Page 39 of Saved By the Billionaire

“So?”

“What do you want to know?” He heard the reluctance in his tone, felt his jaw tighten.

She sighed. “You don’t want to talk about it.”

He compressed his lips. “Not particularly.”

“You’re not close?”

“No.” He sipped his wine again, trying to appear more relaxed than he felt. “Unlike you, I have a vivid knowledge of both my mother and my father. I look in the mirror; I see what each gave me physically, and I know what they gave me emotionally, and I wish it was nothing. I hate the parts of myself that are like my father, or my mother, for that matter. I would do anything not to have their biology in me.”

“Then you wouldn’t be you.”

“That wouldn’t be such a bad thing.”

“Roman,” she reacted immediately, shaking her head. “Whatever else, they made you, and from everything I’ve seen, you’re a pretty incredible person.”

He stood very still, doing his best to ignore the effect her words had on him. To ignore the way her reassurance was like a balm he hadn’t known he needed. Refused to need—anything from anyone.

“Do they live in the city?”

“Not so far as I know.”

“Where did you grow up?”

“A lot of places.”

“You moved around?”

He dipped his head.

“With Tia?”

“Some of the time.”

“How did that happen?”

He thought back, remembering the way they’d bounced around from trailer park to trailer park.

“Were your parents close?”

“It was more that they were falling down the rungs at the same time.”

Exasperation tightened her pretty features. “What does that mean?”

“We were broke, Kate.” He didn’t mean to sound as frustrated as he felt, but the past wasn’t something he particularly liked to discuss. There were no words that could do justice to how much he’d hated every day of his life, his childhood. “My parents were out of work drunks and low-level criminals. They stole, they cheated. We stayed in a place just long enough for them to piss everybody off, and then we moved on. More often than not, Tia would end up in the same trailer parks as us—her parents were not unlike mine.”

Kate nodded slowly. “And you’re close to her.”

He ground his teeth, as an image of Grace and Tia slammed into his mind. How they’d been as girls, running around together, all long legs and big smiles, hair tangled and shining in the sunlight.

“Yes.”

“Amazing that you both ended up living in New York.”

“Not really. It was always the plan.”

“To live in the same city?”