Page 181 of The Rebel Billionaire

He shrugs. “Then I’m struggling to see what the real problem is here.” He folds his arms over his chest and stares me down. “I’m getting the impression it was more than a quick fuck? A quick bang to get it out of your system, and then you’d be done?”

I growl at him, and he raises an eyebrow.

“How does Brooke feel?” he asks, looking at me out of the corner of his eye.

“What?”

“Brooke? What’s the problem? Did she fuck you and run, hide in the bathroom?”

“Of course not, she stayed the night…and stop saying fuck,” I snap.

Enzo smirks before it turns to shock. “Oh.”

“She spent the night in my bed, in my arms,” I admit. “And then we spent the whole of Sunday, through to Monday morning together, until I came away.”

“Wow,” Enzo says. He’s rarely this lost for words, but it seems I’ve got him now.

He knows my thoughts on relationships and sex, and that, since Loretta, I’ve kept everyone romantically at arm’s length.

“How was she Monday morning?”

“She appeared fine.”

“I’m struggling to see what the problem is.” He doesn’t wait for an answer. “I know she’s still in New York, as I’ve heard you on the phone with her multiple times this week, including late at night.” He waggles his eyebrows, and I groan. “How is her sister, by the way? Did she not want to come to London with us to visit her family?”

“I asked her, but she said no. Her family told her to stay there.”

Enzo frowns.

“It’s weird,” I say, unsure I should be confiding this much in my brother, but out of everyone, he knows me best. “Listening to her speak to her family. They’re close. Yet she didn’t go back for Christmas, and no one has visited her since she arrived…I don’t know, something feels off, Enzo.”

“Hey, don’t read too much into it. Sometimes an emergency can make people see things in a different light. It doesn’t mean she hasn’t had problems with her family. This incident with her sister’s illness may have given them all a new perspective. Life-and-death situations often make most issues shrivel into insignificance.”

I know he’s right, but something in my gut tells me it’s more… or is that simply me trying to build barriers?

“When did you get so philosophical?” I ask.

He chuckles. “I have a teenage daughter. Everything’s a crisis. I’m just learning to pick my battles.”

Avril is flexing her teenage muscles, and with Enzo out of the country most of the time, my brother works hard to maintain a relationship with her.

“What’s next?”

I sigh.

“I don’t know,” I say, staring into my wine glass. “Everything happened so suddenly before I came away. I don’t know what’s going to happen when I get back. I’ve told her to think about it.”

“I take it you haven’t spoken to HR?”

I shake my head. It’s company policy for employees to disclose personal relationships, especially those involving a power imbalance. But ours only began over the weekend, and I was on a flight first thing Monday morning.

“Alex—”

“I know, but before I go storming in and laying out my private business in front of Sue, I want to know where we stand.”

“Do you think it was a one-off?”

I shrug, not wanting to put words into Brooke’s mouth before she’s had time to really think about what happened between us. My mind wanders back to Monday morning’s shower and how it felt with Brooke’s lips wrapped around my cock, her tongue licking and teasing my slit, before I came hard all over her breasts.