Page 60 of Saved By the Billionaire

She must have said so aloud because Tia sat down beside them, cross-legged, and said, “Cashmere.” She smiled knowingly at Roman. “How old were we, do you remember? When we swore we’d only ever have the best of the best when it came to bedding?”

“I was fourteen,” he said immediately, his heart thumping hard enough that Tia could feel it against her body. “My father had burned Grace’s mattress, remember?”

“Fuck, yes. What a shit.”

Kate’s brows shot up. She wanted to ask what happened, but it felt like an invasion of their shared memory.

Nonetheless, Roman offered a reluctant explanation. “He was fighting with mom. Pretty normal Saturday night for us. But Gracie tried to fix it. She tried to calm him down. So he grabbed her mattress off the bunk and hauled it outside, threw his half-empty bottle of rum on it then lit it on fire.”

“What a shit,” Tia repeated.

Sadness thickened in Kate’s chest. “What did she do?” she asked, despite herself.

“Came to stay with me a few nights,” Tia said, smiling wistfully. “And Roman cut school and worked jobs for cash to buy her a new mattress.”

Kate snuggled in closer to him, her heart swelling then breaking for this man who’d once been a boy who’d carried the weight of the world, and his sister’s happiness, on his shoulders.

“The three of us made a pact.”

“We made about a hundred pacts, I seem to remember,” Roman drawled, his eyes trained to the sky.

“Yeah,” Tia nodded slowly. “Well, that night it was all about quality. We’d have the best houses, the best furniture, the best bedding. We’d live like royalty.”

“And you do,” Kate said.

“Two of us do,” Roman responded. Not angrily, not even sadly. Just a statement, but a shiver ran down Kate’s spine, and she turned to face him, staring into his eyes, wishing she could silently convey to him how much that wasn’t his fault. How much he’d been screwed by his parents. And what a remarkable thing he and Tia had done to climb out of that poverty and destitution.

She stared at him a second, then two, then ten, and suddenly, time didn’t seem to hold any perceivable value. There was nothing but him and her, and Kate could hardly breathe for how beautifully suffocating that was. She truly thought that if she were to die in that moment, she would die having known the most perfect burst of rightness it was possible to know.

Roman’s hand lifted to her cheek, the back of his fingers brushing her skin lightly before moving to her chin, gently nudging her face away from his. On the periphery of her vision, she saw light. A flash of light. But before she could look at it properly, her gaze landed on Tia and she saw the other perfect, immaculate, contained woman was silently crying, tears slipping down her cheeks and landing on her softer-than-silk blanket.

Another flash of light, a burst of sound. Kate glanced to the sky as fireworks exploded, bursts of beauty and hope. She relaxed against Roman, let her body sync to his, the rhythmic, slow breathing seeping into her.

“They’re beautiful,” she murmured.

“Grace loved fireworks,” Roman said, simply.

“Grace was a firework,” Tia corrected, letting out a sad laugh. “A total cracker of light.”

“Yeah,” Roman sighed heavily.

Kate turned to face him, scanning his face, the reflection of fireworks dancing in his beautiful eyes. “These are for her?”

“Every year,” he said with a curt nod. “Feels like the least I can do.”

Chapter Thirteen

SHE UNDERSTOOD SO MUCH more about him now than even a week ago. It was fascinating how such a short amount of time could leave her with the impression that she had burrowed into Roman’s soul, yet, there it was. And she couldn’t say if it was attributable to the survival skills she’d gained in her short life—having to read people as a matter of course, to understand them, to know how they’d behave or risk being damaged beyond repair. She’d become an expert in summing people up. In meeting a person and calibrating her mind to their heart. Kind. Selfish. Manipulative. Foster caring purely for the boost in funds. With foster siblings, she’d become even more astute. She’d had to. They were close in age to her, often bigger, stronger, and she’d felt like failing to understand them could be truly dangerous.

With Roman, though, it was something more. An instance of his soul speaking to her soul, and communicating things on a level that defied rational understanding. She knew, for example, that he put the dishes in the dishwasher himself as a small but important act of remembering. He might live the life of a king, but he was not a king. He was humble, and he’d always had to work for what he had. He didn’t take it for granted, and doing small domestic chores reminded him of where he came from.

She sat at the bench, watching, one hand supporting her chin, her eyes unable to leave him. It’s just how it was. Somehow, over the course of the day, she’d given up fighting it and had come to accept that for the next week, she was utterly his.

It didn’t take long to clean up. Tia had done most of it when she was putting their sandwiches on plates. But he didn’t stop at the dishes. A moment later, he was spraying the benches then wiping them down, until the entire kitchen was immaculate.

“I thought you had a housekeeper,” she said, head tilted thoughtfully to the side.

“I do. But even when Evelyn is here, I clean up after myself.”