Romance: The Beginning of Loss - A Billionaire Romance Novel (Romance, Billionaire Romance, Life After Love Book 1)

by Nancy Adams

  Copyright

  The Beginning of Loss

  Copyright © 2016 by Nancy Adams.

  All right reserved.

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the author of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

  Published by: Nancy Adams

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  Copyright

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

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  About the Author

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  Colorado, 2000

  An immovable tension ran through Claire as she stood at the edge of the cliff, looking out across the wide-open stretch of Colorado wilderness before her, following the winding river with her eyes all the way to the mountain vista. She’d never been this far out in the middle of nowhere before, never been this close to the Rockies even. In fact, there were a lot of things she’d never done before today, and her nineteen-year-old mind spun in circles in its attempts to make sense of everything and show her the way she should go from here on in.

  Standing with the valley spread out below and a gentle breeze flicking her long brunette hair about, Claire’s eyes searched the bleak expanse of sky that hung above the jagged mountains, praying to it for an answer that it simply would not give.

  “You’re shivering,” came a man’s voice from behind her, making her jump. “Are you cold?” it added.

  Claire slowly turned to see Sam standing behind her, a meek smile on his face, the look of shame floating underneath the surface of his beaming countenance.

  Will I ever get to see his face without that simmering look of guilt emerging on its features every time he looks at me? Claire asked herself.

  No matter how hard he attempted to bury it within his smiles, it would always seep out of him somehow. He would smile sweetly at her, a moment of glory in it, Claire reflected in his eyes, an open wound of desire opening up inside of him, the dimples on his cheeks showing from the efforts of his beaming grin. A light would open up inside of Claire too as she vicariously felt his joy—a joy emerging from his feelings toward her; the two bound in that moment.

  But no sooner was the feeling beginning to bloom than his smile would crease at the edges, the dimples would drop and his eyes would glaze over, Claire’s image disappearing from their murky surface. In that moment, the light that had been slowly opening up inside of her would abruptly extinguish, replaced with a hollow void, threatening to pull her down inside herself.

  Into that void she would then pour her own guilt for what she was doing with this man.

  “You okay?” Sam asked. “You seem elsewhere.”

  Claire let out a withered smile. As she did, a tear slowly dropped from one of her eyes before being caught in the wind as it trailed across her cheek and carried off the edge of the cliff into the never of the valley below.

  “You’re crying,” Sam said as he wiped another tear from her cheek with his finger.

  “Just hold me, Sam,” Claire let out, and Sam took ahold of the young girl and held her tight as she cried bitterly into his shoulder. “We can’t go on,” the poor girl sobbed into him.

  “I know,” Sam agreed, pulling her tightly into him and holding onto her like a drowning man to a buoy.

  “Why did we have to meet now?” Claire whispered tearfully into his ear. “In such terrible circumstances?”

  “Life moves for no man,” Sam replied tenderly. “We met through circumstances beyond either of our controls.”

  “I went to speak with my pastor last week,” Claire said, her voice breaking with sadness. “I haven’t even been to church since my mum gave me the choice when I was fourteen and I chose not to go. But this mess that we’re entangled in has made me so confused that I had to turn to someone.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He told me that I had to leave you and that I had to step away from your life for the moment. That God had given the two of us a test—as proof of our sins.”

  “So you told him everything?”

  “Not everything—I certainly didn’t mention your name.”

  “I’m glad of that,” Sam let out with a little grin.

  “But he is right, Sam—this has to end now.”

  Sam’s grin dropped in an instant and he sighed deeply. Within his sigh, Claire made out a faint groan; a wounded animal crying out in despair inside of him.

  After a brief pause between the two, Sam shuddered and then began, “I’ve felt the light of love only twice in my life. And I felt it the very moment I saw those people. It was like seeing light where there apparently was none and that light was calling to me in some unheard voice—I guess the Christians would call it a moment of ‘divine grace’. One of those people that I saw that grace in was you, Claire. The moment I spotted your eyes gazing across the hospital roof at me as I left the helicopter, I felt something. Do you remember how I stopped as I walked across the roof and gazed back at you?”

  “Yes,” Claire replied with a gentle smile.

  “It’s because your image stopped me and I felt—inside—as if I were staring at a ghost from another lifetime.” Sam paused, gazed blankly over her shoulder at the same spot of sky that she had been so fixated upon earlier, before asking, “Do you believe in reincarnation?”

  “I’m a Christian, so I shouldn’t.”

  “But you believe that our bodies are only vessels for our souls?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Then you can understand that our spiritual bodies could in theory be able to leave us at death and then travel off somewhere until they find anothe
r vessel?”

  “I could see that—in theory,” Claire answered in a sceptical tone. “But how do you ascribe all these new vessels in need of souls? The population of the world is always increasing, always expanding; that would require more souls than what have previously died.”

  “Perhaps some God produces them in a celestial factory. Or perhaps old souls split into fragments when they go from one life into the next. I’ve often thought of this.”

  “You have?” Claire asked in a playful tone, forgetting her tears for a moment.

  “Yes,” Sam answered ignoring her mirth. “I often wonder whether these fragments would then fill several vessels—each soul splitting again at each death into more and more fragments. Maybe over the entire history of the world those original souls that existed at the beginning of time have been split into countless pieces, scattered upon the winds. Would it not be possible that when these fragments are reunited, they recognize something in the other; something unseen, unheard, but definitely there?”

  “I get your theory,” Claire said, taking her face away from his shoulder and looking straight up into his light blue eyes, her own brown eyes red from tears, “but what has it to do with us?”

  “Because the feeling I had when I first saw you up on that hospital roof was like looking into the eyes of someone I’d known since time immemorial. Inside, I felt my soul illuminate the moment my eyes caught ahold of yours. As I stepped across the asphalt, I’d been so sad, so wretchedly miserable for so long that to feel that light as it burned up in an instant spark was to breathe again after months at the bottom of an ocean. You see, I was seeing a piece of my soul again—another fragment that I’d lost long ago. It was as if our souls had found their ways back to each other. I had found one fragment already in my life, and just as that one was about to flitter out forever, shatter once again and spread throughout the cosmos, I had found another piece of myself. Another piece to see me through this dark time—”

  But he was stopped when Claire tugged herself away from him.

  Shaking her head and stepping back, she tearfully exclaimed, “No—we can’t. We can’t.”

  With that, she ran from the edge of the cliff and off into the woods behind them. Sam watched her go, a look of guilt suffusing his sad face. As she disappeared through the trees, he felt her slipping away from him; in fact, he felt his whole world slipping away from him in that sobering moment.

  As far as his guilt was concerned, Claire was right in one respect, in that it was derived from a certain point that made them both feel intensely guilty. However, there was more than just a single reason that made him seethe with shame, and that was when he questioned himself as to why he could put so much on such a young girl whom he had only known for less than a month, a girl ten years younger than himself. It was insane; and it was cruel.

  He was actively pulling her into something that someone so young shouldn’t be a part of yet, if ever. Claire had so much life to live, so much carefree life, that she shouldn’t be finding herself entangled within the complications of Sam’s world at such an early juncture in her brief sunbeam of a life. He realized now that he had put too much on the girl and that he should set her free from all of this; let her live her life and put aside Sam as a mere glimmer within the auroral illumination of her life’s totality. That way she would live the life she deserved and not one thrust upon her by him.

  Sam made the decision there and then that he would let the girl run.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The farther Claire ran through the woods, the more forlorn she felt, until her limbs were so weak beneath her that she was forced to stop and sit herself down at the base of a tree, throwing her head into her hands and crying wretched tears. She felt herself being torn viciously in two. One part of her wanted to run back to Sam, take him into her arms and promise to see this through with him so that they could continue their lives together.

  But another part of her felt deep shame for what she was doing; and what type of foundation for a relationship is shame? Their love endangered so many things. For one, it endangered Claire’s career before it had even started. Secondly, it would endanger any sense of privacy that she had—after all, Sam Burgess was the second-richest man on Earth. Even though he was a deeply private recluse living on seventy thousand acres of Colorado wilderness with a private security team patrolling the area, he was still one of the most sought-after, photographed and written about people in the world, and whenever he left the peace of his home, Sam Burgess was bombarded by the press. If their love was ever exposed, it would be the end of her life as she knew it.

  But then there was the other thing—the thing that brought her face-to-face with the most embittered element of her shame. Shame that strangled her heart and clawed at her gut. The thought that she was duplicitous in Sam’s awful betrayal—that she was as guilty as him in it all—gnawed away at her, filling her with angst. She’d never considered herself ‘bad’ before.

  Now, however, it was a serious deliberation that consumed her thoughts night and day.

  Claire shook her head, wondering how her life had ended up in this place. She was always so unwilling to drop her guard, especially with men. But now she was here in the middle of the Rockies caught in a tangled web of deceit. She’d only ever had one boyfriend in her whole life before meeting Sam, and that was at high school. She was still a virgin when they’d first met, and here she was caught within this man’s life—this hugely powerful man who invested billions into charities, ate with world leaders; whose corporation reached its arms across the globe, employing millions and pushing mankind to the next stage of its technological evolution. It was men like Sam Burgess who shone the torch for mankind and led us all through the darkness. With his company’s donations, various programs were beginning to bring about a social movement alongside elements of the Democratic Party that would place the weight of responsibility on the heads of America’s industrialists and billionaires to finance social improvements in America and the world. No longer would they be allowed to shirk their responsibilities for those that existed underneath them.

  It was this that had first endeared Sam to Claire, that he wasn’t like all those typically stuffy billionaires that raced around the globe in Learjets and yachts ignoring its poverty, its pain, its needs. People that looked at poverty as the reflection of weakness on the part of the poor. At the poor themselves as if they’d made the decision to exist that way all on their own, completely missing the point that if it weren't for extreme poverty, there’d be no such thing as the extreme wealth that propped them up.

  When she’d first sat with Sam and had a normal conversation, she was completely blown away by the fact that he was so humble. She already knew about his charity work as well as his public support for many political activist groups aimed at social change in America, as well as the world. Although he never officially endorsed one single politician, you could often see him on the rare occasions that he left his estate standing behind Bernie Sanders at the Vermont senator’s rallies. His views appeared to mirror those of Claire’s, and when he began to speak so modestly, never mentioning himself, never sharing stories or views that involved him personally, always about others and about the many that suffer upon this Earth, Claire found herself swooning in his presence. He appeared to know so much about suffering and seemed obsessed with its alleviation from the shoulders of the poor.

  It had been then, as they’d snuck away from everyone else in the hospital, to some quiet room where they could talk in complete privacy, that he’d told her about his upbringing.

  They’d only known each other a week at that stage, but inside of him, Sam felt something willing him to share a part of himself with the girl. He had felt that same voice willing him on once before, and he had shuddered at the thought of how both times had been so similar. How both women seemed so alike…

  “It wasn’t good,” Sam had admitted, regarding his childhood, as they’d sat alone drinking coffee late one night in the hosp
ital. “I lived in a working man’s neighborhood where anyone with a few more brain cells than usual was frowned upon. You could watch action films, read the tabloid papers, watch football, baseball and basketball. But if you read for educational reasons or attempted to see something in life other than what every other person in that town saw, then you were looked down upon—you were an oddity. It was a farmyard where idiots raised idiots.”

  “Surely you’re being harsh,” Claire had interjected. “I grew up in the city, so I would have loved the wide open spaces of the Oregon countryside.”

  “The countryside was okay, but the small-town neighborhood was a different matter,” Sam confessed with the shrug of his shoulders. “I felt scared of it all, Claire. I wasn’t like them, I was sensitive to things. I have a photographic memory and I can still feel today how I felt around those people. My home was constantly dealing with some new catastrophe. My old man was always facing redundancy, the bills kept piling up, and his drinking and gambling only worsened everything. My mum did her best to look after six unruly thugs; and me. My brothers were always getting picked up by the police for something. Child Welfare was always around the house, interviewing one of us, or all of us. Everything constantly threatened to collapse in on us, and I recall every bit of it. They got to forget after a few months and repeat the same mistakes; overreact to it all in the same naive way over and over in a loop. But I, on the other hand, saw all the intricate patterns of their lives and it bored me.”

  Claire had giggled then, listening to Sam’s story of his dysfunctional past. She’d noticed that during his speech, he’d taken on an accent.

  “What’s funny?” Sam asked.

  “Nothing,” she replied.

  “No—something made you smile, what was it?”

  “Just now your accent changed, when you were telling me about your family. You sounded like I guess your folks must’ve sounded.”

  Sam let out a grin of his own.