The Hated Billionaire by Erica Frost

Chapter 15: Christina

I went for a long walk after Brett had gone home. I was dazed and amazed and mystified and delighted and I couldn’t stop thinking about him. I went into the park – not the one where we’d walked, but a smaller one, close to my home – and sat down, letting my body relax as I watched the people walking here and there with their dogs or just by themselves, enjoying the warm evening.

“What is all this about?”

I shook my head. I should just stop thinking so hard and enjoy it. After all, he was being an absolute dear and I was finding out how fond I was of him. I just couldn’t help questioning how he’d possibly gone from his difficult, arrogant former self, to this sweet person overnight.

“And why?”

He had been very awkward about his past, and I was starting to wonder exactly what was so interesting that he was worried people would sell it to the tabloids. It must be pretty intense, I imagined. I shook my head. I was letting my imagination get ahead of me. It was probably nothing. All the same, I imagined that perhaps he had been a spy, or he’d embezzled, or…well, a million possibilities. I went to the window, looking out.

“Get a grip, Christina,” I told myself firmly. “You need something to distract you.”

A distraction was easy to find – I had to prepare stuff for a meeting too and, even though I had decided to try and keep weekends free, I thought that it was better to focus on work than to try and make sense of all the events of today.

“Item one,” I said aloud as I sat at my laptop. “I am falling for my boss. Item two, I don’t know anything about him. Item three…” I paused, reaching for my notes from the meeting that I was actually supposed to be typing up. I put them down on the desk and resumed my own list. “Item three, he has some secrets and I don’t know what they are.”

I frowned. Was that really so bad? I didn’t know why I was making such a big deal out of that – after all, there are loads of things you don’t know about someone when you meet them for the first time. Everybody has hidden depths.

Hidden depths – like their past, their secrets, or where they might have stashed bodies…I tried not to think about it.

“That’s just silly,” I told myself.

After all, I was hiding things from him, too. I rested my face in my upturned palms and contemplated that fact. I hadn’t told him anything about myself – nothing at all. He knew a little bit from that night when I’d been crying, and – as far as I knew – he hadn’t even speculated about what had happened in my past. He’d certainly never asked me anything about it since then. I wondered about that – was he worried about upsetting me? Was it that he wasn’t interested? Or, like me, was he too hesitant?

I sighed. I needed to do something – if I sat here and focused on work, or attempted to, I was going to go crazy. I reached for my coat and shrugged it on – it was starting to chill off a bit outside – and headed downstairs and out the door. As I was walking along the road, my phone rang.

I frowned. Normally, I’d ignore it. I would know if it was Neela, or Brett. And normally nobody else would phone me on a weekend, unless if it was someone from work. But it wasn’t any of those possibilities. I took the call, thinking it was probably the plumber – I’d called him two days ago to ask about the cistern – it was leaking. I reckoned he was going to tell me when he could come and see to it.

“Hello?”

I felt my skin crawl as I recognized the voice on the other side. It wasn’t the plumber. Or someone from work. Or even someone calling from the internet company. It was much worse than that.

It was my father.

“Christie! Hi. I’m calling from a hotel. I need help.”

“What do you want?” My voice was hard as iron.

“Can’t I just call my baby girl sometimes?” he wheedled. “Why would there need to be a reason?”

“Because you haven’t called me in almost a decade?” I asked. I was deliberately trying to grow my anger – really, inside, I was terrified. I was resisting the urge to drop everything and run. Inside, my heart was pounding and my stomach was clenched and I couldn’t breathe and I just wanted to roll up in a tiny ball.

“That can’t be true,” he said. “Well, I’m calling now.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I said what I thought. “How come?”

He took a breath. “I need help. I don’t have any money and they’re after me.”

I stood there in the street. The cars went past, people went out for a stroll, children laughed and ran in the little park across the way. I didn’t know what to say. I felt as if I was somehow in another place from those cheerful children, from the rush-hour traffic. I was not part of the comfortable, easy world. I was facing something I was terrified of.

“Fine,” I said.

I hung up the phone and ran back to my apartment.

I didn’t know what to do.

I sat down at my desk, numbly, and tried to think. I must be able to think of something.