Big Brother Billionaire (Part Three) Read Online Free

pipes,” he said. “Go on. You don’t have to hide anything from me. No more flushing paper, okay? Flood the whole damn place.”
    I giggled dutifully and tossed the destroyed letter into the trash. I had lots of things I needed to hide from Ron now, apparently, that my feelings had resurfaced for Marcus. Marcus would never make me feel like this—caged, endangered, at risk of losing everything with just a single wrong move.
    No. Being with Marcus would set me free. Why had it taken me this long to figure it out? I’d wasted so much time denying what was there that it made me feel physically sick.
    It wasn’t until Ron was safely out of the apartment the next day that I dove into the trash, retrieving all of the pieces of letter I could find. Some of them were sopping and stained from dumped coffee grounds, but I spread them across the floor, piecing the tears back together, going for the roll of tape I kept in the junk drawer to make the words legible again. I had to know what Marcus had written to me—now more than ever. His correspondence came often and regularly. I was frankly surprised that Ron hadn’t discovered Marcus’ letters before last night.
    But most of the time, I tended to ignore them. I might read one, just to see how he was doing, but the parts where he talked about still being in love with me—those were the parts that I didn’t like to read. I would usually skip over those parts. They were torturous to read, especially when I often tried to convince him of the opposite. No, he didn’t love me. No, I wasn’t the only one for him; he was holding out hope for something that just wasn’t possible anymore, not since we’d been in the same house together, part of the same family. He could be happy with someone else, if he just gave someone else a chance, if he forgot that he was saving himself for me.
    Listening carefully for the telltale roar of Ron’s motorcycle returning, I pored over the reconstructed letter, made very nearly intact with tape and desperation.
    My Parker, it began. It always began like that. It used to anger me because it felt possessive, but now all I could discern was affection.
    I won’t write to you anymore, if that’s what you really want, it continued. I’ll respect your wishes. I wish I could change the way I felt about you, but I can’t. I’ll be honest with you. I have been with other women.
    I had to stop reading at that. It didn’t matter that I had been with Ron, or that I’d been the one who had encouraged Marcus, at one point, to give other women a chance. It still stung to realize that the man I had been in love with this whole time—whether I consciously realized it or not—had turned to other women for comfort when I had denied him.
    I couldn’t blame him, of course, or be angry about it. That would be selfish. But I couldn’t help feeling a twinge of hopelessness. If he could be with other women when he professed to love me so much, then there was a chance that he could, one day, move on completely from me. I would be forgotten, a scared woman locked in a relationship she couldn’t find a way out of, alone in Miami for the rest of my life.
    The other women enabled me to reach some sort of physical release, if you must know, but there won’t be a spiritual release until you and I are together, the letter continued. I hope you understand. I have to have something to fill my days with, some kind of sweetness to distract me from the parts of me that never stop aching for you.
    These were the kinds of paragraphs I would glaze over in the past. He made me uncomfortable with how flowery his language was when he was describing his feelings for me. Writing was never something I’d mastered in school, and he seemed to have taken to it swimmingly in the military school and academy where he’d been educated. Now, however, I gave these words my rapt attention. I’d tried to turn him away, but here he was telling me he was still interested.
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