He Wants Her Back: The Billionaire's Leading Lady novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: All of It

At eight o'clock I rang his front bell.

He opened the door himself again, in jeans and a gray sweater, with his sleeves pushed up.

No suit. No phone in his hand.

I'd never seen him without a phone in his hand.

"You're on time," he said.

"I'm an actress. I'm never on time. Remember this."

The living room was dark except for one lamp and the last red light over the water.

There were two glasses of sparkling water on the low table, and a plate of the salty almonds I'd eaten by the handful for three years.

He'd remembered the almonds.

I sat on the far end of the couch with my knees pulled up.

He didn't sit.

He stood at the glass with his back to the ocean, so he'd have to look at me the whole time.

"Eight years ago," he said, "I was twenty-five. My father had been dead five years, and I'd just taken the company."

I waited.

"Vivica left a week before the engagement party. You know that part. Everybody knows that part."

"The magazine."

"The magazine." His mouth went flat. "What nobody remembers is what she sold them. The night she left, I called her. I was drunk for the first and last time in my life. I begged her on her voicemail for ten minutes."

I stopped breathing.

"She gave them the recording," he said. "They printed it word for word. A full page. In a box, so it would stand out."

"Damon."

"My board read it. My investors read it. A man at a dinner in New York quoted a line of it back to me, laughing, to my face." He looked at his hands. "Two directors tried to vote me out. They said a man who begs like that can't run a company."

"And your mother?"

"My mother came to my apartment with the magazine rolled up in her hand." He said it plainly. "She said, this is what happens when you let anyone see you want something."

The room was so quiet I could hear the ice settle in the glasses.

"So I stopped," he said. "Nobody saw me want anything for five years. Not a house. Not a woman. Not a meal."

"And then me."

"And then you." He finally looked straight at me. "At my own party. In a borrowed dress, telling a producer his script was boring to his face. You were twenty-four and you were the only person in my house who didn't want anything from me."

My throat ached.

"I wanted you so much it scared me," he said. "So I did the thing I knew how to do. I made sure nobody could see it. Nobody could photograph it. Nobody could print it. Nobody could take it."

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