The Millionaire's Bet [BOOK ONE][#Wattys2015][#SYTYCW15][#CarinaPress]

part twenty-one

ALYSSA

I hated how I had watched Andrew walk away from me and had done nothing to stop him, I had just allowed him to walk away, and I hated that I had done that because he had put everything on the line for me but I was simply too scared to do anything about it. He had told me that I was fucking with his emotions, much like he had fucked with my own, and I allowed him to walk away with the implication that we were going to return to the silence which had consumed us for so long now.

And, now, as I lay in bed admiring the ceiling, his voice and words are the only two things which I can hear, and it's pissing me off. I didn't want him to continue apologising to me, I didn't even want him to make everything he had done to me up, I just wanted him to be there and I wanted him to understand how much of a change this was for me—I was never supposed to feel this way about the enemy and I hated myself for doing so, but I hated myself even more for admitting to him the way in which he had made me feel.

I should, naturally, despise Andrew and want to push him from the nearest cliff, and I should want him to suffer for everything which he had done to me, but there was the rational part of me which wanted to be there for him because I knew that he didn't have anyone other than Robert and his mother. I actually wanted to be happy and I wished so much for it not to be Andrew who had the power to make me happy but, just as he had the power to make me happy, he also had the power to break me.

He had the power to shatter my entire world. I had foolishly, very stupidly, given him the power to bring me crashing to my knees and to leave me with nothing other than a broken heart. He could break me beyond repair and there was nothing I could do to prevent that from happening, not when he was constantly running from me and making excuses as to why there could be nothing between the two of us, and not when he was the one who was already causing me pain because of his cowardly actions.

In the last four months, I had fallen for a man who had made me feel like shit, but had made me feel loved at the same time. I had fallen for a man who blamed me for his problems but was there to make my own problems seem meaningless. I had fallen for a man who was physically incapable of love because of my selfish, bitter sister but he still had the ability to make me think there was a chance for me to have something more than I had ever had with Dean.

I was in love with Andrew Collins and I fucking hated myself for it. I hated that I was weak and that I could no longer run from the way I was feeling, no matter how many times I pushed it to the back of my mind and pretended that he wasn't real, he was still in my thoughts and he was consuming every single part of me. I am an idiot, an absolute fool, for I was the woman who was still chasing a man who was inevitably going to break my heart.

Four months, in four fucking months, this single man had managed to turn my life upside down in both the best and the worst ways. Four fucking months was all it had taken for me to fall so far in love with man, that I didn't think there was a way for me to be able to escape, for I was emotionally attached to a man who only knew how to be cold-hearted and distant—I was with Dean for eleven months before he proposed to me, engaged to him for three months, and I was married to him for seven months, but he never affected me in this way and he sure as hell never consumed my thoughts in the same way Andrew had done recently.

Dean, the very same man I thought that I had loved and wanted to spend the rest of my life with, had never had the same impact upon me as Andrew Collins was now having. Asshole of the year, cold-hearted bastard, stressed-out businessman and emotionless prick, that was the man I had found myself loving and I really did have no clue about how I was supposed to deal with this all.

"Ugh," I shouted into my pillows, grabbing my phone from the bedside table to check the time, and I groaned when I saw that it had just turned half four in the morning, and I knew that there was no hope of me getting any sleep tonight because one fucking man had decided he was going to embed himself in my thoughts, "of all the people I had fall for, why the fuck did it have to be you?"