Page 71 of The Billionaire’s Fake Fiancée
You'd slept with him, that's all. It's not like you are his fiancée. Or that one night meant anything to him.
Yet I'd sensed a depth of emotion from him when we made love. He couldn't have been faking it. Not all of it. He couldn't have been.
It had been real for me. Everything that I had shown him, had shared with him. As real as the ring he'd given me. Too bad Jace doesn't feel the same way.
A few hours later, as the flight begins its descent toward Bombay, I can't stop my fingers from worrying the ring. My heart pounds in my chest, the pulse beating in my ears so hard I think I'm going to faint. I force myself to breathe in and out, trying to calm myself down.
What am I even doing on this flight? One call, and I'd left Jace. broken my promise to him. All I'd needed was an excuse to leave, and I had grabbed this chance to go back in time.
Seems it's easier to face an unknown past than a future I can't see, one I can't even begin to fathom without Jace.
But now when I'm so close to finally being back—back to where it had all started—I know I've made a mistake.
By now the wedding is over and he'll be left explaining why I'm not there. And I'm going to face the one thing I have spent all my life running away from.
36
Sienna
* * *
When I step off the flight at Bombay, the heat crushes me. The moisture in the air hangs heavy, condensing inside the airport. Sweat trickles down my back. I'm jetlagged from not having slept on the flight, and the world blurs around the edges.
As I leave the airport, the noise slams into me with a physical force that almost blows me back. And the smell. That mix of mud and dirt and unwashed human bodies all overlaid with a sense of intense desperation. Of too many souls being crammed into too little a space. It echoes faint memories, flavors I've stored in that secret place inside that now come pouring out.
I don't want to be here.
But what are my options? Go back and face my debtors in the Valley? Face a furious Jace, who no doubt is even now plotting his revenge for breaking our arrangement?
No, I must keep going.
Swept along by the taxi queue, I find myself in a cab and sink back against the faux-leather seats.
The voice on the other end of the line had been frank. I had to come, immediately, to the address he had shared. Time is of the essence.
All these years, and now it's as if time has run out. Abruptly.
I'm here. And for the first time since the call, I let myself think about what lies on the other side of this journey.
My biological mother tracked me down. Found me in the one place in this world I hadn't told anyone I would be. And she's dying.
She'd spent years looking for me, trying to reach me. Ironically, it was the trip to the London that had put me on their radar.
London is geographically the closest I've been to the country of my birth. Perhaps that was one of the reasons I hadn't been comfortable since I'd arrived there?a sense of my life about to change forever.
The PI, who'd been working on my case for years, had traced me to the orphanage that had helped place me, only to find all their records were lost in a fire. Still, they'd remembered I'd been placed in the US, but all other details were lost.
My mother had not given up, though. Using digitally enhanced images that aged me as I grew, the PI tried to trace me over the years, routinely tracking international flights.
The first international flight I'd taken out of the US, and he had found me.
I am not sure what to feel. My thoughts race around in my head, buzzing about, trying to make connections.
If I hadn't met Jace, hadn't accepted his offer, I wouldn't have come to London. My blood family wouldn’t have found me. And I wouldn't be here, bumping along through the mid-morning traffic, eyes scrunched up behind oversized sunglasses.
I didn't want to be found.
All these years, I was hiding from them, from myself, pretending my adopted family was the only reality I knew. I'd spent years putting up those barriers. I didn't want to go back.
