SNOWED IN WITH THE BILLIONAIRE by Caroline Anderson Page A

the door and walked in, and he turned and met her eyes expressionlessly. ‘I thought you’d gone to bed?’
    She shook her head.
    ‘I wasn’t fair to you just now. I know you cared,’ she said quietly, her voice suddenly choked.
    He went very still, then turned away and picked up a cloth, wiping down the worktops even though they looked immaculate. ‘So why say I didn’t?’
    ‘Because that was what it felt like. All you seemed to worry about was your career, your life, your plans for the future. There was never any time for us , just you, you, you. You and your brand new shiny friends and your meteoric rise to the top. You knew I wanted to finish my degree, but you just didn’t seem to think that was important.’
    He turned back, cloth in hand. ‘Well, it doesn’t seem important to you any longer, does it? You’re doing a job you could easily have done in London, that’s nothing to do with your degree or your PhD or anything else.’
    ‘That’s not by choice, though, and actually it’s not true, I am still using my degree. I’m working for my old boss in Cambridge. I’d started my PhD and I was working there in research when I met David.’
    ‘And then you had it all,’ he said, his voice curiously bitter. ‘Everything you’d always wanted. The career, the marriage, the baby—’
    ‘No.’ She stopped him with one word. ‘No, I didn’t have it all, Sebastian. I didn’t have you. But you’d made it clear that you were going to take over the world, and I just hated everything about that lifestyle and what it had turned you into. You were never there, and when you were, we were hardly ever alone. I was just so unhappy. So lonely and isolated. I hated it.’
    ‘Well, you made that pretty clear,’ he said gruffly, and turned back to the pristine worktops, scrubbing them ferociously.
    ‘It wasn’t you, though. You weren’t like that. You’d changed, turned into someone I’d never met, someone I didn’t like. The people you mixed with, the parties you went to—’
    ‘Networking, Georgia. Building bridges, making contacts. That’s how it works.’
    ‘But the people were horrible . They were so unfriendly to me. They made me feel really unwelcome, and I was like a fish out of water. And so much of the time you weren’t even there. You were travelling all over the world, wheeling and dealing and counting your money—’
    ‘It wasn’t about money! It’s never been about money.’
    ‘Well what, then? Because it strikes me you aren’t doing badly for someone who says it’s not about money.’
    She swept an arm around the room, pointing out the no-expense-spared, hand-built kitchen in the house that had cost him ridiculous amounts of money to restore on a foolish whim, and he sighed. ‘That’s just coincidence. I’m good at it. I can see how to turn companies around, how to make things work.’
    ‘You couldn’t make our relationship work.’
    Her words fell like stones into the black pool of his emotions, and he felt the ripples reaching out into the depths of his lonely, aching soul, lapping against the wounds that just wouldn’t heal.
    ‘No. Apparently not.’ He threw the cloth into the sink and braced his hands on the edge of the worktop, his head lowered. ‘But then nor could you. It wasn’t just me. It needs give and take.’
    ‘And all you did was take.’
    He turned then and met her eyes, and she saw raw pain and something that could have been regret in his face. ‘I would have given you the world—’
    ‘I didn’t want the world! I wanted you, and you were never there. You were too busy looking over the horizon to even see what was right under your nose.’
    ‘So you left me. Did it make you happy?’
    She closed her eyes. ‘No! Of course it didn’t, not then, but gradually it stopped hurting quite so much, and then I moved to Cambridge and met David. I was looking for somewhere to live and I went into his office, and we got talking and he asked me out for a drink.