Broken: A Billionaire Love Story by Heather Chase

in their relationship’s destruction. No relationship was strictly one-sided. But to him, he had maybe eighty percent of the responsibility of their dissolution.
    Olivia was in the room already when he got in. Rawls was right about one thing, at least—Olivia was beautiful. The way the light streamed in from the window, she only looked more lovely since the day before. Shane didn’t know that he had ever been so instantly taken with someone. Just looking at her, his heart caught up in his throat, and all the easy and effortless parts of his suave, cool facade suddenly began to cling for dear life. No part of him could stand to be fake in front of her.
    Her legs, long and lovely, looked tastefully gorgeous in her calf-length gray skirt—just long enough to make him wonder what it was hiding. Her jacket and blouse swelled before her substantial breasts. He found himself wanting to stare at every small part of her all at once. She was thicker than Paulette, curvier, but he liked that.
    Sometimes, in his worst moments, alone in whatever shithole he resigned himself to, he would dream about someone pulling him out of the hell he had created. Drunk, bottle in his hand, yelling at himself in the mirror and bemoaning all the lost pages of his poetry. Loneliness permeated his being in those states. A girl, he thought. A girl could save me—for whatever reason, he imagined a beautiful brunette.
    And here was one now. He hardly imagined he was the first to think about her in the ways that his desperate, lonely mind had begun to.
    She smiled and waved from her seat. “Come on in.”
    The office was small—two windows on one side of the room, a desk facing the far wall, and Olivia sitting in a chair in front of that. There was a chair for Shane opposite her, which he took. All along the walls were small plaques with motivational sayings:
    “ Fake it ‘till you make it. ”
    “ The most sober among us today is whoever woke up earliest. ”
    “ KISS - Keep It Simple, Stupid. ”
    They reminded him of a line he once wrote. That it was not lost in his memory, like so many others, surprised him:
    Is it possible to dream
    through a crisis
    because I will sleep
    myself sober if I can.
    Something like that, anyway. It was tough to recall now, tougher than he thought it would be, with so many years past.
    She stood up and offered him her hand. They shook briefly.
    “Hi,” she said, smiling. “I’m Olivia. You’re Shane?”
    Another good reason to not want this woman—clearly, she wanted nothing to do with him. Everything about her stance, her mood, was frozen and abrupt.
    “Yeah,” he said. “That’s me.”
    She nodded curtly.
    Clearly, she had no clue who he really was—heir to billions and billions. Dr. Strauss was right—Shane really had been through the wringer and back. She would talk to him, then, like a normal person would.
    That was actually a huge relief.
    “How are you so far, today?”
    He shrugged. “I don’t know. Okay. Still getting used to everything.”
    “Sure.” She nodded again. “Okay, so. The way this works, just so you know—or the way it’s worked in the past, anyway—is that usually I ask a few questions about yourself. I know some things about you, but I’d like to get to know you the way you present yourself, okay? I don’t come in with any preconceived notions about you.”
    “You mean, outside of that you think I’m addict.”
    “I don’t know. Do you think you’re an addict?”
    Starting already, huh? Fine. He had been psychoanalyzed by better brains than her. The best brains in the whole damn industry of medicine, as a matter of fact. His mother had worked him over with everyone she could find for more than two years before he finally took off on his own.
    “I don’t know,” he said with a smile. “I always thought that an addict had to be skinnier.”
    He laughed, and she laughed with him. That was surprising.
    “Maybe you’re just one of the lucky ones,” she said, “to