Page 41 of The Billion Heirs Boxed Set

“Mom,” I prompt.

“Our relationship was a whirlwind. I know you don’t want to hear about your mother’s sex life, but I’ll just say it was lust at first sight. Looking back, I have to wonder if it was ever love, at least for him. We married, and I moved to Montana.”

“You stopped going to flight school?”

“I did.” She gave up her dream because she got married.

“Then…”

“Then the real Jonathan Bridger showed himself. Verbal abuse. Drinking. Womanizing. He hit me once. Only once. I was pregnant with you and I told him the good news. That’s why he hit me. Because I got knocked up. He divorced me before you were born.”

“He didn’t want kids,” I muse.

My free hand is clenched into a fist, ready to beat the shit out of the dead man who laid a hand on my mom.

She sighs. “I returned to Seattle and got through flight school.”

And never married again. It seems nothing, especially love, got in her way again. Once bitten—or beaten—twice shy.

“I’m sorry you married him,” I tell her.

Her life could have turned out so differently if she’d never gotten involved with Jonathan Bridger.

“Oh, sweetheart. I’m not.”

I set my elbow in the open window and lean my head into the phone. “Why the hell not? He was an asshole to you and didn’t deserve you.”

“Because he gave me you. I’d do it all over again.”

I’m quiet because…fuck. My mom did everything for me. Everything. Now she’s sick and I’m far away and can’t help.

I switch topics. “Your sink clogging again?”

“No, it’s fine.”

She pauses, and just when I’m about ready to break the silence—

“Sweetheart, sometimes bad things happen,” she says, not taking the hint. “It’s hard. Hell, even. But good things result from it. You can’t often see it until later, when you look back. You are the best thing in my world, and as much as I hate to admit it, you were a gift from Jonathan Bridger. I’ll always be grateful to him for giving me the person I love most. You gave my life purpose, Austin. You inspired me to fulfill my dreams.”

Mom’s words ring true. She always put me first, and I never went to bed not knowing I was cherished by the only parent who mattered.

I think of Carly, of what she went through, and wonder if she sees any good things that came from her hellish experience. How can she?

We ride into town and Chance pulls into a parking spot around the central square. It’s a small park with what looks like a war memorial. The town looks more like Mayberry than Bayfield, where nothing bad ever happens.

“I have to go,” I say. “Love you.”

“Love you, too, sweetheart.”

I end the call.

“Your mom?” Miles disconnects his seatbelt.

While we worked side by side the past two days, we didn’t talk all that much.

Instead, Carly invaded my thoughts. The way she looked outside the bar as she rocked her hips onto my fingers. The feel of her hand clenching my wrist. How her eyes closed halfway as she was about to come. How I wanted to get her there, and did just that at the spring. I pushed her over and she was fucking gorgeous.

I let go of my dick-hardening thoughts of Carly and focus back on Miles’s question. “Yeah. She’s got MS and I worry, being so far away.”