The Billionairess (The Billionairess, #1)

Chapter 16: Simmering

After she unhandcuffed me, I helped Rose prepare for bed. I undressed her lingerie, and helped her slip into a black satin nightgown. As she slid under the covers, she gave me a kiss on the cheek and a pat on the bum before sending me off.

As I walked through the living room, I found a bouquet of yellow roses in a vase with a ribbon that must have once held a note. No doubt the note had Tristen Grey's signature on it. I would've burned the roses, but I knew Rose would have been displeased.

I knew it was all silly to worry about. Rose seemed to make herself very clear to whom her heart belonged to. But I couldn't help thinking of Tristen, and how persistent his pursuit would be. I could never fight him. I didn't want to fight him. Plus, I knew Rose wasn't the kind of woman who wanted to be the prize in two men's dick-measuring contest.

Rose was busy with work for most of the rest of the week, so I just attended class and hung out with Lance in the evenings.

I tried to enjoy my time off, but I felt anxious without Rose. A burning, insatiable desire for her touch, and a separation anxiety of not being around her. And I felt nervous wondering if she were speaking to Tristen.

I knew it was wrong to feel this way, but the jealousy and anxiety burned nonetheless.

In class, Mr. Noland rambled on with his lecture on Renaissance literature, but I could never begin to pay attention to him. I stared down at my textbook, specifically at the picture of Sandro Botticelli's The Birth of Venus. I stared at the image of Venus, the so-called "goddess of beauty." Her ivory curves, her luscious golden-red hair, standing on the ocean waves surrounded by celestial attendants.

I sneered at the picture in disgust. This was not the goddess of beauty and love. The goddess of beauty and love was in her penthouse, probably curled on her silk sheets in her lingerie, riding men like Tristen Grey when she should've been riding me...

There was a loud snap, and I glanced down at my broken pencil, one half in each hand. A few classmates glance back at me. I blushed, then quietly put my snapped pencil away.

I needed to see Rose again.

---

In the beginning, being with Rose set me off like a firework. And I still felt that silky wave of fire whenever I thought of her. But the initial blaze brought about by the billionairess had mellowed, and the more I thought about her and Tristen, the closer I came to a startling conclusion:

I didn't know this woman.

I knew she was rich, powerful, and beautiful. But it was all so surface level. Beneath her coolly charming demeanor, there was a complex person I had barely scratched the surface of knowing. I knew I couldn't call Rose at work, so I decided it was time for some research.

Rose Delacourt had thousands of hits on Google. Articles chronicling her life from business journals to celebrity gossip magazines. I never paid much attention to celebrity news before. It was all trivial hub-bub to me. So-and-so get married. So-and-so get divorced. So-and-so had a baby. So-and-so caught cheating, ran away, has sex tips.

But now I was all over it like a scholar on the verge of a revolutionary discovery.

I couldn't find much about Rose's personal life. I skimmed across her Wikipedia page. She grew up in Seattle. Normal parents. Nothing too scandalous.

Then I began searching Tristen Grey with her name.

That's when things got interesting.

I found articles dating all the way back to 2011.The two had been dating for a while. The articles in chronological order flipped back and forth between them breaking up and getting back together. I watched their on-and-off again relationship like flipping through the pages of a book.

After a few hours, I had enough and shut the laptop.

The two of them kept going back and forth. It made sense now why she was still seeing him. I didn't completely buy that she was just trying to get him to leave. With that came a thought that tucked into my stomach and buried there like a plague.

What if they get back together again?

It had happened dozens of times in the past. What if this was just the cycle coming full-circle once again?

But none of it added up. Why would Rose recruit me as her lover if it wasn't true? Was it just to make him jealous?

And moreover, how could a woman like her date someone like him? Why would a dominatrix keep returning to a man who so wanted to keep her under his thumb? This was no longer simply me being jealous. It just plain illogical. How could such a dominating woman keep returning to a man who insisted on dominating her? It was so counter to the personality of the woman I knew.

Questions swirled in my head. There was so much Rose wasn't telling me. I had been so caught up in everything I realized how little I knew about her. Her past. The complexities that made her up and I had yet to unravel.

Yes, indeed.

I needed to see Rose again.

I needed to know who the mistress was that enslaved me.