The Billionaire's Runaway Bride Read Online Free PDF Page A

retreating back and fought back fresh tears. She hated him. She wished she didn’t but she knew that she really did.
     
    She didn’t follow him but she wanted to yell back at him, demanding him to release her from this marriage but she knew him and he would just be amused at her tantrum.
     
    She spent the rest of the afternoon in the garden, walking through the plants and surveying what the gardener had done in her absence. It was springtime and all the buds were just starting to open up from the ground. Sophie had always loved this time of the year. It had always given her promise of a new start, better possibilities. And it had also been easier to escape her father’s anger out here. The winters had been difficult since she might have been trapped inside for days when the weather was too cold to go out into. Those were miserable days and she shuddered at the memories of how terrifying her father could be at times.
     
    At five o’clock, she sighed and went back inside, deciding it was time to start changing for the evening. She would have to give in to his demands for a while until she could convince him that both of them would be better off separated. She didn’t understand why he wanted her. It had been that way from the beginning, she thought as she showered and pulled on one of her black evening gowns.
     
    As she pulled her hair back into a braid again, she wondered why Jason had been so insistent that afternoon at her father’s funeral when he’d asked her to dinner that evening. It had been a painfully cold morning and the minister’s voice had droned on and on. Sophie hadn’t minded though. All she’d felt was a mild sense of frustration as she anticipated her freedom. Perhaps her marriage was God’s vengeance on her for being happy to have escaped from her father’s constant anger through death. But there was no denying the feelings coursing through her that day. The actual funeral had been disturbing as she searched herself for some sign of sadness over the death of her father. The sun had been shining onto her hair but it never broke through the day to warm up the air.
     
    The only moment that really got to her was when she noticed the minister’s nod which was her signal to take some dirt and throw it onto the slowly lowering coffin. At that point, she’d felt a pang of regret, of pain since she’d never been what her father had wanted her to be. She’d tried, so desperately hard. But it seemed the more she tried, the more he yelled.
     
    One time, she’d been about twelve at the time, she supposed, Sophie had been so devastated by her father’s cruel words about her red hair that she’d snuck upstairs to her room and cut it short. When she’d appeared at the dinner table that night, her father had almost been apoplectic at her appearance and his words became even more cruel, demanding to know the man she was trying to sleep with and asking her why she was such a slut. Since Sophie had barely been a pre-teen at the time, she had been devastated, horrified at the questions he was asking of her, some of which she hadn’t really understood.
     
    That was the day she’d started hiding her hair in a braid, pinned to her head. It seemed to pacify him somewhat, when he didn’t have so much of her hair to view. Initially it had been difficult since she had thick, titian hair that eventually grew down her back in springing curls. But she’d learned to use products that would smooth out the fly away strands and hide the color as much as possible.
     
    The morning of the funeral, she’d considered leaving her hair down but years of the habit had her pulling it back and capturing it in the normal fashion although she didn’t bother to smooth it as much as she used to.
     
    It was odd but that afternoon, after the reading of the will which told her that Jason Randal was now the executor of her father’s will, Edward Brandon never allowing a woman to have control of his assets, that she’d