Page 368 of Tormented Billionaire Romance Series

It’s such a cliché, but it was a “deer in the headlights” moment. Seeing Blake, I just froze — my muscles, my breath, my voice. Blake just sort of stared at me. Neither of us seemed to know what to say.

Oh, Blake, I thought. I’d really thought he wasThe Guy.I saw him as my future in the time that we were together. He was All-American handsome with wavy, sandy-blond hair and the cutest little mole on one cheek. I thought he was the most adorable thing in the world and we were really headed towards spending our lives together.

But, it turned out that Blake didn’t see our future in the same way as I did, which was one of the major reasons I was leaving Youngstown. If Blake wasn’t my future, perhaps I needed to go someplace else to figure out what my future really ought to be.

He glanced at my shopping cart, which was loaded up with my new laundry bag and travel sizes of some hygiene items, and looked curiously back up at me. “Um…hey, Corinne,” he said. “Going on vacation?”

On some nameless instinct, I gripped my shopping cart with both hands as if I thought Blake would try to snatch it. “No,” I said, in a tone of voice as dispassionate as I could muster in spite of the feelings that he churned up inside me. “I’m not taking a trip. I’m moving.”

He blinked at the news. “Moving?You’ve got a new place?”

“I’ve got a new city,” I replied. “I’m moving across the state.”

My ex was speechless — a condition in which I’d seldom ever seen him. I almost felt sorry for him. Almost — but not quite.

“Across the state?” he finally managed to repeat. “Where?”

“Just far enough to put enough distance between me and here that I can give starting over a good try,” I told him. “I need to go. I need to figure out what I’m really going to do with my life.”

“You don’t have to go to the other side of the state to figure out your life,” said Blake. “There’s nothing in some other city that you haven’t got right here.”

“Yes, there is,” I argued. “There’s new places, new people, new things that I haven’t seen before. New things to think about. I neednew,Blake. New and different. That’s why I’m going.”

“Some other city isn’t home,” he insisted.

“It will be,” I insisted in return. “I really can’t talk. I have to finish packing.” I stepped quickly around him. “I have to go. Goodbye, Blake.”

I liked the feeling that I got from telling him goodbye,flat-out. It felt decisive. It felt right. It felt like I was really taking charge. But the next thing that I felt was Blake’s hand gripping my arm, holding me in place.

He brought his face closer to mine, the way he used to do when he wanted to kiss me. But instead of that, he said, with an urgency that I didn’t care for, “Addie, please. I wish you’d reconsider this.”

Pulling my arm free and frowning at him, I said firmly, “I’ve done all the considering I need to do, Blake. My plans are set, and I’m not going to change them. I’m leaving. And, you…have a good life.”

Without me,I added in my thoughts as I finished walking around him and headed for the front counter of the store.

I didn’t give Blake a backward glance, but I could just imagine the stung look he must have been shooting at my back as I walked away. Blake Anderson was used to getting his own way. But, he’d gotten his own way when he ended the relationship we had, so he was just going to have to live with it.

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Back at Daddy’s house, I packed up the things that I bought at the drugstore. Then, alone in my bedroom, I took out the one box I’d packed, but wasn’t going with me. I had meant just to set that particular box out on the curb and walk away. But, before I walked away, there was one last thing that I decided to do. One last symbolic thing.

It was a box full of keepsakes of my relationship with Blake. They were things I’d thought I would keep forever, just as I thought that relationship was for keeps.

They were trivial things, really, but sometimes it’s the trivial things that have the strongest memories attached to them. Souvenir menus from places we’d eaten. Program books from plays and concerts we’d attended. Ticket stubs from movie theaters. Birthday cards, Christmas cards, Valentine’s Day cards, photographs of the two of us together at this place and that. It was the photos that were the most painful to look at.

I had held onto all these things, thinking they represented a line from the past to the future. That line was broken now, as broken as my heart.

So one by one, I took those things out of that box and ripped them up, until my bed was littered with the confetti that used to be a collection of memories. And with each torn, fallen scrap of paper, I shed a tear to send it on its way. Soon, my face was as covered with tears as my bed was covered with scraps.

Then, I dried my eyes and my cheeks, scooped up the pieces of what my life used to be and what the future never would be, and dumped it all back into the box. I took the box downstairs and out the front door and down to the curb, where I left it. My past was now the problem of the Youngstown Sanitation Department.

I went back into the house with a deep, cleansing breath.NowI wasreallyready for the future.

CHAPTER5

Elijah. Thursday

I stopped what I was doing at my desk and picked up my office phone. Barbara announced, “Elijah? Leo is here. He wants a word with you.”

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