Page 11 of Saved By the Billionaire

He grunted his acceptance of that. His family had travelled everywhere, and in his opinion, there were very few cities that took pity on a person with no resources.

“You said you were working last night.”

“I met someone through the hostel. He helped me get some cash jobs. Babysitting, waitressing private functions, that sort of thing.”

Roman kept his face blanked of any emotion. The last thing he wanted was to imply a values-based judgement of her life choices, when he understood that people would generally do whatever they needed in order to survive.

“I’ve only been in New York a couple of weeks.” She swallowed visibly. “I need more time.”

“To find this person?”

Her eyes were huge when they latched to his. “Yes.”

“Who is it?”

She fidgeted with her fingers in her lap, then turned to the view. He stayed very still, studying the tense lines of her face and body, the shadowed bruising on her otherwise flawless skin.

“My father.”

She kept her gaze averted.

“I found out, about a year ago, that he was American. I hired an investigator who tracked him to LA, so I spent a few months looking for him out there. Turns out, he’d moved across to New York. But that’s where I’m stuck.”

“Why would your father run away?”

“He doesn’t know about me.” She turned to face him then, her features defiant, just daring him to say something soft and sympathetic. “He never did. My mum decided to raise me on her own.”

“And then changed her mind? Told you about him after all?”

He couldn’t help the hint of judgement in his tone, then. The idea of a child being kept from a parent was particularly callous, in his opinion.

“She died,” Kate said, voice clipped. “A long time ago.”

Roman’s brows creased. “How old were you?”

“Does that matter?”

Defensive, protective, boundary-seeking. He heard all of that in her sharp response, and not only did he understand it, he recognised it as one of his own core traits.

“Young enough that I barely remember her.”

There was a whole world of things she wasn’t saying. Such as, who raised her after that. Then again, if his parents had died when he was a boy, it would likely have saved him a world of hurt. The thought of still supporting their drunken asses, after what they’d done to him, and Grace, was like salt constantly in his wounds.

Only these wounds were too deep and too raw to ever heal.

“So how did you find out about your father?”

Her brow furrowed. “My aunt died a year and a half ago. I didn’t even know I had an aunt. She was my mother’s sister, but I guess they weren’t close. She died and left me some papers; one was my birth certificate, which had my father’s name, and another was a photo of my mother with a man who has my eyes.” She lifted her shoulders. “It wasn’t a lot to go on, but it was something.”

He’d seen a lot of shitty parenting in his life—his own parents, and Tia’s, and any number of the people they associated with. But he recognised in Kate someone who’d almost walked in his shoes. She had a brokenness about her that instantly resonated with him. Maybe he’d recognised it even the night before. It was the sort of vulnerability that could calcify and form hardened knots of resilience, because the alternative was to be so demoralised and destroyed that you wouldn’t go on.

“So you uprooted your life to look for him?”

Another shrug, her slender shoulders so fragile that a part of him tightened with an unwelcome sense of anxiety. Anxiety that she be okay. Anxiety that no harm come to her. “I’m alone,” she said, but the words shook with defiance, as though she were just daring him to feel sorry for her. “I’ve been alone for a very long time. And then…”

“You weren’t.”

Her smile was tight. “It must sound stupid. I mean, he doesn’t even know I exist. He may not even believe I’m his child…”