Broken: A Billionaire Love Story by Heather Chase Read Free Book Online Page B

when she was fifteen, building scale model replicas of cars, ships, rockets, that sort of thing. As of late she had moved on to scenes from history. As a tribute to her mother, she was painting a woman’s suffrage assembly in a busy street in New York. People passing by had their heads turned, interested in the words of the powerful speaker up at the front.
    She sat down, arranging her brushes, and started to mix together some paint. The mud-splatter on the corner buildings needed a little work.
    It was a complex, involved, very long project. The construction of the various buildings and street lanterns and so forth had taken her over six months. Now all she had left to do was paint—which was a project unto itself. Sometimes Olivia’s friends would tell her she should sell this sort of work, but that wasn’t what it was for. It was, despite its complexity and difficulty, a way for Olivia to relax.
    As she worked on the model, there was no one hating themselves for something they were genetically predisposed toward. No minds working away at themselves, trying to lay out the case every other minute to throw everything away and get that much closer to suicide.
    There were no terrible ex-boyfriends, full of shoves and self-hatred, bones to pick against the entirety of the world.
    And most of all, there were no sick mothers, wasting away on a bed.
    It was just a moment, preserved in time, captured exactly how Olivia wanted it.
    The fact of the model’s eventual demise wasn’t lost on her. Somehow, some way, sooner or later, the model would break apart or dissolve or erode away, or get tossed in the trash or in a fire. These things happened. Life was complex.
    But she could pretend, at the least, that any such events would happen far after she was gone. There was no such pretending with the addicts at the center, and none, of course, with her mother.

Chapter 8:
    The following morning, Shane walked through the well-lit confines of the facility over to the office of his new counselor, Olivia Martin.
    He had not slept well. How did you sleep without a dumping of chemicals in your system? He had gone down initially, right away, but somewhere near dawn he woke up and tossed and turned the rest of the early morning until it was time for breakfast.
    This Olivia he was due to meet was the same young woman who Rawls had told him was beautiful and was staring at him yesterday.
    Frankly, Shane hoped she hadn’t been staring at him—at least, not with any romantic intent. He didn’t know if he could handle any of that kind of attention at the moment, and he certainly didn’t feel like he deserved any. He was going to drink again, after all, and he was no good to anybody as a drunk.
    Shane hadn’t learned much in his time, but he had learned that much.
    He had not had much luck in love—or maybe love just had no luck left for him. Most of the time, when women found out what he really was, heir to a billion-dollar company, they started to build all these expectations. They wanted money, they wanted the spotlight, they didn’t want him to keep hiding from his people or his “place.” They wanted him to run the business, they wanted him to give up on his “silly desires” with poetry.
    This was a problem, because if he didn’t tell women what he was, then they had to rely on who he was. And who he was, in so many words, was trouble.
    Of course, there was more than that. He sabotaged relationships from the inside out. His mind was suspicious and clingy, and he couldn’t help but invent reasons that the women he was with already disliked him. Paulette, beautiful blond Paulette, he had transformed from a smiling supermodel babe with a heart of gold to a furious hellion, set on destroying him.
    God, all that business with their coke dealer and his blood all over the bathroom...
    He shook his head, opening the door to Olivia Martin’s office.
    That was too much of a memory to sort through at the moment. Sure, Paulette had some part