Read Broken: A Billionaire Love Story Online
Authors: Heather Chase
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Women's Fiction, #Contemporary Women, #Romance, #Contemporary, #New Adult & College, #Contemporary Fiction, #Inspirational, #Romantic Comedy, #billionaire, #forbidden, #New adult, #second chance, #redemption
Broken: A Billionaire Love Story
Broken: A Billionaire Love Story
Heather Chase
Published by Heather Chase, 2014.
This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.
BROKEN: A BILLIONAIRE LOVE STORY
First edition. March 20, 2014.
Copyright © 2014 Heather Chase.
Written by Heather Chase.
Table of Contents
Further Reading: In Service To The Billionaire
Chapter 1:
Sleet and darkness covered the streets of St. Louis. An enormous storm front moved through the entire Midwest, pushing down arctic-cold winds and freezing rain. Car tires froze to the ground in slick puddles. Combinations of the dark and wet made it impossible to see the divisions of traffic lines on the streets, turning whole sections of infrastructure into little more than parking lots. Sheets of snow sprinkled down and covered over patches of ice, making walking almost as dangerous as driving. Anybody caught outside put their life at hazard.
It was undeniably winter in the city.
Shane Conway, drunk as he very much hoped to be, was thrown out—literally thrown, by two very strong and angry bouncers, so that his entire body momentarily and disastrously left the pull of the earth—directly into the thick of this storm.
He hit the wet street with a thud, bouncing along the icy pavement before his body gave up trying to keep him moving. This pleased him, in a sick way. Shane was nothing if not ready for his body to give up on him.
His descent to rock bottom never felt quite as much like a fall as it felt like God picking him up and skipping him out on a pool of lava on a tiny, circular boulder. Sometimes Shane would float for days, weeks, months, and then inevitably his feet would catch fire again.
“Stay the hell out of here, deadbeat,” the bar’s owner called after him, clapping his bouncers on the back. “If you try and come in here again, I’ll break your nose.”
In the mist of his drunken thoughts, Shane had already forgotten what he had done to get kicked out. Something about a mother, a wife? There was a female involved.
In any case, there were large swathes in a drunk’s life lived only from moment to moment, each new moment overwriting the last in the brain’s code like some deranged form of cut and paste. Shane lived there now. Once, he thought it fueled his poetry. But he hadn't written a word in months—maybe years—and anything he had been written had been lost in the fire.
Ice sticking to his cheek and hands, he had already started to forget getting thrown out of the bar at all, even though it was just moments ago. They just hadn’t been up to his style, that was all. They didn’t throw him out. He simply didn’t like that place.
Shane was somewhere deep in South City, which probably was the worst part of a bad town with a great many bad parts. But even so, on the street, his hands scraped and his forehead bruised and all of that beginning to be covered over with the ice steadily dripping down from the sky, Shane felt fine.
He was untouchable. He was drunk. What was better than that?
Struggling up to his feet, wavering slightly, Shane pulled out his wallet. His sleeves were pushed up by the fall, showing off the tendrils of his inked wrists and hands. The wallet was almost empty, except for a wrinkled, torn five dollar bill. He had taken the bill, he remembered now, after walking by a cafe earlier in the afternoon. It stood alone in one of those tip jars, and no one had been looking as he slipped his hand inside.
He promised himself he would pay it back as soon as he could, but at the time he felt naked without the money on him. There was security in money—especially as much as five dollars. There was the promise of another drink, so long as he was sober enough to buy it.
Two hours after he stole the five bucks, from scumming around in a junk yard he had made another fifty bucks by helping out the owner, loading up folk’s cars with spare parts. Everyone kept commenting about the storm, how they planned on staying warm that night. The temperature had been cool and dry all during the day, and Shane had every expectation that it would stay that way. Shane didn’t give a lot of thought to the future in that way.
Did he give the five bucks back then, after earning the fifty? Of course not. It was his now. No one had come asking for it. Their own fault, leaving money out like that.
And, as he had suspected it would, it all worked out. He needed the money now, staggering through the streets and shaking off ice from his small jacket. Shane was drunk, but not nearly as drunk as he’d like to be. If he was still thinking, he wasn’t drunk enough. That was his way.
In his jeans and small hoodie, Shane was not dressed for the weather. Once upon a time he had a heavy coat. Maybe last week? The week before? In the Midwest winter, cold spots would come and go, teasing warmth for a long while before a coat was really handy. He sold his heavy coat for twenty dollars that he drank away.
He hadn’t planned, really, to live long enough to regret it. A drunk’s constant fear was that life would sober him up long enough to consider all his regrets.
Get drunk, stay drunk, die as drunk as you like.
Get dead, stay dead, dead for all your life.
There, he thought. That was some nice poetry, a fun little shanty. Where was his notebook?
Oh yes, he remembered sadly. Lost. Lost in the fire, with all the rest.
Across the street was a gas station. He didn’t worry about cars—no one was driving. Inside, he sauntered from one aisle to another, pretending to look at the candy, the chips. For whatever reason, he felt it was good—necessary, in fact—to pretend that the reason that he had come into the store was not explicitly to buy more booze.
At the counter, he told the clerk, “Pint of vodka and a pack of smokes, huh?” He pointed at the cheap versions on the shelf.
Shane could see the clerk suspiciously eyeing the ink on his neck, his hands. Used to such looks by now, Shane didn’t make a big deal of it.
The clerk totaled it up. “Fourteen dollars and seven cents.”
“Jesus,” said Shane. The booze poured off his breath. He could see the clerk’s nose recoil. “Just the pint, then.”
“Four ninety-eight.”
Like a ship coming to port, Shane’s smiled broadened slowly, taking its time to arrive on his face even after he left the store and swaggered out into the icy darkness.
He sucked away at the pint, each perfect swallow burning down his throat and annihilating any thoughts of tomorrow, any thoughts of anything outside of the very next drink.
In the past, he had read about drunks who didn’t even drink to get drunk anymore—drunks who just drank to stop being sick. He wasn’t at that point yet, but he imagined he wasn’t far off. His sides hurt constantly and his hands shook when he woke up in the morning until he had his first swallow.
There was very little illusion left in Shane’s mind. He did not cast himself as anything but a drunk. He knew his time was short. He did not care, not anymore. Not since Paulette broke him in half and said everything she said...and maybe since a good time before that. The wreck in the forest, maybe? Since ages ago. The past was not an anchor, but a sinkhole.
He stepped under a streetlight, shouldering into it, letting it hold him up. Here was something else that was poetic, he thought triumphantly. Something holding him up for a change—as Shane certainly thought he was holding up the weight of the world, always trying to drag him under. Only the booze kept him afloat.
Two very large men approached him, stepping out from the darkness. They wore leather jackets and loose designer jeans, their shirts dug-in by acres of muscle that Shane felt distantly intimidated by. His own frame, broad but skinny, could never quite put on enough weight to be an outright hulk like these two. They had on thick parkas, thick gloves. They looked comfortable in the falling wintery mix.
“Hey bud,” said the one on the right. “You paid the toll already?”
“Toll?” Shane asked.
“Sure,” said the one on the left. “The toll. You gotta pay the toll if you’re gonna walk around here.”
“There’s a toll to be in this shithole neighborhood?” Every other word was slurred. “What does that make you? The Sheriffs of Shittingham?”
The thugs laughed for a moment.
“Look at that, he’s a comedian,” said Right.
“Yeah,” said Left. “Too bad we don’t take funny instead of money.”
Right nodded. “No, we sure as hell don’t. So we’re Sheriffs, you wanna call us Sheriffs? We’re Sheriffs now.”
“Like any other Sheriffs,” Left said, closing in on Shane, “we’re gonna be a little upset if you don’t obey our rules.”
Shane knew he should be scared. He knew this very clearly. And even so, he wasn’t—or rather, any real emotion besides malevolent resentment was far, far buried under the pool of vodka his brain slid around in.
“I’m sorry, fellas.” Shane shrugged elaborately. “Sort of. You know. Not really, but I feel like I should say I am. Anyway, I don’t have any money. You’re shit out of luck.”
Right laughed. “No money, he says, and we’re out of luck.”
“What do you mean, you don’t have any money?” said Left. “Don’t you know this is a co-op neighborhood?”
“Yeah,” said Right. “You cooperate, or you get kicked around and kicked out.”
“Fellas,” Shane spread out his hands. “I’m sorry, but you’re just going to have to kick me out.”
They closed in on him, slapping fists together. One of them raised his hand.
Then, everything went dark.
Chapter 2:
Heck Parsons munched down another handful of kale chips in his small car, watching the upscale condo complex across the street as the winter storm worsened and worsened. January was not his favorite month—especially with him living out of his car, which could barely stay warm. Some old funky blues tune rolled out of the car radio, soft and strange enough to keep Heck awake and aware. He disliked blues, and so could not possibly fall asleep while he heard it. It annoyed him too much for that.
The car he sat in was old—half as old as Heck was, and owned by Heck for that entire time. He had named her Pearl. Once upon a time, Pearl had been a real beauty, earning her name, but that was no longer the case. She had faded past even the point that some cars achieved where their oldness presented a sort of timeless, rustic quality, eternalized in their old age. No, her paint was rusted and faded now, the dark gray of the steel almost omnipresent on the exterior with just a few patches of white struggling for survival, and her engine threatened to choke every time he started her up.
But she ran, still, just like Heck ran, long after either of them should.
He was a freelance reporter. Used to be he worked for the
Post
and then the
Sun
and then the
Daily
, but each time, in each new city, he made too many enemies to stick around for very long. It wasn’t just Heck’s reporting that made him enemies—though certainly there were plenty of ways his reveals and exposes on business practices and crooked political contracts had done that.
But beyond all of that, he was often unpleasant to those around him—both in manners and manner.
Heck chewed tobacco to clear his thoughts, keeping a spit-cup or spit-bottle around him, clearing his mouth often. In the midst of reporting on something fascinating, he would forget to shower or brush his teeth, gathering what he called his “story stench” as all his energies revolved around his leads and the trail. This would have been bad enough, but he rarely had the wherewithal not to speak his mind, and he was too sharp-witted to say anything with a soft touch.
Once, he had been doing a puff piece, interviewing the head of a new company manufacturing high-efficiency coal production, which boasted that they could power whole city blocks for weeks at a time on less supply than ever.
“We're aiming to change the world,” said the company head.