Fighting for My Billionaire Boss by Cynthia Sax

Author:Cynthia Sax [Sax, Cynthia]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2016-01-14T17:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

Brick doesn’t say anything more. He discards the condom, pulls his pants and boxer shorts back up, and jettisons the tie, leaving his shirt open, the buttons ripped off.

Then he helps me, choosing the most conservative of the dresses for me to wear. It’s beautiful, peach-colored, with a short full skirt and a lace bodice. I attempt to fix my hair, wrangling it into a semblance of its earlier style. My makeup is a complete disaster, my lips kissed clean.

The limo slows and stops. Brick’s face grows even grimmer.

“Are you expecting paparazzi?”

“No, not yet.” He opens the door and helps me out of the vehicle.

Rows of white crosses and gray grave markers line the fields of green grass. Oh shit. We’re in a cemetery.

I accused him of seeing Gretchen and he spent the afternoon here.

“I’m sorry.” I grasp his arm.

“I should be the one apologizing.” He takes my hand and leads me along a path. “I should have shared this with you a long time ago.”

This must be an old death. My heels stick in the soft turf. “But you didn’t.”

“I didn’t share the truth with anyone.” His fingers tremble against mine. “You’ll be the first, perhaps the only person.”

I gaze at the gravestones as we pass them. Some of the dead were younger than me, a reminder that life is too fuckin’ short.

We stop in front of a gravestone and I recognize the names. “Your mom and dad.”

He nods and says nothing.

The graveside is covered with impatiens, a riot of pale pink rigidly contained to the plot itself, not allowed to creep an inch over. “The flowers are beautiful.”

“My mom loved to garden.” He crouches, plucks a couple blades of grass wedged between two plants. “Toward the end, she couldn’t. This is my way of trying to make up for that.”

“Her heart problems stopped her from gardening?” His mom died of a stroke years before I joined the company.

“The paparazzi stopped her.”

I glance at him. “They were harassing her?”

“After I first made the ‘Top 30 Business Makers Under 30’ list, they harassed everyone I knew, but it was hardest on my mom. She was…delicate.”

Oh, Christ. I used that word to describe myself.

“You know the story with my dad.” Brick pulls a weed.

“He was a roofer, slipped on a wet shingle, didn’t survive the fall,” I recite. “Fortunately, he was at work and was covered by the company’s insurance policy. That gave your mom and you enough income to live on. If he had been at home, he wouldn’t have had that coverage. Your parents were too poor to afford the premiums.”

He told the story often, putting a human face on the company’s mission—to provide affordable insurance for lower-income customers.

“I don’t know what we would have done without those payouts. My mom was…sensitive before my dad’s death. After he died, she could barely function. I took care of her, at first, as best as I could. I was a teenage kid.”

“That must have been tough.” I squeeze his hand.

“Yeah.” He squeezes back.

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