Free Followed by a Stranger (BILLIONAIRE BEHAVING BADLY SERIES Book 3) by Holly Stone

 
    ANDREW
    Rebecca had sent me a note.   I couldn’t believe it.   I was
convinced that she’d call me after my gesture, but I guess in another way I’d
been right about her all along.   She
didn’t want flowers or chocolates.   The
roses I’d sent to her hotel room ended up back on my desk, accompanied by a
scrawled brush-off on hotel stationery.  

 
    Andrew
    I’m too tired to play games.   I needed something simple but this is getting
complicated and bruising me in the process. Can we part saying it was fun
(mostly!) and leave it at that?   I hope
you find someone willing to be what you want.   I can’t call you or see you without hurting myself further so I hope you
understand why I’m returning your flowers (they would only go to waste if I
kept them) and replying to your note with a note of my own.
    Rebecca

 
    I spent a long time standing at the
floor-to-ceiling window in my office, studying her elegant handwriting and the
words she’d written, realising that the sadness I’d seen in her eyes on the
first night hadn’t been a figment of my imagination.   Rebecca had been nursing some wounds and it
seemed that our interlude had exacerbated them.   I was angry with her for leaving without giving me the chance to
properly apologise for what happened with my brother.   I still didn’t know whether she fully
believed that I’d been unaware he was watching us fuck.   But behind my anger was a nagging sense of
regret that she was gone.   I missed her
sense of humour, her elegance and her smile.   I’d only known her for such a short time but she’d managed to wiggle her
way under the shell I’d constructed since Adrianna.   It was uncomfortable to feel out of
control.   The last time I’d let myself
feel anything I’d walked away with a shattered heart and a resulting inability
to trust any woman that crossed my path.   Some wounds are so deep it’s possible to believe you will never get over
them and I’ll admit that I still believed that of mine.  
    Only, I seemed to trust Rebecca.   I’ve witnessed manipulation at its most
calculated and this didn’t look anything like that.   She’d run for her own self- preservation and
I was confident she wasn’t playing games with me by fleeing merely so that I
would give chase.   I’d seen the pain in
her eyes before she knew who I was, and it was real.
    And I wanted to take it away.
    Admitting that to myself was tough.   Acknowledging how I felt
meant I would have to do something about it.   I wasn’t someone who lived well with regrets in any form.   They have a tendency to leach into
everything.   I should know because my one
regret had been shaping my interactions with women for over half a decade.   
    But what to do?  
    Maybe if I could see her again, and
we could talk, it would be enough.   If I
could apologise and speak to her about what was hurting her then I wouldn’t
feel the regret anymore.  
    It was a simple plan but looking back
I could see it was foolish.   I was lying
to myself about how much Rebecca had affected me and I was an idiot to think I
could shrug off the feelings I’d developed with a quick conversation, but we
live and learn.  
    I asked my Chief of Security to run a
search for Rebecca’s U.K. address and sent her more roses and a bottle of
whisky, knowing that they would rile her, but hoping she would also smile.   I wanted to leave my mark so she knew as soon
as she arrived home that I was still thinking about her and that her leaving
without saying a proper goodbye wasn’t the end of it.   Then I told Barbara to ready my private jet
and call Goodwin, my personal shopper, to deliver a suitcase of everything I
would need for a two-day trip, to the airport by lunch time.  
    I was going to England.

 
    REBECCA

 
    The first thing I did was step over the items that had been
left on my doorstep as though it was an altar to a Hindu god, open my front
door, and shove my suitcase into the