you here to tell me this because things didn’t work out with you two? That a cute little story about you framing him would make me go back to him?”

Nicole’s eyes widened a fraction, her head slightly shaking as she stared at me in disbelief. “You truly don’t believe me?”

“No, Nicole. I
don’t
.”

“Do you believe that he loved you?”

“No.”

Nicole pursed her lips and looked from left to right, seemingly not knowing what to do with me. “Do you have any idea what that night was about?”

“An important family dinner was all I heard it was,” I shrugged.

On a sharp, exasperated inhalation, she pinned me with her golden eyes. “Axia, Lovello was going to propose to you that night. The pictures that you saw of us, we were in a jewelry store shopping for a ring. For
you.
“

Unblinking, I stared at her for several heartbeats, my pulse firing away, until I caught myself. “Well that was a stupid idea. Someone else beat him to it,” I dismissed in a bored tone, even though on the inside I was screaming:
Propose?! Propose?! Holy stinking shit!
Trevillo never gave me that tidbit.

Nicole threw her hands up in the air. “Oh my God, you’re such a
bitch
!”

“Thank you,” I evilly smiled.

“Did you hurt him on purpose?” she demanded, running me over with a cold stare.

Now that was laughable. “If that story you just told me is true, then I think the person who hurt him is you, Nicole.”

I got up and went to fetch a bottled water from the fridge, taking one back for Nicole, too. There wasn’t a moment’s hesitation from her as she opened the bottle and downed half the water in one gulp. Contrition colored her cheeks, as if she was now realizing that if Lovello had been feeling any hurt from the break-up — which I highly doubted he was — then it was on her account.

“That night,” she started again. The woman really came to
talk
. “I didn’t know what was happening. He just popped up at my apartment with a dress, hurrying me into it. He wasn’t even formally dressed, and I knew he should’ve been suited to that occasion. He rushed me to his car and drove like a maniac to the restaurant. It’s when I got there and saw you, and heard everyone at the table talking about the irony of you getting engaged to your ex-boyfriend on the same night Lovello was to propose, that I realized I was being used as a jealousy bullet. But I didn’t care, ‘cause I was thinking to myself that I’d won him back.”

“So you’re telling me that you had those bite marks on your skin and Love didn’t notice them? All this just sounds like a bunch of bullshit, to be honest.”

“No. I always had them covered when I’m around him.” Irritation was evident in her voice. “I just don’t understand why you’re so resistant to the truth. He
didn’t
cheat on you, Axia. He saw the bite barks, yes, but that’s
after
you left the restaurant. Trev stormed back into the restaurant after whatever chat he had with you, and just tore off my shawl, checking my shoulders. When he saw them, he got pissed, called Lovello a ‘blockheaded asshole’ and left. He hasn’t spoken to me since.”

“And Love?”

“He just sat there staring at me for what felt like a lifetime. Like he’d zoned out completely. Then out of the blue, he grabbed me and dragged me out of the restaurant. I thought he was mad at me and was going to curse at me for what I did. But instead, he shoved me into his car, drove me home and fucked the daylights outta me. He was so aggressive with me, I couldn’t even … God.”

A wave of nausea washed over me at the thought of Lovello having sex with Nicole. I’d had a preview with their tongue-tying in the restaurant. But actually having sex?

Stomach churning, I shot up and bolted to the bathroom as my lunch made its way up my throat. Over and over, I heaved my tripes out into the toilet, then dropped my head on the seat, feeling like I’d just been flogged. I felt debilitated, lethargic, with a sudden desire to sleep into tomorrow. But, alas, Nicole was here, so I flushed the toilet and freshened up.

“Are you okay?” Nicole asked in a genuinely concerned voice when I emerged from the bathroom.

“Yeah,” I croaked, dropping my half-alive body down in the chair. “You were saying?”

Nicole made a curious narrowing of her eyes, but asked nothing more of my well-being and continued in the same vein. “What I’m saying is, I think you need to save Ty — um, Lovello. I know earlier I said that
I
broke up with him, but I don’t think we were even together to begin with. I rarely see him, he sleeps around, and I’m always the one to initiate sex with him.” Another wave of nausea. “I came home one day to find him jackhammering that popstar Netta Williams or whatever her name is on the kitchen counter. He didn’t even care that I walked in on them, which pissed off that pop chick and she —”

“Hold up.
Home
? So you moved in with him?”

“Yes. Well … kind of.”

“Wow. You must’ve had a field day burning my stuff,” I mumbled, more to myself than to her as I gobbled down some water in the hope of easing my queasy stomach. Although I’d packed all of Lovello’s things and sent them to him, he’d never sent back even an underwear of mine. Now I’m thinking that it’s probably because this conniving bitch burned them. Hell, he might have helped her.

“Your stuff?” she asked, bewildered. “There was nothing for you there. The penthouse was so cold that I —”

“The penthouse?
That’s
where you moved into?”

“Yes. His home,” she said, frowning at me as if I were daft. “Does he have another?”

A shrug jerked my shoulders. If she didn’t know that the penthouse wasn’t his home, then I wasn’t going to be the one to tell her she’d moved into his debauchery den. She was the one up for chatting and spilling all kinds of details. Not me. I was just the listener.

“Anyway, he’s not over you, Axia. And I think you should at least try to get back with him. As indifferent as you’re being right now, I know you loved him. And you don’t get over someone you
love
in five weeks.”

I raised an ‘oh really’ brow at her, but she ignored me with a roll of her eyes. “Likewise, Lovello tries to play it off by sleeping around and overworking at his company. He prays longer than usual and he listens to that Chris Brown song all.the.god.damn.
time
.”

I couldn’t help laughing at her frustration. “What song?”