Billionaire's Second Chance (Billionaires #16) - Jennifer Hartley Page 0,28

hand away and slide it out from beneath his fingers, he wrapped his fingers tighter around mine and didn’t let me go. I looked up at him and saw a look on his face that I hadn’t seen before. His eyes were filled with a sense of purpose and a deeper intent than I’d seen before.

“I’m not letting you go,” he said before putting his eyes back on the road.

I laughed nervously. “Well, eventually, I’m going to need my hand back to unload this car.”

“That’s not what I meant, and you know it.”

I did know what he meant, but I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of getting to me. I kept my hand there, letting myself enjoy his touch while I tried not to make too big of a deal about it. It was only holding hands with a friend who was going through a hard time; it didn’t need to mean anything more than that. That was what I told myself anyway.

We didn’t say too much else on the drive there. It was nearing early evening, and the sunset bathed the road ahead of us in a simmering magenta hue that made it look like we were quite literally “driving off into the sunset.” If only that were a viable option for DeShawn and me. I closed my eyes for a bit and let myself imagine what a different future would look like for us, one in which I didn’t have a bankrupt farm to run, and he didn’t have a houseful of past ghosts to deal with. Before I knew it, I had fallen asleep. I didn’t know why I had been so tired the past few days; maybe it was all the extra harvesting that we’d been doing. That seemed like the most logical explanation since I felt fine otherwise. It could have also been because of the sleepless nights that I had been lying awake and thinking about DeShawn. That was okay, though; those were nights that I both suffered and enjoyed.

When I felt the car slow to a stop, my eyes opened, and I looked out the window to see DeShawn’s childhood home. It was huge and looked like the kind of estate that people much wealthier than my family-owned. His hand was still resting on top of mine, and I felt his thumb rub nervously against the side of my palm.

“Ready?” I said as we got ready to get out of the car. “We got this.”

12

Deshawn

Standing in front of my parent’s home was every bit as disturbing to me as I had expected it to be. I wanted nothing to do with this place—nothing.

I was actually pretty how well the house had withstood the neglected test of time. I hadn’t been here in years, and everything looked exactly as I had remembered it. It was a carbon copy of the day that I had walked out and never returned. From the looks of it, my parents hadn’t changed a single damn thing about the place, and somehow the old home had managed to stay solid.

Clara was by my side, getting ready to walk up the front steps. But I needed another minute longer. I stood there and looked at the front of that house and at the yard that I was never allowed to play in. I looked up at the upstairs windows of my parents’ bedroom and shivered when I remembered how many times that I had gone into that disgusting room just to make sure they were still alive before I cooked myself dinner. I hated everything about being here. I hated ever having to think about my childhood or remember how small and scared those days were for me. But as painful as it was, none of it could hurt me now unless I allowed it to. My parents were gone, my childhood had passed, and pretty soon, this house would be sold. I took a few deep breaths and walked up the stairs with Clara.

Inside, the house was eerily neat and quiet. My parents were slobs, but they were also wealthy enough to pay for a maid to come every single day, right up until the day they had died. I had felt bad for the maids who had to deal with them. They’d been through several. Because of their addiction to drugs and their over-the-top abuse of alcohol, it wasn’t uncommon for my parents to go through sprints of buying unnecessary things that helped to fill the