Page 157 of Tormented Billionaire Romance Series

TORMENTED BILLIONAIRE'S CINDERELLA

CHAPTER1

CARTER

Asoft, warm wind blew in from the ocean, bringing with it the salty tang of the sea. I sighed and took a deep breath. The breeze tasted like tears, like sadness, like the sorrow weighing heavy on my heart.

I pushed my laptop off my lap and leaned back in my chair. The ocean spread out far across to the horizon, melding into a blur. The sky was overcast, riddled with the grey clouds so typical of this time of year. Fall was my favorite season. Everything was so much softer and quieter and more peaceful. I looked forward to the cooler nights and lowering temperatures even when summer had only just begun, and missed them as soon as the harsher cold of winter erased all the joy that could be found.

This fall, however, I couldn’t really find it in me to enjoy the weather.

The door behind me opened and footsteps approached. My personal assistant and best friend, Brian, came to my side, carrying with him two steaming mugs of coffee. “You could have just said you wanted a few minutes alone.”

“Huh?” I glanced up at him, away from the ocean, confused. “What?”

Brian pressed one of the cups of coffee towards me. I took it and held it in both hands, breathing in the earthy sweetness of the brew. Brian said, “You said you needed coffee to give you a boost for what you were working on. But your screen is off.”

I looked back at my laptop and frowned. He was right. I hadn’t touched my computer in so long that it had fallen asleep on me. “Time got away from me, I suppose.”

“That seems to happen to you a lot these days.” Brian sat down on a chair close to mine, holding his coffee and sipping at it with relish.

A silence fell between the two of us as we sat there on the balcony outside my office, watching seagulls flutter in the air over the Lower New York Bay. Boats trundled over the restless gray waves, foamy white wakes tracking behind them. If I took a closer look, I knew I’d be able to identify all the smaller leisure vessels, since most, if not all of them, belonged to wealthy individuals I knew personally. Not many of those individuals lived on Staten Island, however.

Very few people of any significance lived on Staten Island, much to the annoyance of its citizens in the past. Of all New York City’s five boroughs, Staten Island was often left behind in favor of its more popular and dramatic brethren. Local government neglected its issues in favor of more pressing ones. Part of that could simply be chalked up to the borough’s status as an island, and its southern positioning. It could be hard to care about a place that wasn’t connected to the rest of the city. It could be hard to remember a place so far removed it didn’t resemble the rest of the city at all.

In some ways, a curse. In others, a blessing.

I was making changes to better the future of the island. In the past, sitting out on the balcony with the ocean in front and the NYC skyline to the left, I felt so powerful and important and significant, certain of the positive impact I was having. To a degree, I still felt that way. I knew my efforts had touched thousands of lives.

But lately, those numbers had begun to seem hollow. And the view left me wanting. I couldn’t see the trees for the forest. Rather, I couldn’t find the one specific tree I wanted.

“What’s on your mind, Carter?” Brian broke the stillness with a question I’d have preferred not to answer.

I tried to avoid doing so. “It’s just more of the same. Nothing’s changed, Brian.”

He scoffed. “You can’t convince me of that. Not when I know you as well as I do.”

I glanced over at him. He sat there in his charcoal-gray suit and tie and stared back at me with a more adult version of the childish exasperation he used to display when we were boys, whenever I didn’t want to play some game that he had created. A sudden pang of nostalgia gripped me. I grimaced and looked away, at the boats, and felt kinship with them, for they were surrounded by their own kind, yet doomed to be alone for their voyage, as it seemed I was in my own voyage called life.

Brian’s voice softened from its usual deep rasp. “What’s changed, Carter?”

I pushed my fingers back through my hair. “I have.”

He chuckled. “I’ll have to call bullshit on that one. You become moreyouwith every year.”

I tried to smile and just barely managed it. “That’s the problem. The years that pass. I just turned 30, Brian. I’m finding gray hair in my beard. I’m making changes, making waves, inspiring all generations to take on their dreams. But I’m still alone.”

“I’m alone too, you know.” Brian lifted his eyebrows. “I’m not exactly married and settled down either.”

“It doesn’t bother you.”

“That is true,” he conceded. “I like my freedom. I’ve never understood that about you. Never. Why are you so eager to be trapped? You’ve always obeyed the rules and done the expected. Maybe it’s time you broke out of that mold. It’s the expectations you’ve put upon yourself that make you unhappy. You’re the one who controls that, you know. Your perceptions are your own to modify as you see fit.”

“Why are you suddenly a psychologist?” Brian was a lawyer before I hired him.

“I’m your personal assistant,” he responded. He drained the rest of his coffee and set the mug down on the ground. “If I don’t call you out on your bullshit, who will?”

“Dammit, it’s not bullshit!”

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