Dating A British Billionaire (BWWM Romance) (8 page)

“No. Don’t.”

I froze with my hands on the coffee grounds. My heart pounded so hard, I could hear it in my ears. “Ed...” I started, turning around to face him.

He had taken a couple of steps towards the kitchen, but other than that, he was still in the same defensive position he had been in for the last five minutes. He raised a hand up at me. “Don’t say anything. I ask the questions and you tell me the answers.”

I winced at this. His cutting voice caught me off guard. A piercing pain shot through my torso, landing in the very pit of my gut. “Okay, well just… If you could let me explain…”

He slammed his fist against my counter.

I jumped at the sound.

“You had months to explain on your own accord and you neglected to.”

“I’m sorry,” I cried. Even coming out of my mouth it felt like a useless attempt at a flat apology.

“For what, exactly? Please tell me because I have no idea how you even planned for this to go.”

“I didn’t mean...”

“For me to find out?”

I dropped the bag of coffee on the counter and took a step towards him.

He immediately stepped away, his movement resembling something like a distrustful lion.

“No,” I bowed my head, drowning in my own shame. “I just didn’t know how to tell you.”

“You didn’t know how to tell me?” he demanded.

I approached him all in one stride, wrapping my arms around him. His body remained rigid and unresponsive. He was cold to my touch and I could almost feel the repulsion in his every muscle. He was rejecting me in the most primitive way. “No, I didn’t and for a while, I didn’t think that it would matter. You were just this billionaire playboy. You were fixated with me, but I didn’t think it would last.”

He shrugged me off of him with one violent movement.

I stumbled backwards, my back slamming into the counter. In the pang of discomfort that followed, my tears finally managed to escape, streaming down my face. I had been so stupid. Even now, listening at my own words leave my lips, my justifications for things hardly mattered and what half-explanations I managed to muster did nothing to absolve me of this action. Through my blurry vision, I could see that Edward’s jaw was as set as ever. He barely flinched at the obvious distress on my face.

He didn’t care.

“I’m just a billionaire playboy?” he asked, his voice sounding strained, as if he had expelled it from knotted vocal chords.

I gulped. It was the worst thing I could have said, but if I had known that before the words left my lips, I never would have uttered them. I had no idea what the right thing would have been, or if it even existed in the first place. “No. I didn’t mean that.”

“That’s what you said,” he snapped.

I released a huff of breath. “God, I am so sorry.”

“Is that what it was?”

I shook my head even though I did not yet fully understand the accusation.

“You just weren’t taking me seriously.” He nodded, his lips folded into a disgusted frown.

Oh God, “No, no.” I frantically shook my head, but it didn’t seem to be doing much good.

“If you believed I loved you, why would you keep your family from me?”

“I wasn’t keeping them from you!” My voice broke in the lie.

“What do you call this?” he demanded, his hands outstretched to either side of him.

“I was waiting for the right time!” I yelled back. I wasn’t entirely sure if this was the truth. Was I waiting for the right time? Did I actually believe that time would ever truly come?

“We’re engaged! The right time has come and gone.”

My stomach rolled with the mere thought of what I would have to say next. “I just thought you’d leave me if you knew.”

“How did you think you were going to be able to keep this from me?”

I shook my head, staring down at my bare feet, my red toenails. “I thought you’d leave me.” The thing was that now he knew and there was nothing I could say or do to take back the way that he found out, or to make this any less true. I was damaged, used goods. I had been living in a fantasy world. I pretended that I could keep myself away from him; that he was only a client. But I was so in love with him that I could never bring myself to leave his world.

He grasped my shoulders with both of hands. He knew he expected me to look at him. I knew he wanted me to own up to what I had done; to openly receive whatever criticism that he could give me, but I couldn’t bring myself to look up and into his eyes, to see the anger, or worse, the hurt that filled him up.

“So you lied to me?” he roared, grasping my shoulders and shaking me. “About your own daughter?”

“You would never want me like this,” I pleaded, breaking out of his grip and turning away.

“Who are you to tell me what I want?”

I faced him once more. I knew, standing there in my kitchen, wearing his shirt, staring at his almost-naked self, that there was nothing to hide behind anymore. I didn’t have the heels that made me feel ten feet tall, nor was I wearing the lipstick that hid my frowns. I wasn’t in a far off restaurant in central London where my own address hardly mattered. I was right here, stuck in the reality of it all, and I couldn’t lie to him anymore. “You fell in love with some girl in heels and a four thousand pound dress. I didn’t have the courage to tell you that girl doesn’t exist.”

“What are you saying to me?”

Waves of regret washed over me, the weight of so many bad decisions made at once. “That I can’t do this.” There were more secrets; more things I couldn’t bear to let him find out. It was better to run now than to have to face his reaction when he got to know the real me. He would never stay, which was why I had to push him out now. “I can’t marry you.” It was the hardest thing I ever had to do. “I can’t be with you.” When I finally looked up at him again, his face had turned a steady shade of red. His eyes were bloodshot, but when he reached out to me, I stepped out of his way. “I can’t be swayed on this.”

“I wanted to marry you.” His voice was as brittle as dried grass and his eyes were filled with tears just waiting to spill over. “I thought… I thought I won you.”

The lump in my throat was so large, I could hardly talk around it. My whole world was spinning. “That’s just the problem.” Even then, it felt like a lie. “You think I’m prize to be won, a perfect golden trophy. I’m not. I’m flawed. And I can’t do this.”

He huffed out a quick breath. There was nothing more to say and he wouldn’t dream of begging.

So, he left.

That night, it was back to work, but leaving my ring at home was like walking out of the door without my own hand.

Chapter 13 – Nisha

I woke up the next morning missing something. My eyes opened to one of those rare sunny mornings in London, but I couldn’t bring myself to care. I had hardly had anything to eat at dinner the night before so my stomach growled ferociously, but I couldn’t bring myself to crave anything. As I made it to my bathroom, I remembered the events of the night before. Everything from visiting my daughter before work and not being able to get past my mother’s threshold to almost breaking out into full–on sobs in front of my client. Thinking back to it, I was almost certain I had lost him as a client. But I didn’t care. As I searched the bathroom counter for my toothbrush, my eyes honed in on that perfect oval diamond engagement ring. I gaze at the way the diamond caught the light streaming in from the small window above my toilet. The event from earlier that day came crashing down on me.

My stomach lurched at the image of Edward’s face when he first saw my daughter. The confusion…the hurt. There was no undoing that. I doubled over, tears pouring out of my eyes as I clutched the edge of the counter. I could not believe this. I couldn’t believe myself. I couldn’t believe Edward and I were done; that that fantastical part of my life had ceased to exist. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t handle it. I wouldn’t.

I washed my face with cold water and blew the brains out of my nose before hurriedly brushing my teeth and making my way out of the room. “Valerie!” I yelled as I entered the main room of my flat. Even at that distance, I could hear her singing to herself in the shower.

I nodded to myself, a smile playing on my lips. She was getting loads better about getting herself up and dressed in the morning.

“Yes, Mum!” she called back.

“Nothing! Just make sure you wash your ears.” That dialogue alone was enough to make me feel emotionally spent. When I got back to my room, I sat on my bed for what felt like ages, thinking through all of the things that had just happened to me. I tried to imagine everything about Edward from his smile to his witty sense of humor, all the while trying to forget everything about him from his smile to his witty sense of humor. It was all too much for my mind to handle and yet not thinking about it at all seemed like a far worse option.

Eventually, I checked my clock to find that I had completely run out of time to lament about my life choices. Valerie was going to be late for school if I didn’t get her going. So, I stood up and made my way back to my bathroom, where I covered the bags under my eyes with foundation, applied eyeliner then spent the rest of the time desperately wishing there was something I could do about the sadness in my heart.

An hour later, I had dropped Valerie off at school and had the whole day to myself. The old me would have loved that idea. I would have gone to central London, found a nice green area and contemplated my possible future. But that day, I knew exactly what, and who my future consisted of, and that it was quickly slipping away. Somewhere between my croissant and my third Americano, I realized that I couldn’t go on like this. I couldn’t last another day, another moment even, away from Edward. He never gave me a chance to explain because I wouldn’t let him.

So, I stood up and speed walked to the next subway station, my apology, my explanation, my plea playing on loop in the back of my head.

“Hi, I’m here to see Edward?” I had never actually encountered his secretary before, a very sterile-looking woman with eyes like she had a million goals and aspirations.

“Oh, hello, Nisha.” She shot me one of those ‘I’m-not-really-thrilled-to-see-you faces’ then picked up her phone to call me in.

I stood there for one long, excruciating moment longer, while she said, “Nisha is in to see you… No I don’t bloody know what she wants… what ring?...oh that? …Yeah, it’s on her finger…”

I took my hand off of the desk, feeling oddly self-conscious.

“Look, I still have to work on that speech you sent me, and get the memos out for the holiday party. I don’t have time for this. Just come out and see her for yourself.” With that, she hung up the phone and shot me a tight smile.

My lips stretched into some sort of replica of her facial expression as I stepped away from her. Luckily, I only had to wait another short moment before his door clicked open. I watched Edward walk all the way to the front desk, before he even looked at me. His teeth ground together in a movement that looked like he was flexing his jaw. The sleeves of his button down had been rolled up to his elbows and his hair lacked the dress I had become accustomed to.

“I told you to tell everyone that I wasn’t in,” he said to the secretary in a subdued voice.

She shot me a loaded looked before answering him with, “I didn’t think you meant her…”

It was only then that Edward looked up to face me. His eyelids drooped low and his jaw remained clenched. “Come,” he said, before turning around and leading me into his office.

Although I had been in the big room countless times before, entering it at that moment made me feel very much like an outsider. I didn’t wait for an invitation from him, but simply sat down in the chair on the other side of his desk. Much to my surprise, instead of taking a seat across from me, he went to stand in front of his window, completely refusing to even look at me.

“Ed?”

“Don’t bother returning the ring. I don’t want it.”

I gulped. “I haven’t come to return anything.”

I watched him nod with his back to me. “So why have you come?”

“I wanted to apologize.”

He pressed his hands against the window seal, bending slightly over. He sucked in a deep breath before replying with, “What’s done is done.”

“I wanted to tell you about Valerie, but I was afraid you wouldn’t want me.”