Page 81 of The Billionaire's Accidental Legacy

She was learning that she needed to begin to build things from her heart.

And there was no certainty there.

She was so used to certainty.

To the absolutes of her mind, and life was more than absolutes. It was these messy uncertain spaces, where she had to do battle with her own doubts. Where she had to try to find a picture of something that she had never seen before and figure out how to walk toward that.

An image of herself holding her baby. An image of herself hugging a small child before that child went to school.

Of loving that child when they were messy, crying and inconvenient.

Of giving that child all the things she had never had.

Love, she realized, filled the blank spaces. It was love that allowed you to feel what you could never know.

Love was the most important thing, and it wasn’t as simple as something you kept in a file in your mind.

She felt changed out here. With so many fewer things to see you, and know and learn.

Left behind with only her feelings.

With the silence of the trees and the sounds of the waves.

With the beat of her heart, and the need in her soul to find more than what she had been given up until this point.

She didn’t know what she was doing. But she would use love to fill in the spaces.

She was very afraid that she was beginning to love him.

Very, very afraid.

Because she wasn’t sure what more he had inside. Because she wasn’t sure if there was more to him. She wanted there to be. There were moments when she was almost certain.

You know what you have to do.

She did. But it was frightening.

But they had done all this backward. Sex first, a baby and now they had gotten to know each other.

But there was still more in him. She was certain of it. There was still a part of himself that he held back.

And she realized that they were at the point now. The point where she ought to seduce him.

Because it meant something different now.

Because they had changed.

She had cut her feelings off to protect herself from the horror of their lives. From the pain she’d caused due to her father’s machinations. So much so that she had, for a time, forgotten what feeling was. So much so that she had denied it to the point that she was afraid she didn’t have it.

She had stopped protecting herself in some ways, but she was still clinging on to pieces of that protection.

She had to stop. Because that was the key to change. To her actually becoming new. To her actually being the mother she needed to be. The sister she wanted to be.

The woman she had always wished she could be.

And that meant taking a chance.

The risk. But this was different from gambling. When you gambled, the prize wasn’t specific. Not generally. It was just a pot of whatever the fools decided to gamble. And this was only her heart.

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