Page 56 of Saved By the Billionaire

“Am I sober enough to at least kiss?”

She couldn’t see his face, but she was aware of the way his body tightened and his shoulders squared, the way he almost seemed to be bracing himself for something. But he strode back towards her and rather than sitting on the edge of the bed, he brought his body over hers, his whole body, legs on either side, arms braced at her hips, and then he was kissing her long and hard and slow, his tongue just as torturous and skilled as she remembered from that morning. But it was his body that sent her nerve system into overdrive, his every movement a torment and promise, an exercise in control.

He pushed up and stared down at her in the dim light, breath ragged. “Do you have any idea what you do to me?” he demanded, each word enunciated with a pained breath. He moved his hand to her face and held her cheek. “Sometimes I find myself wishing I’d never met you, and then I imagine that and I feel⁠—”

“What do you feel?”

He shook his head though, standing. “You need to sleep this off.”

“I thought the whole point was to get drunk with Tia,” she said to his departing back. When he didn’t turn to face her, she asked the question that had been humming in the back of her mind all day, since Garrett and she had spoken that morning. “What’s today?”

Roman stopped again, and his lines of tension were different this time. More alert. More preventative. “What?”

She stifled a yawn and wriggled deeper down into the covers, eyes suddenly heavy. “What’s today?”

Silence hung, heavy and sustained. He was quiet for so long that Kate wondered if he was going to ignore her. She propped her heavy head up onto her palm, elbow depressed into the mattress.

“Roman?”

He nodded curtly, once. “It’s the eighth anniversary,” he said, the words floating towards her like they were being carried on a stream.

“Of what?” Another yawn. She smothered it with the back of her hand.

“Of my sister’s death.”

It took Kate a second to catch up. “Grace is dead?” she said, for clarity, though it wasn’t really necessary. Somehow, it all seemed to fit together, but her brain wouldn’t quite work in the way it needed to, to have it make sense.

“Yes. Sleep tight, Kate. I’ll check in on you soon.”

Chapter Twelve

IT WAS DARK WHEN Kate woke, and it was with that awful, groggy, disorientation she’d experienced with the jetlag of first arriving in America. Her mouth was claggy and her head was woolly. But the wool cleared as she blinked her eyes and they focused on the small, silver, expensive-looking clock Roman had on one of the bedside tables.

It was only early. Six in the evening. Wait, or the morning? She reached for her phone, checked the date. The evening. The same day as…

Oh, Lord.

Fragments of memories came jabbing at her. The way she’d thrown back glass after glass of champagne, picked fights with Roman. Loved fighting with him. The things they’d said. I wish I’d never met you. Her heart splintered, because it wasn’t the first time she’d heard it. A tear slid down her cheek, not because of him, per se, but because of all the homes she’d drifted through in her youth, looking for one to land in and for it to truly be a ‘home’, and never finding that. They hadn’t all been cruel, but they’d all let her go. Even the nice ones, who’d said they wished they could keep her. A lump formed in her throat and she set her jaw defiantly, dashing angrily at her cheeks.

But there was more. Her woolly brain wouldn’t work with her, wouldn’t cooperate. She pushed out of bed in frustration, forgetting momentarily that her ankle had regressed and crying out as shockwaves of pain arrowed through her. “Damn it,” she said, moving gingerly towards the bathroom. She closed the door behind herself and leaned against it, then flicked on the light. It was overly bright and she squeezed her eyes shut again, opening them a few times to give herself time to adjust to the assault of light.

When she could bear it, she moved towards the vanity and looked in the mirror, surprised to see a relatively normal-looking face staring back at her. She didn’t look as though she’d been dragged through a bush backwards. Nonetheless, she felt like it. She ran warm water and cleaned away her makeup, patted her face dry, brushed her hair and pulled it over one shoulder, then hobbled into the wardrobe and changed into a pair of loose woollen pants and a clean sweater.

But as she prepared to leave the sanctuary of her room, and stood right by the door, a vision of Roman in that exact place came to her, his back taut, his shoulders squared. Of my sister’s death.

Grace, his sister, was dead.

And Kate hadn’t known. He hadn’t told her. Tia had been surprised by that, as though it were the sort of thing he did tell people. So why not her? And why did it feel like that mattered? Why did she have a sixth sense that Grace’s death and Kate’s presence in his life were somehow inextricably linked.

It hit her like a karate chop, so she dropped her hand away from the door and pressed her weight against it instead, facing the bed, breath rushed. They were linked. It wasn’t in her imagination. He’d saved Kate, he’d been obsessed with saving her, in fact. Because he couldn’t save Grace.

This wasn’t really about her. It was some kind of balancing of the scales, Roman proving to himself that…that what? That he was good? Was he using Kate to make amends for Grace’s death?

She didn’t know the details of what had happened to his sister, but she did know Roman, and there was nothing that could have happened to Grace that he wouldn’t internalise as his fault. It was his saviour complex, writ large. It was his worst nightmare.

I don’t ever want to see you vulnerable and trusting, easy to take advantage of.

What a fool she was! Kate had taken those words and wrapped them up for safe-keeping, buried deep within the layers of her heart. Like they meant something when, in reality, he probably wasn’t even meaning her, so much as his sister.