Page 87 of The Billionaire's Demand

Hormones?

She suppressed a grimace, turning to look out the window once more.

‘How are you finding it?’

‘Mortifying,’ she answered honestly. ‘I cannot believe you had a lawyer draft this.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s so...personal,’ she spluttered.

‘They act for me in the strictest confidence,’ he assured her. ‘This document is completely private.’

‘It’s not that,’ she said with a shake of her head. ‘Doesn’t it embarrass you that they think this is what our marriage is about?’ She lifted the contract higher.

‘It is what our marriage is about,’ he said without a hint of shame. ‘Besides which, I do not particularly care what my legal team thinks about my private life.’

Libby’s eyes narrowed. ‘I bet you don’t care what anyone thinks,’ she said, wishing on all the stars in the heaven that she knew just a little more about the man she was metaphorically getting into bed with.

‘Not particularly,’ he said with a shrug.

The steward returned with a cup of tea. Libby thanked him but made no effort to lift it off the table.

‘It is my experience that people will generally think what they want whether you like their opinion or not. Worrying about it is therefore somewhat futile.’

Her lips twisted into the ghost of a smile. ‘I suppose you’re right,’ she said, wondering at his innate confidence, and where it came from. Except it went beyond confidence. There was an air of such self-reliance that now Libby did wonder about his life, his childhood, his experiences. What had happened to shape him into the man he was today?

‘You said you didn’t really know your parents,’ she murmured, placing the contract aside and giving him her full attention—or at least, finally showing that he already had it. ‘Who raised you?’

Was she imagining the slight pause? The shift in his features?

‘I was in foster care,’ he responded crisply. It was an open-ended answer. She had no personal experience with the foster system, but she’d heard and read enough to know that some people didn’t fare too well with it, while others did. She supposed it was down to the luck of the draw.

‘And?’

His expression didn’t change. ‘And at fifteen, I ran away,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘I decided I’d had enough of being parented, and wanted to take my chances on the streets.’

‘You did?’

He nodded once.

‘I can’t even imagine...’ she said softly.

He looked at her long and hard and Libby’s mouth was suddenly as dry as dust.

‘Can’t you?’

Her eyes widened. How could he possibly know about her childhood?

‘Why do I find that hard to believe?’ he pushed.

She shook her head. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Perhaps it’s because I see something in you, Libby, something that is broken in all the same ways I was.’ He ran his gaze over her features, slow and deliberate, as if he was tasting her. ‘Am I wrong?’

Her lips parted. He wasn’t wrong, but she’d always thought she hid her pain so well. She tried. Her childhood had been difficult, emotionally draining, hurtful. She carried those wounds to this day, yes, but Libby had sworn she wouldn’t be defined by them. Where she felt pain, she acted with love. She smiled when her heart hurt. She was determined to respond to whatever darkness had been in her life with pure light. To hope for lasting love even when her mother had demonstrated again and again how unlikely that was.

That Raul had seen beyond her façade scared Libby to death.

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