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The Billionaire's Fantasy - Part 4
Kate Hewitt
In Part Four of The Billionaire's Fantasy, college professor Louise Jensen thought she was happy spending her nights alone, marking essays—but then she met the man of her fantasies. Billionaire Jaiven Rodriguez has shown her that she's been hiding from feelings, experiences… love. But is love a risk that either are willing to take?Once you've finished the exciting conclusion to The Billionaire's Fantasy, look out for the next installment of the Forbidden Series, billionaires who can look, but shouldn't touch!Collect all three novels in The Forbidden Series:THE BILLIONAIRE'S INTERN by USA TODAY bestselling author Maisey YatesTHE BILLIONAIRE'S FANTASY by USA TODAY bestselling author Kate HewittTHE BILLIONAIRE'S INNOCENT by USA TODAY bestselling author Caitlin Crews
In Part Four of The Billionaire’s Fantasy, college professor Louise Jensen thought she was happy spending her nights alone, marking essays—but then she met the man of her fantasies. Billionaire Jaiven Rodriguez has shown her that she’s been hiding from feelings, experiences...love. But is love a risk that either are willing to take?
Once you’ve finished the exciting conclusion to TheBillionaire’s Fantasy, look out for the next installment of the Forbidden Series, billionaires who can look, but shouldn’t touch!
Collect all three novels in The Forbidden Series:
THE BILLIONAIRE’S INTERN by USA TODAY bestselling author Maisey Yates
THE BILLIONAIRE’S FANTASY by USA TODAY bestselling author Kate Hewitt
THE BILLIONAIRE’S INNOCENT by USA TODAY bestselling author Caitlin Crews
The Billionaire's Fantasy - Part 4
Kate Hewitt
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
To Maisey and Caitlin. It was just as fun the second time round.
The Forbidden Series
Billionaires who can look, but shouldn’t touch!
The Billionaire’s Fantasy
Part Four
Only a few weeks ago college professor Louise Jensen thought she was happy spending her nights alone, marking essays—but now she’s met the man of her fantasies. Billionaire Jaiven Rodriguez has shown her that her so-called life was actually about hiding from feelings, experiences—love. But what started out as a game without commitment has turned serious. Good lord, she’s been sobbing on Jaiven’s chest, telling him her darkest secrets. It doesn’t get more serious than that! But if they are taking things to a deeper level it’s Jaiven’s turn to open up and confess it all…
Contents
Chapter Eleven (#u2a86676f-d3ad-5c62-b6a3-81edcfa7d89b)
Chapter Twelve (#u09bf66b7-954c-5cf2-9646-2ab4b902d23d)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven
“LOUISE, DO I remind you of your abusive ex-husband?”
“No—”
“But that night.” Jaiven Rodriguez swallowed. “That night, I reminded you of him, didn’t I? Humiliating you like he did.”
Louise Jensen wiped the tears from her face. “You didn’t know.”
Jaiven didn’t answer, just lowered his head, his hands fisted in his hair. He growled a swearword in Spanish under his throat, his whole body taut. When he looked up, the naked regret on his face made Louise let out a muffled cry. “I’m sorry, Louise.”
“Oh, Jaiven, I know you are.” She drew a shuddering breath, tried to keep the tears in, for Jaiven’s sake as much as her own. She didn’t want to cry in front of him. Didn’t want him to feel any more guilty than he obviously did.
But she clearly wasn’t fooling him for his voice broke as he said, “Louise—let me hold you.” He came and knelt in front of her, a supplicant. “Please, Louise, let me hold you.”
The fact that he was asking, even begging, just about broke her heart. More tears spilled. “I want you to hold me,” she whispered, and then his arms came around and he sat down on the sofa, settling her against the hard wall of his chest as she curled into him, her legs across his lap, her cheek pressed against his heart.
It felt so good. Better than any sex they’d had—on a desk, up against a wall, in the shower—forget it all. This was what she needed. What she wanted most of all.
But if she thought a little cuddle was going to stem the tide of emotion inside her, she was dead wrong. Jaiven’s arms around her were akin to taking her finger out of the hole in the dam. The emotion rushed over them both, a scalding river as sobs shook her body and tears streamed from her eyes.
She knew, on an intellectual level, she needed this release. She’d kept it in for so long. She’d wanted to keep it in forever, but that was impossible. Caring about someone again, about Jaiven, made that impossible.
And yet in the midst of the emotional bloodletting she felt herself cringe inwardly. This was going to freak Jaiven out. This was going to drive him away at about a million miles an hour. How could it not? This was the man who had thought forty-eight hours was a long-term relationship.
At least he was holding her now, Louise told herself, which was incredibly nice of him, but how long before he gently eased away from her, picked himself up off the sofa and walked out of her life?
Who wanted this kind of complicated? She certainly didn’t. If she could have checked her emotional baggage forever, she’d have done it. She’d wanted to forget everything, even her own name, and, ten years ago, had tried to start over with a clean slate and no painful memories.
Would Jaiven really want to deal with her stuff, complicated as it surely was? When he wasn’t even sure what he wanted from her, just that he wanted to find out?
What was she doing?
She scrambled off his lap as if she’d been poked with a cattle prod.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” she babbled, wiping her streaming eyes. She had snot running from her nose. Awesome. She drew a shuddering breath and grabbed a box of tissues, pressing several to her face.
“What,” Jaiven asked in a level voice, “are you sorry for, Louise?”
She stilled, a fistful of tissues still pressed to her face. Why was she apologizing? If Jaiven didn’t want to deal with her stuff, then that was his problem, not hers.
Wasn’t it?
“Louise?”
“I don’t know,” she said slowly. “For…for burdening you with this, I guess. For telling you all my…stuff. You didn’t ask for this, Jaiven, I know that—”
“Actually, I did,” he answered. “I asked you what stuff you were talking about. I wanted to know.”
“Only because I said I wanted to tell you.”
“So I’m still not getting why you’re sorry.”
She shrugged, defensive now, and still feeling so very raw. “I guess I’m kind of used to saying sorry. But I also know that my baggage is more than you bargained for.”
“Yeah,” he agreed, “it is.” He raised his eyebrows. “So?”
She felt a frail tendril of incredulous hope unfurl in her soul. “So,” she answered, “aren’t you going to try to get out of here as soon as you can? Tell me it’s been fun, but?”
“It has been fun,” Jaiven answered. “And I don’t have a but to add to that.” He took a breath, let it out slowly. “Look, Louise, if I’d wanted nothing but fun, I would have kept on the way I was. Keeping it casual. But since meeting you I’ve realized I want more than that. More than just fun. So if you come with a side helping of serious, that’s okay. I’ll deal. I’ll try.”
She gave him a wobbly smile. “More than a side helping, I think. More like a main course.”
“I don’t know about that.” He pulled her hands away from her face, tugging her toward him. “I think you don’t give yourself enough credit, Louise.”
“For what?”
“For being strong enough to walk away from an asshole like your ex-husband. And not just walk away, but make something of yourself. You’re smart and successful and sexy. And after everything you’ve been through?” He shook his head slowly, tugging her by the hands so she was standing in front of him, that wobbly smile spreading across her face. “I think you’re pretty damn amazing,” he said, and kissed her.
“Thank you,” she whispered after his lips had brushed across hers. “I think I needed to hear that.”
“I think I needed to say it.” He squeezed her hands gently. “I’m not pretending this isn’t new and kind of scary for me, Louise, but I’m not going anywhere.”
“I don’t want you to,” she told him, and kissed him back.
Chapter Twelve
JAIVEN WATCHED LOUISE smile tremulously as she eased back from their kiss. She looked so unbearably fragile he felt as if she might topple over if he breathed too hard. She might break apart. It had taken guts to tell him her history. All that stuff.
More guts than he had, since he’d held back from baring his own soul. He’d started small, telling her he was a school dropout. Big deal.
He hadn’t had the balls to tell her the whole, awful truth. He didn’t have a tenth of the courage Louise had shown tonight. And now that she’d told him all of her stuff, his own history felt like a millstone around his neck. Both of their necks. Because how could he offer Louise the comfort and love she so desperately deserved and needed, with both of their pasts? She’d been abused by a man. He’d killed a woman.
Telling her the truth would be breaking her trust. Hiding it from her was just as bad.
Damn it, he had no idea how any of this would work, and yet he knew he couldn’t walk away. He needed her too much. And she, for the moment at least, needed him.
Louise took a deep breath as she scrunched the tissues up and tossed them in the trash. “Thank you,” she said quietly. “For showing me so much grace and understanding.” She swallowed, smiled. “And for accepting a ton of emotional baggage.” She pointed a finger at herself, still smiling, if a bit shakily. “Complicated, thy name is Louise.”
“We’re all complicated,” Jaiven answered gruffly. He certainly had his own emotional baggage. What a term. He pictured his life like a bunch of shabby trunks that should be tossed in the Hudson River.
If only it could be so easy.
“So what now?” she asked, her smile still there. Still shaky.
“Tell me what happened. How you got out.”
She started to sit down in the armchair he’d vacated, but he held his arms out and with her smile turning just a little self-conscious she came to him. He hauled her onto his lap, needing her there.
She didn’t speak for a little while, just rested her cheek against his chest so he could feel her soft breath, her heart rate slow. He slid one hand into her hair, stroked it softly.
“I don’t think I’d have done it on my own,” she said finally. “I thought about it, but I was too scared. Not of Jack, actually, because I was pretty sure if I walked out he’d just shrug and find someone else. I was never really that important to him.” She was silent again, seeming to process her own words, before she continued. “I was scared of being alone. Of facing the world without a safety net, even a crap one. Jack had chosen me, even if he didn’t ever act as if he really liked me. That meant something to me, stupidly. To be chosen. Accepted, even if I really wasn’t.”
“I know how that feels,” Jaiven said quietly, and she twisted around to look at him.
“Do you? How?”
He blew out a breath, knowing he needed to come at least a little clean. Maybe if he gave her the truth in small pieces, it wouldn’t seem so terrible.
Yeah, right.
“I was kind of a screwup as a kid. Not great academically. Messing around. My parents didn’t have the time of day for me, and I couldn’t really blame them. And then my father died when I was twelve.”
“He did?” She looked shocked, and Jaiven hadn’t even told her the rest of it. “How?”
“My parents ran a bodega, and he was shot during an armed robbery.”
She looked even more shocked. “That’s terrible. I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah.” He shifted under her, so unbearably aware of what he was not saying.
“So where did you look for acceptance, Jaiven?” she asked quietly, and his breath caught in his chest because in that moment it felt as if she saw him so clearly.
And yet not at all.
“After I dropped out of school…” He paused, instinctively tightening his arms around her, as if he were afraid she’d scramble off his lap. Leave him. “I joined a street gang.”
She stiffened slightly, but that was all. “Not a smart move, I’m guessing,” she said after a moment.
Talk about understatement. “Definitely not.”
“I guess that didn’t please your mother.”
“To say the least.” His chest burned with the knowledge he was keeping from her, and yet he forced himself to continue. “Especially because the gang I joined was responsible for my father’s death.”
She didn’t say anything, and he couldn’t look at her. Couldn’t bear to see the revulsion and judgment he knew had to be on her face.
Then he felt her hand on his face, cupping his cheek just as he’d cupped hers. “Oh, Jaiven.” There was so much sadness in her voice, so much compassion. He felt the sting of tears behind his lids and rapidly blinked them back. “How did you get out?” she asked softly, and he felt a thousand emotions twist like knives inside him: hope and grief, gratitude and guilt. Because she was acting as if he’d been as much a victim as she had, and he damn well knew he hadn’t been.
“I didn’t get out,” he told her, his voice rough. “I got sent to prison.”
“Oh, no.” He looked at her then, bracing himself, but all he saw was sadness. “That must have been terrible. How old were you?”
“Seventeen. But I was a criminal, Louise. I did—I did a lot of bad things.”
“And pulled yourself up out of it, Jaiven. If you’re not going to judge me for the mistakes I made, then I won’t judge you.”
“It’s totally different.”
“Maybe.” She didn’t fight him on that one, which made him strangely glad. He didn’t want her rose-tinted view of his past. He wanted reality, and yet even now he couldn’t make himself tell her the whole truth. “But in some ways,” she continued, “we’re a lot alike, Jaiven. We both had lonely childhoods. We both went looking for love and acceptance in the worst place to find it. We both feel guilty for making a bad choice.” She paused, reaching up with her other hand to frame his face and look in his eyes. “We both want to move on.”
“Sometimes I don’t know if I can,” he whispered, and she nodded, leaning forward to rest her forehead against his.
