The Billionaire's Romance (A Winters Love Book 2) by Holly Rayner Page B

Aaron lived in a building called the Strathmore. Being a New Yorker born and bred I had of course heard of it although I’d never been inside. It was on east 84 th street in the heart of Manhattan. The building was huge and looked like it was trying to reach the sky to me. The smartly dressed doorman opened the door for us and Aaron greeted him, but it wasn’t the warm greeting that I might imagine I would give someone I saw every day.
     
    The lobby was gorgeous, decorated in a Mediterranean style with large potted palms and comfy looking overstuffed couches and chairs. The coffee and end tables were made of white wicker with glass tops and expensive looking vases filled with fresh flowers. The elevators were almost as elegant as the lobby and smoothly took us up to the forty-second floor. We stepped off into an almost deathly quiet hallway with one door directly in front of us, one across the hall and another at the far end of the hall.
     
    “Are there only three apartments on the whole floor?” I asked him as he was unlocking the one in front of us.
     
    “Yes, just three,” he said.
     
    When we walked inside and he flipped on the light, I saw why. His apartment was huge. It had to be at least 2500 square feet with three bedrooms and three bathrooms. There was a gourmet kitchen and a formal dining room. But what completely took my breath away was the view. You could see all of Manhattan and the living room was surrounded by floor to ceiling windows and a set of glass doors that led out to a beautiful little balcony.
     
    “Oh Aaron, your home is beautiful,” I told him. He looked around when I said it as if it were the first time he’d seen it too. Finally he shrugged and said,
     
    “It’s home.”
     
    We set our Chinese food up on the dining room table and had our dinner. The food was amazing and I felt like Aaron and I were finally falling into a comfortable place with our conversation. He was so smart and so well-informed that I wondered how he found the time to read so much when his life seemed so consumed by running a multi-national company.  I often looked at him and marveled at the fact that behind the gorgeous face that didn’t look a bit over its early thirties had already seen the battles that starting and building a successful company and gained the respect of nearly everyone in his field. I was in awe of how much he’d achieved in such a short time. I also knew that had to be where his reserved personality likely stemmed from. I’m sure that in order to get the business world to take someone so young so seriously, he had to shed himself of the ways of the young too quickly. I could see him trying with me though and for that I was appreciative. It made me feel special and he was opening up more to me about his personal life as well. He told me about his family home and that he’d been trying to buy it for years but the people who own it now didn’t want to sell it.
     
    “Have they lived there long?” I asked him.
     
    “Yes, they’ve lived in it for almost twenty years and raised their children there. To them, it’s their home.”
     
    “It didn’t go to you when your parent’s passed?”
     
    “It did, technically, the entire estate did, although it wasn’t much. The attorney’s who handled it thought it would be best since I was so young to sell it and place the money in trust for me. I’m grateful to them for that, it’s most of what I used to go to school and start my business….but I think all the time about how hard my father worked to buy that house. My mother used to tell me that someday I’d grow up and raise my own family in it….”
     
    “Maybe the owner’s will change their mind someday.”
     
    “Maybe,” he said with a sad smile. I knew talking about his parents and their deaths made him sad so I said,
     
    “I grew up on Long Island.”
     
    “I had you figured for Upstate,” he said with a grin.
     
    “Really? Why’s that?”
     
    “You’re just so