Billionaire Misery by Lexy Timms

were parted, almost as if he were about to give her one of those earth-shattering kisses she loved so much. Her heart raced and her eyes locked on his full, soft lips, the full lush curve of the bottom lip and the sharp delineation of his philtrum above.
    “Jessie, I love you and I’m not letting go.”

CHAPTER 10
    T hose were words she’d wanted to hear for so long, from anyone. Her life had been an exercise in loneliness and ambition ever since the day her father died. When her mother died, it had only intensified, and she could see that now. She whispered, “I can’t love you, Craig. I can’t. Not anymore.”
    His grip grew more forceful. “Are you saying you did before you knew he was my father?”
    She realized he had her there. She shook her head, “Don’t do this to me. Please don’t.”
    “Don’t do what?” There was a trace of anger in his words. “Don’t tell you I love you? Don’t say I know you love me too, and you’re letting something out of my fucking control, or yours, or fucking anyone’s, to stand in the way of something that could be special? Or should I not tell you that you’re letting revenge blind you? I get it because I did the same fucking thing. You know where that got me, Jessie? Exiled. Left out in the wind, all alone.” His eyes burned with a fire she had never seen before. “Don’t put yourself outside the person who loves you. It’s not worth it. We have enough on Wilkes... I’ll testify. I hate being a rat, but I’ll do it. If it’ll give you enough revenge to finally let go, I’ll do whatever I need to do.” He stared at her, laying everything bare with that look. “But tell me, Jessie, when will it ever be enough?”
    That question struck at the heart of everything. When would it be enough? Her father’s old crew was all either dead or locked away for the rest of their lives. The men who’d killed him were dead. Now Wilkes would go down.
    And it wasn’t enough.
    Pain sliced through her. Katie was a Wilkes. Craig was a Wilkes. She loved Craig, and she was really starting to like Katie. How could she when they were Wilkes? What if one day she realized that, not only was the revenge she’d get when Wilkes went down not enough, but that she wanted his children to suffer too? Was she that dead-set on revenge? Was seeing them suffer something that she would need to feed that revenge too? She was horrified by the idea, but she also knew just how deep that need for revenge went, whether she wanted it to or not, and she knew that that raging need might never be satisfied.
    She didn’t want to hurt Craig or Katie, but she might do so simply because the need to avenge her family ran so deep inside her. “Craig, you weren’t there, stuck behind a false wall while your father was killed. You weren’t sitting in a tiny rental place with an eviction notice on the front door and a disconnection notice for the electricity on the table, waiting for a mother who never came home again.”
    He stared at her without sympathy. “No, I wasn’t. And you weren’t at that home where the foster parents beat us with belts. You weren’t at the group home that had a sadistic man in charge, and who delighted in telling the youngest kids that they were there because they were bad and unlovable. You weren’t there when we were forced to go hungry. Maybe the same things happened to you? I don’t know. But what happened to me didn’t happen to you. I used to want to go back and do all the same things to those people that they did to me, but you know what? I can’t. And even if I could it wouldn’t matter, it wouldn’t change what happened. Jessie, you have to see that. You have to break the cycle.”
    “How can I love you?” The words were a whisper. “I can’t. I can’t love you, knowing that your father...”
    “Put me into the foster system without a backward glance, told the world I was dead, and then wrecked his daughter’s life by pretending I was dead—and making