Billionaire Romance Boxed Set 2(209)

“Let me down!” I screamed. “You’re going to hurt yourself!”

“If you don’t stop moving so much, not only will I drop you, but yes, I’ll hurt myself.”

Because he was an idiot and wouldn’t listen to reason, I stopped moving. Why did he have to do this? It didn’t change anything. I bawled, tears streaming down my face, completely and utterly lost in my depression. This shouldn’t happen. It just shouldn’t.

He carried me inside, all pretense of following the paramedic’s orders gone. He carried me through the hallways, to places I didn’t even know existed. I hadn’t spent a lot of time in his main house and it was all so foreign to me, so fancy. Pictures on the walls and elegant carpets under our feet. Expensive vases on fancy tables sitting in front of windows as pure decoration and nothing more; no flowers, just vases. Asher carried me through his house until we reached one large set of doors, then he kicked them open and marched inside. Only then did he put me down.

“I don’t understand why you did that,” I said. “I wish you hadn’t.”

He went back to the doors and closed them, pulling on the ornate, gilded handles. Clicking a latch shut, he locked us inside.

“Look,” he said.

I looked, for all the good it would do me.

He’d brought me to a library. It was nothing like the one in his guest home, and yet something like it, too. Entirely different, but still very much comfortable and cozy. A hearth off to the side, large enough for four people to lounge in front of it, lay waiting for winter and a cozy fire, with people sitting in front of it and toasting marshmallows. The bookcases were different, extravagant, with rolling ladders perched on the sides like something out of classic literature. Mahogany tables cluttered with books and candelabras with half-used candles, and writing pads and old-fashioned quills, plus new pens and a few pencils.

Plus books; a million books. Hidden in a corner was an ancient-looking card catalog, with a desk and a reference computer next to it. Did Asher really have a computer just to keep track of all of his books? Probably, yes, and it did seem useful.

The library in his main house was massive, a two-story affair with an open center. I glanced up for a moment and saw catwalks on the second “floor” of the library, with stairs leading up to them, going all the way around the perimeter of the room. More shelves up there, more books, more everything. It seemed so magical and I thought for a second that I’d fallen asleep on the couch in his guest home and dreamed all of this.

In the center of the library I saw a small dais with a broken book placed reverently atop it. A glass dome covered and protected the book. It was a copy of Dante’s Inferno, the one I’d ruined the first day Asher and I ever met.

“You can’t leave,” Asher said.

“Why not?” I asked, somehow managing to push aside my tears. “There’s no point for me to stay,” I said. “Every reason I initially came here for is gone now, so I think it’s best for me to go.”

“No,” Asher said. “I want to hire you.”

“Hire me for what? I don’t want to be your assistant anymore, Asher. I don’t want to do that. And even if I did, I can do it from my own home. I can go into work like everyone else. I don’t need to live here.”

Asher furrowed his brow. “Jessika, I…”

“What, Asher?” I asked. “Give me one good reason to stay, because I don’t think there are any.”

“I love you,” he said, fast; too fast. “I do. I thought you knew that, and…”

“You don’t,” I said. “You love the idea of me. You loved that I was willing to give you children, and you love that I… I don’t know what you love, but you don’t love me.”#p#分页标题#e#

“No,” he said. He moved towards me but I moved away.

“Stop,” I said.

He didn’t stop. He kept coming and I tried to back away, but there was nowhere to hide. I stood pressed against a bookshelf, trapped, with nowhere to go.

“Jessika,” he said. “I don’t care about any of that. I don’t care about children, or money. If I lose everything, so be it. I understand that it could happen. I take that risk every single day and I realize that no matter what I do, sometimes it’s impossible to succeed. You risk everything, but for what? I enjoy it, my work and my business, but if everything suddenly came crashing down, as it almost did today, I could live without it.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“I don’t want to live without it, but I could,” he said. “I couldn’t live without you, though. Not now, and not ever. You mean so much to me. I want to know everything about you. I… will you go on a date with me?”