Kylie Bray (Love, Hate and Billions) novel Chapter 16

I watch her tall lithe form walking toward the jet.

I stand in wait, patiently watching Vincent get out of his car.

His jacket is now gone, his disheveled hair giving the impression he ran his hands numerous times through the mass, on the drive here. A slight breeze, elicits shivers down my spine, as goosebumps prickle on my tanned flesh. I run my hands down my naked arms. My face changing into a frown the closer he gets to me.

“What are you doing here?” I ask straight away.

“There is obviously a problem, I want to help.” I raise my eyebrows at his blunt answer because him helping us in any way is foreign.

“We don't need your help, I SUGGEST you run along to your people and leave us to our own devices.” I am not sure where my confidence is coming from, it has never shown itself in the face of Vincent before.

Maybe the reason being is that my brother is missing.

Or that I know he doesn't really want to help, he just wants an in with his brothers, my brothers, and that thought, that knowledge pisses me off. My brother is missing. I don't have time for games now.

“Don't get smart Kylie,” He warns me, pulling his shirt sleeves up his hairy arms that I have spent nights imagining wrapped around my body.

“Smart? You think I am smart, OH now I get a compliment, wow.” My sarcastic reply has those hardened eyes of his that I have spent months hoping would look at me with interest just once, widen in shock, as his jaw, the jaw I spent hours wishing I could touch just once, tightens in anger.

Good I want to anger him.

I want him to be pissed off, I want him to take me on.

“Have you forgotten that I am more a Stone than you? They are my family by blood, DNA. I don't need your permission. I wasn't asking for it.”

I step closer to him, so close our nose could touch. His dark scent washing over me, a torturous reminder that I will never have him. I will never touch him. He will never look at me and want me. Vincent will always be a made-man and I will always be a thorn in his side.

I think of how stupid and naive I was to just believe that I could starve myself from that craving of such a poisonous drug-like Vincent.

I tried don't get me wrong, but trying and achieving are completely different words.

I can’t say whether it was just me that made the decisions that turned my life because on one side it's said that we are our decisions, we make them, we live by them, and I have, but looking back on those times I always wondered whether those decisions really were my own.

Papa once told me that sometimes our choices were intertwined with other people's actions, we just couldn't help but go with the flow hoping to be breathing in the end.

Like a natural path of life. I don't know what to say to that.

Do I regret it now, no, I would have done it all again-the hurt, pain, loss, anger, I would've done every fucking thing again.

It was my heart that chose Vincent Stone how could I not.