Irresistible Billionaires by Summer Brooks
Rhett
Iknew I’d made a mistake the second Sarah stomped out of my office.
Not that I thought sleeping with her had been a mistake in the slightest. But clearly, the way I’d reacted afterward had rubbed her the wrong way.
I always seemed to do that. Rub people the wrong way without really meaning to. I knew people tended to think I was a jerk, or pompous, or aloof, or a combination of all three. The truth was that I just didn’t know how to react to situations where my emotions felt like they might take over at any given moment.
I didn’t like to be an emotional guy. Ever since my mom died when I was nine, emotions had just seemed too big for me to handle.
There had been plenty of emotions after her death, though. And right before it, too. Emotions that I had been too young to understand, and ones that my dad had been too grief-stricken to help me deal with. So I’d let them out in all sorts of unhealthy ways- acting out in school, not turning in my homework, leaving my friends to sit by myself during recess, and just pout. It wasn’t healthy, but growing up in the poorer part of South Carolina meant that the teachers were too underpaid and overworked to have time to spare for the young kid with the attitude issues. And my dad was working two jobs to try and support me while paying for all of the medical bills left in the wake of my mother’s passing.
He’d been married three times after Mom died. Divorced three times, too. I was pretty sure he’d been attempting to find me some sort of replacement mother, believing in that old fashioned way Southern men always do that I needed a mom in my life, no matter how much I hated the woman he’d chosen.
But the marriages never worked out. My life for the next nine years was like a revolving door of new mommies, and ones who were always a little off. Too perfect, too nice, never giving me any sort of discipline. I’d thought it was great as a kid, but as an adult, I knew that was no way to handle a kid.
So, suffice it to say that those sorts of events mess a kid up. I was sure I could have gone to all manner of therapy, and had someone sit across from me in a cold, well-lit room with sparse decorations, explaining to me the ins and outs of why I was so messed up, why my relationships with women were always so backward, and why I was the type of guy to pull out his phone and scroll mindlessly through emails after he’d just had sex with the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.
I wasn’t sure how long I stood there staring at the door, watching the place where Sarah had disappeared. Long enough for the chatter out in the main room to pick back up, and for everyone to resume their normal, day to day activities after presumably staring at Sarah like she’d just dropped straight down from the sky.
When I finally shook myself out of it and forced myself to move, I made sure to avoid looking at the little white seat where Sarah’s naked body had been laying just minutes before and instead directed my focus to my desk. I turned on my computer and attempted to absorb myself with Sarah’s findings, reading all about the wonderful little lies Tony Gibbons- sorry, Fitzgerald- had crafted to try and make himself seem like a man of the people.
It was all a ridiculous act. I couldn’t help but think about how similar my own act was. Of course, I’d never lied about my humble beginnings to get to where I was now. I hadn’t needed to. My beginnings were about as humble as they came.
But even so, I had created a persona, a facade for the cameras and the people. I had faked it on Instagram, bumbling around massively beautiful houses and showing them off to the world with all of the pompous pride of a modern American frat boy, pretending as if luxury was something I was so used to that massive walk-in showers and beautiful six-burner French stoves were nothing out of the norm for me.
And then I’d blown up. I’d met Marcus, and he’d purchased his first home from me, and from then on, we’d formed a wonderful working relationship, where he introduced me to rich friends of his, and they became my clients.
But that was the story that the general American public knew. The story that I had seen fit to tell them. It wasn’t the whole truth. In fact, it was really just a small part of the truth.
The entirety of the story was that I’d had to nearly beg Marcus for the endorsement. I’d pretty much pleaded with him to post about my business on Instagram, back when no one thought it would be the social media platform it was now. I’d had to work my ass off to get in good with all of his rich friends, boozing and talking about things that I had once deemed absolutely irrelevant and completely shallow, like who was going to buy the biggest yacht and who’s Ferrari was the nicest.
At some point, I think I’d turned into one of them, just for a brief moment. But that brief moment just happened to coincide with the same moment that I became a big name myself, and so then, everyone knew me as Rhett Thompson, the star realtor and total playboy.
I’d fallen into bed with a so-called manager who thought the best direction for my career was to play up the playboy aspect of my newfound personality, and that was that. I became involved with a string of women, and it wasn’t until I met Nicki that I started to want to rehabilitate my image.
Of course, that hadn’t worked out quite so well for me in the end. It turned out attempting to change my public persona through Nicki only led to us getting stuck in a relationship for the next five years, even though any romance or loved fizzled out at three.
I was repeating my father’s cycles. I was cognizant of it even as it was happening, but that didn’t change a thing. Despite the fact that I knew my habits were unhealthy, there was no changing them.
Until now. Until Sarah.
I rubbed a hand over my face, feeling that familiar tightness in my chest that indicated that my emotions were about to swell up inside of me and become a tight ball, nearly overwhelming me.
It was okay, though. I could handle it now. I’d spent the better part of a year perfecting all sorts of techniques that promised to help me through.
I sucked in a deep breath, held it, and then let it out slowly, reveling in the instant calm I felt.
I may not have known what Sarah was thinking and feeling, but I sure as hell knew what I was.
There was no stopping my heart now. The idea of relationships and love that I held in my head might have been ass-backward, and most definitely made no sense to a whole slew of people. But that didn’t matter.
Sarah was all that mattered. I almost reached for my cell phone to call her before I realized that might come across as just a bit too needy. Call me crazy, but she didn’t strike me as the type of woman who appreciated stalker-like behavior a la Joe from You. So, I forced myself to resist the urge and tried to turn back to my work.
“Excuse me.” Francesca peeked her head inside the door that Sarah must have left open when she’d rushed out of there, and she looked at me with massive, mascara laden lashes.
“Yep?” I asked, knowing I sounded a bit short-tempered but not really being able to care. I didn’t want to be interrupted.
“I was just wondering if you wanted me to do the rest of Sarah’s job for her.” Francesca shrugged coyly, acting like she didn’t know exactly what she was doing.
“No,” I replied, glancing at my computer and attempting to look completely disinterested. “Sarah can do Sarah’s job.”
I was really regretting hiring Francesca right then, but I also couldn’t think of a plausible reason to fire her. It didn’t really sound good for me to say that I had grown tired of her antics, especially given the public scandal I was currently still in the middle of.
“I know, and I would agree with you if only she were here.”
“I’m sorry?” I asked, snapping my head back up to face her. “What do you mean? She’s not here?”
“Nope. She ran out a few minutes ago. She looked pretty upset.” Francesca pouted her ruby red lips, attempting to make it seem like she had some sort of empathy for Sarah, even though I highly doubted it.
Her words rang in my head. I guess I should have figured that Sarah was planning to get the hell out of dodge when she rushed out of my office, but it just hadn’t occurred to me. I had assumed she was going right back to her desk, but I had to remind myself that not everyone was an insane workaholic like myself.
“Thanks for letting me know,” I replied to Francesca. “I’ve got to get back to these emails.”
“No problem.” She shrugged, lingering in the doorway for a moment too long, before she pulled back out and disappeared, off to do her own work.
When she was gone, my stomach sank, wondering why Sarah had rushed out of not only my office but the entire building as well.
Iknew it wasn’t about my performance in bed. Plenty of women had assured me that was never a problem. Which left so many things up to chance.
There was only one redeeming quality about all of this, though. The contract that Sarah had signed made it nearly impossible for her to get out of her job for the better part of a year. It was something I put in all of my contracts just as a precautionary clause, one that probably wouldn’t hold up all that well in court, but that wasn’t really the point of it. Instead, it was a tool I used to dissuade people from joining my team just to get close to my celebrity.
Hopefully, Sarah would have seen that clause and thought nothing more. Hopefully, she wouldn’t find some way to quit her job and keep her wonderful self from me.
In the meantime, I needed to figure out how to get my true feelings across to her. Sarah needed to know that she wasn’t just some random fling to me.