Read Online Broken: A Billionaire Love Story by Heather Chase - Free Book Online Page A

the scholarships required only employers. Some required only professors. Others said co-workers only, or former studying partners. Some required people of note from her home town.
    So, just like with the applications for the universities, she would have to cast a wide net to scrounge up enough recommendations. Applying for recommendations, basically.
    What fun, she thought dryly.
    Finally, essays. Dreaded, dreaded essays. Olivia could scarcely think of something more intimidating and terrible than writing just one more essay.
    Writing had been a source of continual terror for her in college. Nothing stirred up her anxiety like having to complete whole pages full of perfect words. Paper due dates would hang over her head like vampires in the window, not actually striking until the sun was just about to come up and the paper was due.
    To combat her anxiety (and, as it always happened, the subsequent depression), she had read every piece of advice she could find—had tried to plan first, or push out shitty drafts just to see them done, or do a lot of research and take many notes. She had tried writing on a schedule, or only in the mornings, only in the evenings. She had tried eliminating all other parts of her schedule, and giving her small amounts of words to write every day. She had tried rewarding herself with sweets and drinks, or punishing herself with grueling workouts.
    But, at the end of the day, there was nothing harder than just putting one word in front of the next.
    For the application and the scholarships, she would need a total of five completed essays. One just for admission, and four more for the different scholarships and fellowships available—of which there were twelve (luckily, she could mix and match the essays a bit). Of the twelve available, she would be lucky to receive just one of them—the luckiest of all being a fellowship that would let her teach undergrad classes and pay her way in full.
    There were also statements of academic purpose, which she considered in essence an essay, so she counted them as part of the five she had to complete.
    Each essay was short—no more than seven hundred fifty words—and somehow that was much, much worse than something ten or twenty pages long. The constraint of so few words with so much weight upon them had her filled with stress about writing down anything at all for fear that it would be the wrong word.
    She knew, somehow, somewhere, that words were malleable, and that she could change them however she wished, but still they had this power over her. If she began in the wrong direction, starting the wrong way, then she was doomed.
    Just thinking about it, right now, she had begun to feel the tendrils of panic creeping over her brain. Somewhere in her bag was a small vial of medication for the onsets of these attacks—medication that was essentially used for stage fright. Her psychiatrist—whom she had not visited now for some time—had told her that what she felt about writing was much the same feeling as others had before making speeches or acting in front of crowds.
    Someone knocked at the door, breaking her concentration. Grateful for the reprieve, she got up to answer it. Her body was still shaking with the sudden stress of considering the entirety of that application exercise.
    To her surprise, it was Shane. Her heart started racing, and all the anxious tension that had filled her body when thinking over the application fled immediately.
    “Hi,” said Shane. “I’m sorry to bother you, but I forgot my jacket.”
    “Oh,” she said, turning around. “Let me grab it for you.”
    When she turned back around to face him, jacket in hand, he was right in front of her. Her breasts crushed easily against his hot, strong chest, and suddenly his hands were on her hips.
    He paused just for a second, pulling her into his hard body, waiting for the okay from her eyes. She closed them, longingly, parting her mouth and leaning in, and then they were kissing and it