The Billionaire’s Savior

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Blurb:

A billionaire, marriage of convenience, black romance book.

Chris Odom is a billionaire with agoraphobia.

Yet, what he truly craves is a connection that goes beyond the walls of his empty home.

In a leap of faith, he posts an ad on Craigslist in search of a wife.

Enter Robyn, who’s barely making ends meet.

When she stumbles upon Chris’s ad, she sees it as the perfect chance to reset her struggling life.

They hit it off, get married quickly, and start a new life together.

However, it doesn’t take long for Robyn to realize that Chris isn’t the only one trying to escape from shadows…

Just when things get serious, new challenges threaten to unravel everything.

Can Chris and Robyn move on from the past as they build a new life together?

Or will the skeletons in their closets be too much?

Find out in this billionaire, African American romance story by Shamika Louis.

Chapter 1

Chris couldn’t entirely pin point the very day it all started. Couldn’t tell the doctors and the specialists the point at which leaving the house had become a problem. They laid the blame at the door of what they loosely called the accident, and what the cops specifically called a hate crime.

Well if you force it onto other people…what do you expect?

No one had actually said those words to him, but he knew that is what the cops meant when they frowned at his explanation and scribbled in their notebooks. Apparently (and was Chris and his now dead white girlfriend aware of this?) public displays of affection between him and his blonde blue eyed beau in the line at a cinema were just asking for trouble. He had heard it enough, when he sat in the gutter, cradling Nicole’s head in his hands, watching the life leave his lover’s beautiful blue eyes, her blood staining through Chris’s clothes. They had been nineteen, and so very much in love. Confident with the cockiness of youth, out and proud of it, standing in line for tickets and laughing over something their programming lecturer had said, when it happened.

These were no rednecks, no placard waving bigots, just teenagers. Normal teenagers, in jeans and sweatshirts, nothing out of the ordinary, except for the fact that they were high on something. They pushed Chris and he stumbled and fell, the bone in his left thigh fracturing on impact, an unlucky fall, nothing more. Then…
If only Nicole had just helped him, instead of turning on the group and calling them on their catcalls, then maybe, just maybe, she would be here today. But she didn’t. Nicole wasn’t like that, she had principles and a temper and she fought back, one against five, confronted their drug-hazed violence. She was silenced, so very quickly, by the business end of a broken bottle, the jagged glass a clean cut across her jugular, the scarlet evidence as quick as a blink of the eye. It was the boys that called 911, dispersing almost instantly, terror in their eyes, with no witnesses that came forward. The evidence of their crime probably washed away in their mom’s washing machines at forty degrees. Chris couldn’t even identify them, describe them, in so much pain, in shock, but the violence never left him.

Chris went through the motions, like you do. He went to the funeral, on a hot Manhattan day, with Nicole’s parents refusing to accept it was a hate crime, that their daughter couldn’t possibly have been with some black guy, after all she had been presented at her debut ball just last year hadn’t she?

Chris didn’t make their grief worse, didn’t argue that Nicole wasn’t just his best friend, but was, in fact, the woman he loved. He didn’t tell them that they had planned to move to Canada for work after college and start a family of their own, married and happy. It wasn’t fair to tell them. Was it?

Apparently, so the doctors said, the leg bones are the longest and strongest bones in a person’s body. When you stand or walk, all the weight of your upper body rests on them, and Chris’s femur had cracked. It takes a lot of force to do that, they told him, but I only stumbled off of the curb, Chris had replied. They looked sad. After all the patient had just lost his girlfriend in a violent and bloody way, and his leg would need a lot of healing. They didn’t know what to say to make it better so they referred him for counseling and ticked the relevant box on their clipboard.

So when asked, by the counselors he struggled with for years, and with the doctors who visited him, he just said, I was in an accident, I think it started then. He hadn’t been the loudest most confident person before the accident, and since the accident, any small amount of confidence he may have had had disappeared. He wasn’t shy exactly, more like reclusive, like Howard Hughes.

Agoraphobia was what the doctor’s labeled it and gave him medication that was to help settle his nerves. They all said it was a “fear of open spaces” but Chris knew different. It wasn’t open spaces; it was like he had this unreasonable fear and anxiety whenever confronted with unfamiliar surroundings or situations, leading to God awful panic attacks. It morphed, so that this fear became more a fear of having another panic attack, a vicious cycle setting in. Avoiding these situations was easy. Don’t go anywhere. Lead a life of self-imposed isolation. Be happy.

When he turned twenty five, his trust fund matured and he was able to order his life as he chose. He took online classes in computer science while participating in a master class to develop an app that was able to detect the presence of cancer in the body. It was purchased at a ridiculous price by a pharmaceutical multinational while still in beta testing. Chris didn’t even have to touch his trust fund after that. He was set for life, both financially and as far as his reputation was concerned. He had more offers than he could handle, and if it wasn’t for Cleo, his assistant who came by every day; he didn’t know how he would manage it all. He had no necessity to leave the house, he had a dentist that would visit, and he shaved his own hair. It wasn’t difficult really once he got the hang of it. He could have paid for a barber to come do it, but he didn’t see the use of that. The less people he had to interact with the better.

He had passed his twenty third birthday alone and contented to be that way, passed his twenty sixth birthday knowing it was nice to not have to push himself out there, being shy and all. When he got to twenty nine he wondered if maybe life outside his four walls was passing him by, and now he sat here five days from his thirtieth birthday and his shyness, had just morphed into becoming just damn lonely.
He did try. Even started a conversation with the grocery guy, who was so startled that he stumbled back over the five-pound bag of potatoes and the frozen sausages, sprawling open-mouthed on the floor. Chris was mortified, scuttling back into the safety of his apartment and letting Cleo deal with retrieving the food from the hall. He went back to his online friends and focused on the areas of his life that were working.

He took to researching his condition on the Internet, typing in helpful terms like help me I am trapped in my house which returned a list starting with help me get rid of house centipedes, which wasn’t helpful. His search on I can’t leave my house gave him a clear link to I can’t leave my house without concealer and chapstick! again probably a two on the sliding scale of usefulness.