Millionaire Hero (Freeman Brothers 4)

37BrynI barely even processed that I’d just walked out of Nick’s house until I was most of the way home. My brain was going in so many directions, I was on complete autopilot when I got in the car and started driving. He shocked me with his declaration. It was the last thing I expected to hear come out of his mouth that night.

He was protective of me, sure. That was to be expected. We were friends, at the very minimum. And the attraction and chemistry between us was undeniable. But that didn’t mean I would have ever expected him to open up like that to me. Especially not after the day I’d had and talking to him about my meeting with Justin.

That whole encounter had thrown me off so much. When I left the park, I was rattled and emotionally exhausted. It was a difficult thing to understand, and impossible to describe, but somehow, he seemed to know what I was feeling. Or at least be able to emphasize with me. It was comforting and reassuring just being there in the house with him.

That was all I thought it was going to be. I knew he wanted to see that I was doing alright and that I got through the meeting safely. He wanted to hear what we talked about and know what was really going on. Like I said, he was protective of me. He wanted me to be safe, both physically and emotionally. He was also protective of our baby and worried about how Justin would react if he found out.

None of that added up to me expecting him to tell me he loved me.

After leaving his house, I spent the rest of the evening thinking through our interactions. From the very first moment I’d walked into his office all the way through until I walked away from him. I tried to tumble it all through my mind again and again, picking out every little detail. I went over every conversation I could remember, everything he’d said to me.

No matter her how many times I went over it, and how much I remembered, I couldn’t wrap my head around it. When could he possibly have fallen in love with me? At what point in the tangled, dramatic few weeks we spent together did Nick realize his feelings for me were changing and they were becoming something like love?

Even more importantly, why would he want to?

His success bore repeating. possibly several times over. After all, Nick was a millionaire. Possibly even a billionaire. He didn’t need to work. Everybody in Charlotte knew that. But he did anyway. He spent his days working because he was driven to. It showed his integrity and his character. He wasn’t just going to sit around and do nothing because he had all the money he would ever need.

He wanted to do something meaningful. He saw more in investing than just people trying to generate wealth. To him, what he did helped people to achieve their dreams. It created the types of lives they wanted to live, enabling them to build families and leave legacies.

Nick Freeman was nothing short of amazing. And then there was me. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t think of a reason why he would fall in love with a freelance website coder whose track record only showed a truly terrible taste in men.

I woke up with the same thoughts and questions running through my head. Lying on my back and staring up at the ceiling for a while, I waited to see if my mind had come up with any sorts of brilliant insights while I was sleeping. That was something I’d read about one time, that dreams were just your brain’s way of distracting and entertaining you while it dealt with more important things.

I didn’t know how much of that I really believed, but it made sense at least to an extent. If my brain wasn’t having to focus on all those things it had to do all day while I was awake, it had the opportunity to really focus on major things.

It was somewhere in the middle of my second hour of drifting in and out of sleep and avoiding really tapping into my feelings by waxing poetic and philosophical about my brain that I forced myself to face reality. Not just that my stomach was rumbling with hunger and I needed to get up to eat. Or that there was work ahead of me for the day.

As I forced myself up out of bed and went into the kitchen for a cup of decaf coffee, I had to come to terms with the truth that I had definitely reacted to Nick and his revelation in a bad way. Not even just in an ambiguous way. An actually actively bad way.