I stare at him. “You know?That’s it?” I throw out my arms. “I tell you I’m a criminal, that your father’s blackmailing me, and that’s all you have to say?” My voice pitches high, hysteria creeping in.
“No, Lola.” Roman cuts towards me, grabbing my wrists and pulling me in close. “I’m telling you,I know. I have always known.”
I blink. Tears slip down my cheeks. “What, what are you talking about?”
Roman’s smile is pained. He palms my neck as he threads his fingers through my hair and presses his forehead to mine. “You think anyone in this town would sell you drugs without Mase and I hearing about it?”
My palms press against his fancy shirt. “I don’t understand.”
“We knew what you were doing, Lola. Hell, we followed you the entire time.”
My hands still on his chest. Brainwaves glitch. I push away from Roman, my mouth dropping open. “Are you serious right now?”
Roman’s lip twitches. “You’re not as sneaky as you think, Firebird. And you don’t need to worry about my fucker of a dad blackmailing you. The only prints they’d find on that bag of drugs are mine, not yours.”
My blood runs cold. I stumble back another step, my heel grazing a broken chair leg. “What?”
Roman slips his hands into his suit pockets and shrugs. “We made sure you weren’t going to get caught but just in case we missed anything I left my prints on the drugs.”
“Are you insane?!” I shriek, panic vibrating the very atoms inside of me.
Another shrug. Like he didn’t set himself up to take the fall for me. Like he’s not confessing he risked his entire lifefor me. “I wasn’t about to let you go to prison.”
“Oh, but it’s okay for you to?” I scoff, almost losing my balance as my heel catches on the floor. I tear the damn things off and point one of the pointed bronze shoes at Roman. “You shouldn’t have done that. It was my decision, my choice.”
“You could have gotten caught.”
“I was willing to take the risk.”
“Yeah? Well, so was I.” Roman closes in on me, snagging the heels from my hands and dropping them on the floor before gripping my hips. “I let you do what you needed to do because if you didn’t, I would have done far worse. But if there is ever anything I can do to protect you, then I’m damn well going to do it.”
Maybe it should be romantic, but his words terrify me. I untangle myself from Roman’s grip, my bare feet scraping on broken debris. The ruins of my shop blur in front of me. Everything is broken.
This is what I do to my life, but I refuse to do it to Roman’s. “You need to go,” I whisper.
“If this is about my father?—”
“It’s not.”
“I won’t let him hurt you.”
I spin around. “I don’t care about the fucking blackmail, Roman and I don’t need you to fix everything. I don’t need your protection! I didn’t ask for it. Not then, not now. You can’t throw your life away to save mine.”
Roman’s jaw sharpens. Eyes of stubborn fire. “I can do whatever the hell I like.”
My breath breaks inside of me as I shake my head. “Look at this place. This is my life. But you… you have the entire world at your fingertips. Hell, you could buy a whole chain of coffee shops and still have more money than you know what to do with. You’re a billionaire, Roman. A literal billionaire. What the hell are you doing here? With me?”
Roman spears his fingers through his hair, mussing it up in ways I’ve fantasized about. “Because this is where I want to be,” he argues. “The fancy dinners and private jets? That’s not me. You know that.” He shakes his head in disbelief. “I’ve never wanted that life. All I’ve ever wanted, since I was fifteen, is to be a part of your family.”
I put on a good front most of the time. I wear confidence like it’s make up but maybe that’s all it is, a mask. I keep pretending that Richard’s words didn’t hurt me, that I didn’t believe him when he said I wasn’t good enough, but maybe I do believe him. Maybe I believe everything everyone has ever said about me because I can’t help my first thought from slipping free. “And what if I ruin that too? What if this thing we’re doing ends?”
Mase is like a brother to Roman, my parents better parents to him than his own. I can’t be the reason Roman loses them.
He glares at me. “So, what? You’re ending it now instead?”
I wince. “No. I don’t know. I just… I need some space.” I wave a hand around the wrecked shop. “I need to figure out how to fix all of this because right now, I’m not sure I can.”
“You can. You will.”
