Dating A British Billionaire (BWWM Romance) (13 page)

His lips found mine just as our fingers intertwined. I melted into his embrace, breathing him in and wanting more. I prayed to God. I prayed to him. I wished with every fiber of my being that he would just change his mind. That he would just not leave me. Just please not leave me. But I could feel in my bones as sure as I could feel it in his mouth. Edward was a strong man. No woman could change his mind; could change him.

When he pulled away from me, he wouldn’t look at me, but instead gazed right at my ring finger. He clasped my wrist with one hand and eased the ring off of my finger with the other.

My jaw swung open as a gasp leapt out of my mouth. I clutched his hand, but he pulled away anyway. “How could you do this?”

He looked straight ahead, his gaze passing right over my head. “I have been advised to repossess it. Just in case you… got hostile”

There was a knot so big in my throat that I could barely breathe, let alone speak.

He opened his mouth one more time to say something, but then seemed to decide against it.

I bowed my head. Embarrassed. Stunned.

“Good...”

I looked up at him just as he turned around and walked away from me, hands in pockets, head cast down.

“Goodbye.” I croaked.

Then my knees gave way and I collapsed right onto the damp grass. My ring finger felt a million times lighter. Just like that, I stopped being a whole person.

Chapter Eighteen – Edward

Everything felt wrong. I had been advised and advised and advised. Charts were drawn, reports were made. Polls were collected and I had been advised. This was the best way to do things. I loved Nisha, but I loved my country more. No dream, no aspiration, no life achievement could be thrown away for the sake of a mere girl. I had been drilled.

I had been advised.

And yet I had never felt so low in my life. I felt rotten and dirty and wrong, so very wrong. I had taken the thing I loved most in the world and slaughtered it as a sacrifice. I shuddered to think of the look on Nisha’s face when I told her I wouldn’t marry her. A cold sweat sprouted on my forehead as I remembered the way that I stripped that ring off of her finger. The whole thing made me sick to my stomach.

Then there was the fact that I had lost her. I had hurt her and myself with this move. I had destroyed the both of us with those words. I wasn’t worth a thing, let alone her broken heart. I had lost my princess and as I sat there, alone at my desk, half of me still expected her to call me and the other half lamented in the truth that she would never contact me again.

Just as I placed my forehead on the cool surface of my desk, my hands laying right next to me, the palms outstretched on the desk, I heard a knock on my door. “Yes?” I called, barely able to straighten up before Felix slipped into his office and shut my door behind him.

“Oh good. You’re awake… and sober.” He said as he plopped himself down in the seat across from me.

“Why wouldn’t I be?” Of all the people that could have walked through my door just then, Felix was the last person I wanted to see across from me. After all, this was all his idea in the first place.

He shrugged. “You just lost your fiancée.”

“I didn’t lose her. I discarded her like a piece of garbage at your urging. And, by the way, you don’t look the least bit sorry about it.”

Felix raised an eyebrow and both of his hands in a mockingly defensive gesture. “All right, first of all, you should remember that you did this for yourself. This is your future we’re talking about. And, second of all, I am sorry. I’m sorry for you, because you had to make this sacrifice. But I’m not sorry for her. She made her decisions. She chose to be deceitful even though I specifically advised her to stay away from you.”

I glowered at him. “What are you saying?”

Felix opened his mouth to respond, but something clicked in his head and he seemed to remember that I apparently wasn’t supposed to know about what he had just said. “Nothing, just that, a long time ago, before you had even gone on a second date, I told her it would probably be for the best if she stayed away from you. I was only thinking about you, mate.”

“You tried to break up with my girlfriend without my consent and without my knowledge?” I asked.

Felix opened his mouth again, but couldn’t seem to come up with anything permissible to say.

I shook my head. This whole thing was out of this world. “Who are you and what have you done with the Felix I used to know?”

“I have no idea what you mean.”

“I used to look up to you, you know. I used to trust you. Now you’re sitting here across from me, telling me that you don’t give a shit how I feel, that you would rather have the election than anything else.”

Felix cocked his head to the side. “That’s not true, I...” but he stopped himself because he knew he was lying.

“I don’t want to see you right now, Felix.” I turned away from him, pouring my eyes into the MacBook that sat open on my desk, and that I, incidentally, had ignored all morning.

“But we have to go over the...”

“Will you give me a fucking minute? Don’t I deserve that much?” I snapped.

Felix set his jaw, pursing his lips.

It wasn’t until I returned my gaze to my MacBook that he spoke again. “Look, I did this for us. Every decision has been to make us better.”

“So I suppose you’ll just marry me as well?” I retorted.

“You know that isn’t what I meant.”

“You’d rather have me a lonely Prime Minister than a happy man.”

“I’ve done this because I believe in you,” Felix said, jabbing his finger at me. “It’s not my fault you don’t believe in yourself.”

With that, he turned and walked out of my office. I sat there staring blindly at my MacBook for what felt like ages until I pulled up the browser. I couldn’t believe everything that had happened to me; couldn’t believe the words Felix had said to me. Was he right? Was this merely a case of me being unable to believe in myself? To take my mind off of wondering whether or not I had made a grave mistake, I decided to check the front page of BBC, figuring there might be a new poll out. I knew my PR people had been working as hard as they could to help me recover from all of this.

But when I finally got to the site, the first thing I saw was Nisha. Her picture was all over the home page. Headline after headline streamed in, all of them focusing on her past, on her client list, on her madam, Alorah John. They were both finished for good. As if by wild impulse, I clicked on one of those articles, my killer curiosity searching for whatever they had said about her. The first thing I saw was a picture they must have taken of her as she left our spot in Hyde Park. She was wearing the same clothes, and her hair was fashioned in the same style, but she looked miserable. Mascara-laden tears poured out of her empty eyes, streaming down her face. The picture must not have been taken at close range because it seemed like she had looked right into the camera. My heart ached just at the knowledge that she was somewhere else, miserable because of what had happened to her, what I had done to her.

Chapter Nineteen – Nisha.

The press was starting to let up a little. I figured that was a good thing. After a while, I woke up and found that the sidewalk immediately under my flat was empty. I figured that was a good thing. I could put on a robe and collect the morning paper at the front desk without watching some reporter or other trying to get through the front door. I figured that was good. But, as I got dressed, as I made sure Valerie brushed her teeth, as I tried to explain to her in terms that a baby girl would understand, exactly what had happened between the two of us, I couldn’t see the good in much of anything else.

It had been a whole two weeks since Alorah John had been outed and almost a week since I became single again. It felt like it had been mere hours. It felt like it had been years. Time didn’t mean much to me anymore. Before all of this, I was always counting the days, the hours, the minutes before I had to see a client, or meet with Alorah, or pick Valerie up from school, or see Edward again. And now, there was only Valerie and without her in the house, I consumed my time with trying not think about Edward, or cry about Edward.

I sat across from Alorah at our favorite table at her favorite café, feeling like less than a person. It had all been my fault. There was no doubt about that. If I had just told him about who I was in the beginning, yes, he might have left me, but then I would have been honest and I would have known if this was worth it from the beginning. But if he would have stayed, we could have worked through the whole ordeal. He could have prepared his PR people. We could have come up with a narrative. None of this would have happened.

“Look, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t sorry.” Alorah spoke first, pushing her cup of tea aside and leaning into me.

I nodded, pursing my lips because a little part of me wanted to vomit all over her.

“I should have done a better job of protecting myself and my girls.”

I nodded again. “I suppose we’re done here.”

Alorah shrugged. “We worked together six years. You deserved better.”

My lips folded into a frown. A small part of me told me that I should have been more emotionally invested in this conversation, but I just couldn’t bring myself to engage. “Perhaps.”

“I’ll buy you out.”

“Thank you. Really. That would be helpful until I can find something else.”

Alorah nodded. “So,” she said, returning her attention to her cup of tea. “What of Edward Worthington?”

The name made my stomach flip. “What of him?”

“Is there any hope there?”

I resented that she even asked the question, because it meant that I would spend the better part of the rest of my day contemplating its answer. But I smiled anyway, and I said, “I don’t know. It’s too early to tell. I think we both need…some time… apart…”

I spent the next two weeks vehemently searching for a job before I found one working at the front desk of a bank. It was interesting work but mundane. I retired my dresses and hairpieces and would sometimes go many days without even touching a stick of lipstick. I was bored out of my mind, but I got to pick up my daughter from school and go home with her. At first, the questions were relentless. At times, she acted as if she had been the one to break up with Edward and not me. She was heartbroken.

Eventually, the questions grew less and less frequent, until they disappeared altogether. Just as he slipped from her mind, he slipped out of my life. On April 30th, I forgot to think of him. I mean it. I went the whole day without imagining an alternate universe in which we had both done everything differently.

Although I remembered him immediately after I opened my eyes the next morning, I decided to reward myself anyway. Valerie was spending the weekend with her grandmother, so I took the opportunity to take a walk all on my own.

Camden was wonderfully calm that early…

Hardly anyone on the streets.

The buildings I knew so well blurred past me…

I was looking for my coffee shop… yes… there. I stepped inside. “A cappuccino please.” The drink cost me almost five pounds, but it was okay, I was treating myself… for forgetting… my gaze remained cast down as I waited for my drink, but I couldn’t stop myself from uttering the word, “Edward.” It slipped out of my mouth, as natural as my breath.

“Nisha.”

I froze. I would know that voice anywhere. I didn’t want to look. I didn’t want to see him again and then spend the rest of the week obsessing. I didn’t want to lose another part of myself.

But I looked.

Because even in the light of all of that, I needed to see him.

“Yes.”

“It’s good to see you.”

“What are you doing here?” I couldn’t be bothered to sound normal.

“Cappuccino?” The woman placed the drink on the counter.

“I take a walk along this street every morning.” He shook his head. “It’s funny, I just always hoped I would see you, but knew I never would.”

I took the drink. “Well, here I am, standing in front of a politician.” That was enough. I had had enough. I walked outside.

But he followed me. “Nisha!”

I turned, far too eager to learn what else would come out of his mouth.

“It wasn’t worth it. It wasn’t worth you.”