Broken: A Billionaire Love Story (7 page)

This bitch, he thought. She doesn’t know the first thing about suffering if she thinks I’m not alone in doing it.

That thought was so vitriolic, so vehement, that it shocked Shane. She was just there to help, part of him said. You don’t have to bring name-calling into the equation.

“All I ask,” she continued, “before we meet next time, is that you go to the meetings we have here and see if you can recognize any commonalities between the people you meet and yourself. That’s all.”

“And don’t drink.”

“Well,” she shrugged. “That’s not really a problem so long as you’re here, is it?”

As far as Shane went, the jury was still out on that.

They talked a little more after that—what his overall life goals were. What he wanted to be, whether he had any aspirations as a child. He told her about his poetry, and she seemed pleasantly surprised, asking him how much he wrote.

“Not very much at all, lately.”

This was an understatement. Ever since the fire, there had only been snippets, all lost whenever his pants rotted away and shed from his body. But still, lost in those books at school, with all those words in his head—that was the last time he had ever felt truly happy.

He told her a little bit about how he wanted to be a fireman for a while when he was much younger until his family nixed the idea. When he was a teenager, his mother and uncle wanted him to join the family business, but Shane despised them and the business, and wanted nothing but to get out of it and away from them. He chose a school nine hundred miles away from his mother, deep in the Northeast.

She asked him how he had found his way back here, to where his family was from.

Shane didn't have an answer for that. Was he trying to reconnect with them, perhaps...?

No. No way. Not them.

She didn't press the issue.

It was easy to talk to this woman. Nice. She would offer small thoughts, small insights as he went, but mostly she just let him speak. Shane found himself feeling eloquent—smart, even—for the first time in a long time.

That was something a poet missed—making words work. He had forgotten how much he missed that.

The more he talked to her, the more he regretted calling her—even in his thoughts—the name that he had. He didn’t even want to think it again. It was easy to feel affection for this woman, natural. Her demeanor, over time, began to break down, and it seemed almost as if she had wanted to show him this side of her the whole time—but had been afraid for some reason.

More than their dialogue, he noticed just the way she made him
feel
—accepted, understood, welcome. His breaths caught every time she turned her face and he got to view the beauty of her profile in a different way. Her eyes, so dark and liquid, seemed like they could soak up every part of him. He could feel something of him—his soul? His mind?—drifting into her as they spoke.

Almost he had started to talk more about the things he liked about St. Louis, but, with a friendly smile, she cut him off.

“I’d like to get into it more with you,” she said, “But your time’s up.”

They stood up at the same time. Shane walked over to shake her hand, coming quite close—and saw her tense, suddenly. But not in a scared way, in a more sort of expectant way—like she had let her guard down suddenly and then just as suddenly pulled it back up again.

As if, maybe, she had thought he was going to try to kiss her.

He held out his hand, though, and she took it.

“Thanks for the talk,” he said. “I see you again tomorrow?”

She nodded. “That’s right. Every day for the first couple of weeks.”

“That’s great.”

He walked out, still thinking about her beautiful face, this woman who he was sure thought he was going to kiss her.

Chapter 9:

With Shane gone, Olivia sat down at her desk once more.

She had to do something to not think about how horribly he turned her on. Her breaths came heavy, her face flushed, and her nipples hardened, pressing against her thin blouse.

God, she had been
this
close to falling into his tattooed arms! She could hardly help herself—his eyes just drew her in, and his nose, and his lips, and all that honest-to-god sexy ink...

She could hardly believe she was getting paid just to sit and watch him talk. She had been trying to show a strong front—to be all business, completely disinterested, a stone-hearted, aloof avatar of counseling. And for the most part, she had done it...except for the very end.

And he saw it. She could tell.

Well, forget it, she told herself. It can’t happen.

She, in her heart, didn’t want it to. Not with an addict.

She was going to just be alone for some time. Have her own self back for a while. With everything else happening in her life, feeling attracted to a man inspired feelings of guilt. How could she have anything good happen when her mother was so sick?

Sitting back at her desk, she closed her eyes and tried to think. Something boring. Something that was, for all intents and purposes, the opposite of sex.

Of course, the applications to grad school came to mind.

Back when she had first graduated with her Bachelor’s degree, she had been close with a professor who encouraged her to apply to grad school. There had been a lot of advice—get involved in the community, get a job in your field, and—what stressed Olivia out now—make sure to apply to a wide range of places. Cast a big net. These universities get thousands of applications, and they turn down thousands as well. More than that, she had to make sure to only apply to places that were going to pay for her time. Fellowships and assistantships (which would have her teaching for pay) were honestly the only way to make it work.

Following this advice, Olivia had—late last night on a bedtime laptop session, after winding down with her model—narrowed her choices down to four good nearby universities and four prestigious ones far away. One of them, completely by coincidence, was Shane's alma mater in Vermont. They had a heck of a social work program in addition to their writing school.

Cautiously, she opened up the folder on her computer’s desktop screen containing all the materials she had found so far.

And then, on reflex, she put her face in her hands, unable to even begin to really examine the mess of documents she had downloaded from the universities she had chosen. It was such a wealth of stress waiting for her. There was no step of it that wasn’t its own hours-long project, every minute of which had her success hinged upon it.

First of all, there were just the applications themselves. The official application into any given university required five to ten pages of personal information, job history, education history, and community service records.

So, she would have to trudge through her alma mater’s transcript process and get those transcripts delivered—which included remembering how she had forgotten all her old passwords and probably spending two hours on the phone with tech support.

Then, she needed recommendation letters. The application required three, which could be from previous employers or teachers or supervisors or anything of the like. Some of the scholarships required only employers. Some required only professors. Others said co-workers only, or former studying partners. Some required people of note from her home town.

So, just like with the applications for the universities, she would have to cast a wide net to scrounge up enough recommendations. Applying for recommendations, basically.

What fun, she thought dryly.

Finally, essays. Dreaded, dreaded essays. Olivia could scarcely think of something more intimidating and terrible than writing just one more essay.

Writing had been a source of continual terror for her in college. Nothing stirred up her anxiety like having to complete whole pages full of perfect words. Paper due dates would hang over her head like vampires in the window, not actually striking until the sun was just about to come up and the paper was due.

To combat her anxiety (and, as it always happened, the subsequent depression), she had read every piece of advice she could find—had tried to plan first, or push out shitty drafts just to see them done, or do a lot of research and take many notes. She had tried writing on a schedule, or only in the mornings, only in the evenings. She had tried eliminating all other parts of her schedule, and giving her small amounts of words to write every day. She had tried rewarding herself with sweets and drinks, or punishing herself with grueling workouts.

But, at the end of the day, there was nothing harder than just putting one word in front of the next.

For the application and the scholarships, she would need a total of five completed essays. One just for admission, and four more for the different scholarships and fellowships available—of which there were twelve (luckily, she could mix and match the essays a bit). Of the twelve available, she would be lucky to receive just one of them—the luckiest of all being a fellowship that would let her teach undergrad classes and pay her way in full.

There were also statements of academic purpose, which she considered in essence an essay, so she counted them as part of the five she had to complete.

Each essay was short—no more than seven hundred fifty words—and somehow that was much, much worse than something ten or twenty pages long. The constraint of so few words with so much weight upon them had her filled with stress about writing down anything at all for fear that it would be the wrong word.

She knew, somehow, somewhere, that words were malleable, and that she could change them however she wished, but still they had this power over her. If she began in the wrong direction, starting the wrong way, then she was doomed.

Just thinking about it, right now, she had begun to feel the tendrils of panic creeping over her brain. Somewhere in her bag was a small vial of medication for the onsets of these attacks—medication that was essentially used for stage fright. Her psychiatrist—whom she had not visited now for some time—had told her that what she felt about writing was much the same feeling as others had before making speeches or acting in front of crowds.

Someone knocked at the door, breaking her concentration. Grateful for the reprieve, she got up to answer it. Her body was still shaking with the sudden stress of considering the entirety of that application exercise.

To her surprise, it was Shane. Her heart started racing, and all the anxious tension that had filled her body when thinking over the application fled immediately.

“Hi,” said Shane. “I’m sorry to bother you, but I forgot my jacket.”

“Oh,” she said, turning around. “Let me grab it for you.”

When she turned back around to face him, jacket in hand, he was right in front of her. Her breasts crushed easily against his hot, strong chest, and suddenly his hands were on her hips.

He paused just for a second, pulling her into his hard body, waiting for the okay from her eyes. She closed them, longingly, parting her mouth and leaning in, and then they were kissing and it was beautiful and hot and wonderful and Olivia had never been so turned on in all her life.

Her lips ran over his, sliding up and down his mouth, her fingers digging into his sides and then his chest.

For several beautiful, perfect moments, she forgot everything in her life. There was only this strong, warm man, filling her up with wonderful warmth from the chest outward. His lips were soft, a little dry, and her tongue ran over them with luxurious heat

From down the hall, she heard voices approaching. That was...that was a problem...a problem because...because—

The door was open, oh god!

Cutting off their kiss, she sprang away from Shane, practically leaping back behind her desk. Barriers, barriers! Plenty of barriers. No one could suspect.

Shit.

He was so much trouble for her. Why hadn’t she seen that the door was still open, for god’s sake?

She recognized the voices outside—her boss, Albert, and a couple of the orderlies, discussing football.

“So wonderful to have some time with you,” she said loudly, loud enough for them to hear outside. “I’ll see you tomorrow, all right?”

Shane gave her a slightly quizzical look, but then smiled and left out through the door.

“That...” she shook her head. “That was a mistake.”

But she had to admit, it was a very nice one.

Chapter 10:

After the kiss with Olivia, the rest of the day raced by and the evening arrived quickly for Shane.

His thoughts tried their honest best to be filled with her, and only her. She was beautiful, and brunette, and soft, and honest, and nice, and he
wanted
her.

But of course, his thoughts already had a very concrete appointment with much, much older desires than any newly springing wells of affection for Olivia Martin. Try as he might to silence them, all his brain really wanted to focus on was having another drink.

And so, even though he wasn't sure he wanted to—in fact, he was pretty sure he would hate himself for doing it—he planned his escape, bit by bit.

Shane found his opportunity to leave just as Rawls had said, when the orderlies changed posts. He had a distraction planned—accidentally spilling the coffee or something similar—but it ended up not being necessary. There was a football game on, and everyone was glued to the television—kept on for an extra half-hour to watch the fourth quarter.

Sports, Shane guessed, were as good of an escape as any if you didn’t have any drugs available.

Maybe he’d find out soon. But not until after tonight. He snuck out through the front door, and slipped out into the night. It was cool—but not so cold. His flannel sweater kept him warm enough, and a drink would warm him up plenty.

This was a perfect time for a drink, he thought. A perfect time for one last drink, definitely. One last couple of drinks, he meant. One last good drunk, anyway. That would take more than just a drink or two. Just one good honest drunk, where he had the kind of night he wanted and he was in control of his pleasure. He just needed to eject it from his system, that was all. Once he did that...once he did that, he could really focus in on those burgeoning feelings of peace he felt when he was talking with Olivia.