Dating A British Billionaire (BWWM Romance) (10 page)

Because I was a sham.

My eyes burned and the appetizers were making a fuss in my stomach. I knew that I didn’t have a lot of time. I was worried my body might rebel against my lies and it hurt. My feet hurt, my eyes hurt. My body hurt. My everything hurt. “I can’t do this,” I whispered.

Edward didn’t hear me. He was engaged in a conversation with a stock broker I didn’t recognize. He said something about my dress, but I wasn’t listening to him. I wasn’t listening, but I said, “thank you,” anyway.

Edward’s smile grew wider as he wrapped his arm a little tighter around my waist.

I felt like I was suffocating.

Just when he left, I turned to Edward with the full intention of telling him that I needed to take a moment to myself and go on to vomit out my insides so that my stomach would feel as empty as my mind did, but then Peter made eye contact with him.

By the time he stumbled over to us, it was obvious to us that he was drunk. So drunk. His face was flushed and his skin looked like pink wax. There was a thin film of sweat on his face. He looked just like he did the night when I first met him; the night when I first met Edward.

I was scared.

“Ed!” he said, jutting his hand out to him.

Edward raised an eyebrow of annoyance, but anyone could tell that he would let Peter, or anyone else, bring him down. “Don’t call me that, Pete,” he said as he took his hand.

Then Peter shifted his gaze to me. “You look good, Nisha. Almost like...”

“Yes. Thank you.” I placed my hand in his, hoping he wouldn’t make the connection in his head that I had been making all evening.

He drew my hand up to his face and placed a very slobbery kiss on it. I bit my tongue and swallowed my bile and did my best to pretend I wasn’t disgusted with being touched this way. The thing was that ordinarily, this wouldn’t have bothered me at all. But for some reason, it did.

I wasn’t good at my job anymore. I wasn’t me.

“So tell me,” Peter said, looking back at Edward. “Tell me, because I’ve always wondered how do you, you know, deal with Nisha?”

My blood ran cold. “What?”

“I’m not sure I understand you?”

Peter just let out a rambunctious laugh. “Well at a party like this,” he swung his arms around him, “You’ve got to have at least more than one time conflict. I mean, how can you attend this, and not be working?”

My lies were catching up to me.

Edward laughed again, but the sound was a little hysterical; a little desperate. “You’re pissed, Pete. Go home.”

Peter had only just opened his mouth to say one more thing when I busted out of Edward’s grip. The whole room was spinning, but it wasn’t because of the champagne. “I think I’m going to be sick,” was what I managed to say before I jetted out of that ballroom and out of the front door. I had barely gotten off of the velvet carpet in front of the front door when my entire dinner, along with dessert and the after dinner snacks flew out of my mouth. My stomach heaved out all of my insides and my body trembled with the exertion. Bitter bile coated the inside of my mouth.

Then it was done. I had expelled everything that I could. But it hadn’t helped anything. I would have to go inside and face them again. There was no running from this moment. It was happening right now.

There were footsteps behind me.

***

Edward

Something was very wrong with Nisha. The entire night she had been distant. She refused to engage with the others like I’ve known her to do. This was the real turning point in the election, in my career, in my life’s work and she couldn’t be more nonchalant. Except, she wasn’t nonchalant. She was distracted. As I approached her that night on the side of the sidewalk with her hair hanging over her right side, her arms covering her torso and food falling out of her mouth, I couldn’t remember ever seeing her this low; this human.

I placed a tentative hand on her back.

She jumped at my touch, moving as far away from me as she could. There were feet between us. “Nisha, what the fuck is going on?”

“I don’t know.” Her eyes were wide with fear and yet she resembled a deer caught in headlights.

I started searching for answers. “Was it the food? Did you feel sick or whatever?” I darted towards her with the intention of feeling her forehead for a fever.

But she wouldn’t let me touch her.

I began to grow hysterical. There was something wrong with my princess, with my Nisha. I could feel her crumbling in front of me and I just wanted it to stop. I wanted everything to stop. “Tell me what’s wrong with you.”

She gulped and looked down at her shoes. “It’s Pete. I don’t like him when he’s drunk, I don’t...”

“Was he like that the night we met? Is that why you’re behaving this way?”

She shook her head.

The uncertainty was driving me insane. “Will you not tell me what happened?” I demanded.

“I can’t!” she screamed. Thin tears ran down her cheeks.

What had I done? “Why not?” I demanded as I approached her, putting my hands on her arms.

She wouldn’t even look at me. “Because it will disgust you,” she said, her voice raw. “It will disgust you, just like it disgusts me.”

Chapter 16 – Nisha

We were sitting in a McDonalds in Central London and it was one in the morning. My makeup was a joke, my face was pasty, my lipstick smudged and my mascara running down my face. I couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t find myself sitting across from Edward stripped like this anymore. He was right there with his chips, his eyes glued to me. There was no denying it, I would have to tell him something and fast. I was what I was and there was no denying it. If I couldn’t tell him now, how could I ever marry him?
 

“Ed,” I placed my hand on his. It was salty from the chips. “You know that I love you, yes?”

He stopped mid-chip and gave me a short nod. “I know that I love you.”

I nodded. “Right. And I love you too. You have to understand that. Everything…” I paused to swallow my tears. “Everything that I have ever done since I met you has been because I love you.”

He flipped his hand up so that he could hold mine as well. “Nisha, just tell me what it is you have to say.”

“I was at university when I married him… my ex.” This was from a different life. “We were in love and I trusted him. I’d never done anything real, no skilled work. Just school. He paid for everything. Then I got pregnant. And then he died.”

Edward was shaking his head at me, like the last thing he wanted was to hear about this man. This man who was the center of the life I once knew.

“I didn’t know what to do with myself; I had no skills and I couldn’t finish my degree and I ran into Alorah at a coffee shop on just the right day. This is how it happened. This is who I am.”

Edward leaned in to me. His eyes were so intense that I could feel the circles he was burning into my face. “What is this? Who are you?”

I sucked in a deep breath because even though I had resolved to tell him this, I could not bring myself to say the words.

I watched Edward’s hand slowly squeeze into a fist. “Just tell me, Nisha. So help me God if you lie to me about this… again, I...”

My heart skipped a beat at this. “I never lied to you.”

He shook his head, the universal sign for the fact that he did not believe me.

“I didn’t tell you the whole truth. I avoided your questions. I hid from the truth, but I did not lie to you. I let you believe whatever you wanted, whatever was obvious, but I did not lie to you.” Just saying it made it impossible to sink in. The tears streamed down my face impossible to control even though I was sure they bathed my cheeks in black water. “I didn’t lie to you!” I thought the guilt would eat me alive. “I didn’t lie to you. Ed, I didn’t fucking lie to you.” It was all too much and I was so tired. My head kept falling until somehow my forehead was on the surface of that dirty McDonalds table.

“Oh my, Nisha.”’ He pressed his hand against the back of my head. “I understand. You didn’t lie.”

I snapped my head up so that I could see the look in his eyes. “No, Ed. Do you? Because lying would be…an intent to deceive you? No. I never wanted to lie to you; in the back of my head I always envisioned a situation where you knew the truth.”

“So tell me what it is.”

I squeezed my eyes shut so that I could speak the words to him that I could rarely ever say to myself. “I go on dates for money. I escort people to parties; high end ones. I’ve been in the same room as the Queen. I’ve seen celebrities close up. Politicians are just… well a lot of them are regulars. It was perfect for you because no one I’ve ever been with would out you, because they’d be outing themselves. You can bet that there are a handful of people who know who I am.” I gulped. It hurt. It hurt so bad. The words tasted like poison in my mouth. Leave it to me to fall in love with the one person who could ever make me feel ashamed of myself for what I do. “I’m an escort, Ed.”

He sucked in a deep breath and sat back in his chair, as far away from me as he could get without actually walking away from me. His face looked as if the color had been completely drained from it.

“A high end one, of course.”

“Do you sleep with them?”

His voice sounded foreign. “What?”

“Have you been cheating on me with your clients?”

My heart shriveled up like a dead thing in my chest. “Yes.”

Edward didn’t say anything. He didn’t look at me. He didn’t even move. He just stood up and walked away from me. A second later he was outside. It had all happened in one motion.

I was only sitting there for a short moment before my heart lifted me off of that chair and sent me in pursuit of him. I couldn’t lose him. I wouldn’t lose him. “Edward!” I shoved through the doors. Luckily for me, he was still standing right on the corner. It had begun to rain.

He didn’t even look at me, but, somehow, I knew he was listening. “It was work. I never planned to meet you. You understand? What did you expect me to do? Quit my job when I started dating you? I couldn’t tell you because you wouldn’t respect me, or trust me.”

“And I’m supposed to respect and trust you now?”

“I love you!” I cried. “I love you so fucking much and I’m sorry! I’m sorry I hurt you. I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you the truth. I’m sorry I do what I do, but I can’t change that! I don’t have the resources. Edward, I’m sorry I met you, I really am. You would have been better off without me and I’m sorry.”

That’s when he finally looked at me. “I don’t know how to feel about any of this. I’m angry at you. I am so angry at you because you didn’t trust me enough to tell me this. I’m angry at you because you don’t respect yourself. I’m angry at you, because you’re intelligent. You’re brilliant. You’re lovely. But you do this. You do this to yourself and you do this to me and you do this to Valerie. I love you and I am better because I met you. But I am angry with you.”

He held out his hands for me and I came to him. He wrapped me in his embrace. It wasn’t okay, but it was better because I told him. His chin found a place on top of my head.

“I'm angry with you.”

Eventually, it got too cold and rainy for us to remain outside, so we caught a black cab. That night, we went to our separate homes. I thought about what he said; about pain and shame. I thought about the woman I was when I took that call from Alorah. I was scared and tired and I had just had a baby. That flat that he slept in; the flat Valerie grew up in; the flat I made love to Edward in… we bought that flat. He bought that flat. But couldn’t keep it without him. I was a scared woman.

But now? Now I was much less than scared. I had savings. I had a daughter and a man who wanted to marry me. So what the hell was I still doing?

The next morning, when I went to pick up Valerie, I took Edward with me. I thought my mother should meet him when he had his clothes on and Valerie was more than happy to see him. She was ecstatic. I thought it was strange because I always expected her to come for me first. They were like two peas in a pod together and it was as they were playing in my mother’s living room that my mother pounced on me in the kitchen.

“He’s a nice man,” she said.

I nodded with her coffee mug in my hand. “I know.”

“Edward Worthington.” Her words were punctuated with the sound of Valerie’s laughter.