Winter's Price: A Billionaire Romance: The Winter Billionaires, #6

By Olivia Blake

It seemed as though everything was beginning to unravel.

 

Andrew was trying to destroy her. Alan was threatening to reveal the secrets of her past if she didn't pay him off. Someone was terrorizing her with phone calls and emails and worse. Stephen and Derek were away, and she was all alone. And Stephen was never going to believe the truth. Everyone around them already assumed the worst. Celeste knows him—he'd pretend to blow it off and swear that he believed her, but inside it would start eating away at him and he'd never be certain that she was on the level.

 

Could I stand to leave him before he told me to go?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tove Press
• Release date: Jan 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9781533760081

Book preview

WINTER’S PRICE

THE WINTER BILLIONAIRES PART SIX

OLIVIA BLAKE

Winter’s Price

Copyright © 2016 Olivia Blake

Published by Pink Parts Press

All rights reserved. No part of this eBook may be reproduced in any form or by any means, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without permission in writing from the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Names, characters, places, businesses, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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Summary

It seemed as though everything was beginning to unravel.

Andrew was trying to destroy her. Alan was threatening to reveal the secrets of her past if she didn’t pay him off. Someone was terrorizing her with phone calls and emails and worse. Stephen and Derek were away, and she was all alone. And Stephen was never going to believe the truth. Everyone around them already assumed the worst. Celeste knows him—he’d pretend to blow it off and swear that he believed her, but inside it would start eating away at him and he’d never be certain that she was on the level.

Could I stand to leave him before he told me to go?

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Winter’s Price

Bonus Material

Preview: Winter’s Storm

The Winter Billionaires—Andrew

Dark Bargains

With One Word

About the Author

Winter’s Price

CELESTE LEFT WORK BEFORE LUNCH. She was too stressed to get any work done and terrified that she would have another run in with Andrew, so she bolted as soon as she could get away. Rachel was out running an errand for her boss, so Celeste watched through the cracked door until she knew Andrew was safely in his office and then made a break for it.

Derek still wasn’t answering his cell phone, and the more Celeste thought about it the less inclined she was to call Stephen and get him involved. She knew how important the tests for his new system were, and she was afraid he’d drop everything and fly straight back if he found out what happened. What was she going to tell him, anyway? The only explanation she had for those pictures was the truth, but she didn’t expect anyone to believe it. Even if they did, would it really make a difference? They’d never be able to fully trust her when it all came out, would they? They’d always wonder, always have doubts.

It was going to kill her to lose Stephen. She’d only just found him, only just begun to hope that things might work out. She should have expected that he would be snatched away, though. That was how her life worked. It was why she ended up living on her own before she graduated from high school. At this point she’d have to count herself lucky if the only other thing she lost was her job, because she knew quite well that Andrew was capable of carrying through on every threat he’d made.

If they had tried a relationship and it hadn’t worked out, Celeste supposed she could have lived with it. Not even getting the chance to find out whether they could have had a future together was the part that she was having trouble accepting. Stephen had said that he loved her. That should have counted for something, but when Andrew hit him with all the damning evidence about her, how quickly would his heart chill towards her?

Was it worth sticking around to find out? Could she stand to leave him before he told her to go?

It was a long fight through lunch hour traffic to get home, and she spent every minute of it replaying Andrew’s attack over and over in her head. If he decided to go full-out after her, her life was over. She’d never be able to get any kind of meaningful job, even if she somehow managed to finish her master’s degree.

By the time she finally made it through her front door she was a total wreck. At first she thought she was going to throw up, and she crouched in her bathroom by the toilet with her face pressed against the cool porcelain. At last, after sitting for a while with the apartment door safely locked behind her and poor Molly worriedly buzzing up against her back, she began to calm down. She wasn’t sure whether she would ever really feel safe again, though. Not there, not anywhere. If Andrew decided he wanted to destroy her life, there was nowhere she could hide.

Unless she wanted to throw her whole life away, Celeste’s only option was to do exactly what Andrew told her to.

When the nausea subsided enough that she was sure she wasn’t going to throw up, Celeste washed her face and went to sit down in the kitchen. She tried calling Derek several more times with no luck, so she ended up spending the night curled up on the couch with Molly. For hours she stared at the television without actually seeing anything she watched. Then when she finally fell asleep, she dreamed about a monstrous version of Andrew standing over her in the shadows surrounding her bed and woke up terrified, drenched in sweat with her heart trying to hammer its way through her chest. After that, every time she dozed off she jerked awake again after twenty minutes or so, until the sun peering around the blinds let her know that morning had finally arrived.

It was Saturday and there was