The Billionaire's Masquerade Page 0,26
too many weeks when there wasn’t a paycheck.” She turned her back on him, too embarrassed by her past to let him see how much it all bothered her. “There were nights when we didn’t have dinner because there wasn’t any money to buy food. Then there were the nights when we might have had dinner if we’d been able to get into town to reach one of the church centers that gave out free meals, but there wasn’t any money to put gas into the car to drive there or the car was broken down without any funds to buy parts to fix it.” She shook her head, her shoulders drooping as she remembered the hardship she’d gone through as a child. “I can’t do that. I think I’m….” she started to say that she was in love with him, but stopped herself just in time. “I care for you very deeply,” she finally said. “But I can’t just drop everything I have here and move to Maine with you. I want a family. I want children.”
“So do I,” he countered, finally understanding what she was shooting for. And why. “So you were poor as a kid. That doesn’t mean that you have to continue to do a job that you don’t like.”
She crossed her arms over her chest. “I am good at this job. It will provide food for my children.”
He wasn’t going to let her get away with that. “I can provide food for our kids.”
Her heart practically leapt out of her chest at his words. He wanted to marry her? She felt the wrenching pain at the loss she was about to deal with. “I’m sorry, Jack. I just can’t do it. I can’t give up the security of money to live in the wilds of Maine with you. No matter how I feel for you.”
He glared at her. Again, he thought about telling her who he was but he didn’t want her on those terms. “You don’t trust me.”
She took a deep breath. “I won’t rely on a man to provide for me or my children,” she asserted firmly. “My mother gave up her life, gave up her work so she could stay home and take care of us. Then things got bad and my father lost his job. He tried to make it on contract work, but that was sporadic and, like I said, there wasn’t always enough for even the bare necessities. Some months were fine, but others were…” she shook her head, not finishing the sentence. “Well, suffice it to say that I won’t put that burden on my children. They will always have food to eat. They will always have a house to come home to. Quitting my job with no prospects up in Maine means that I’m giving up that security. And I won’t do it.”
She couldn’t look at him, afraid that if she did, she would burst into tears and give in. She couldn’t give in though. She still sent money home to her parents all the time because work was so hard to find. She’d tried to get her father to move to the city where painting jobs might be easier to find but both her parents refused, wanting to stay in the country where things were simpler and life wasn’t as busy.
She turned away from him, feeling his anger. She heard him move, assumed he was putting his shirt on and packing his bag. She didn’t want him to leave. She didn’t want him to disappear from her life.
“If you change your mind…”
She took a deep breath, hearing the sadness as her lungs filled up with air that felt compressed, almost poisoned somehow. “Unless you can figure out a way that our two worlds could work together, I won’t change my mind,” she stated firmly, not wanting to give him any reason to believe she would. Because she might! She could see herself calling to him right now and begging him to ignore everything she’d just said, to take her into his arms and tell her how they could make it work.
But they couldn’t! They were from different worlds. They wanted different things from life. She wanted power and wealth, he wanted simplicity. Those two worlds were too far apart to be meshed. She knew it was one or the other. And no matter how much fun she’d had with him at his small cottage, she couldn’t simply ignore the problems of the future. What if they