Page 83 of Saved By the Billionaire

“Yes.” It was a fierce rebuttal, but it didn’t reassure her. Kate’s brows drew together, uncertainty fanning through her.

“Are you lying to me?” She didn’t even need to ask. Roman wouldn’t lie. His moral code was black and white.

“No. But Kate, I wanted to. I wanted to get over you. I wanted to find someone else. I thought about it, and standing here right now, that feels like as much of a betrayal as if I’d actually done it.” She bit into the flesh on the inside of her cheek to stop from reacting. “The thing is, no one would ever fit the hole you left in my life. It wouldn’t be fair—to them, you.”

“Or you,” she whispered, unsteadily, relief like a raging wave in her body.

“I don’t deserve fair.”

She dug her nails into her palms, trying not to care so much. But wasn’t that the reason she was here? “Well, my night was very nice, thanks. But I kept wondering…”

He drank from his water, eyes on her. “What did you wonder?” He moved to put the bottle down on a table, across the room. Putting space between them as though he needed that.

“Why I didn’t feel anything for him.”

Roman nodded, slowly, as if digesting that.

“He was a really great guy. Smart, funny, gorgeous, wants kids—that’s why they divorced, by the way. He did, she didn’t.”

“You really got his life story.”

“I’m a good listener,” she said, lifting a shoulder, and saw the way Roman tensed. As though somehow she’d diminished what listening to him had meant. Well, tough. She wasn’t going to tell him that nothing compared to what it had felt like to have Roman open up to her. “But when he kissed me, there was nothing there.”

Roman’s head whipped to face hers so fast she felt the air reverberate. “You said you didn’t kiss him.”

“He kissed me, on the cheek. It was a salutation, calm down.”

But Roman wasn’t calm. He looked like a wild animal being forcibly restrained, his whole body shaking with the effort of keeping it together.

“I felt nothing,” she said, shaking her head, moving to sit on the edge of the sofa, then changing her mind and pacing towards the kitchen area. “Not on a single one of my work dates, and not tonight. I’ve met dozens of lovely men, and haven’t wanted to go out for real with any of them. And it’s all because of you. I hate that,” she said, feeling the threat of tears. She’d unlocked some kind of floodgate, and it couldn’t be quelled. She’d gone from being someone who never cried to having her emotions right beneath the surface. That was because of Roman, too. He’d changed her in so many ways, made her confront her past, and he’d opened her up, in all the ways she’d opened him.

But he’d hurt her, too.

He’d treated her as expendable—or materialistic, and she was neither. She drew herself up to her full height, jutting out her chin, forcing herself to say what she’d come to say. “You had no right to talk to me like that.”

“I know.”

“I’m not finished.”

He nodded once, moved ever so slightly closer but at a narrowing of her gaze, he stopped, stood his ground, hands in pockets—a stance as non-dominant as Roman Hayes could effect.

“Before you, I was fine. I was doing fine.”

His jaw shifted as though he wanted to say something, but to his credit, he was silent.

“And then…you made me feel…things I didn’t want to feel. Things that make me…feel…like I used to, when I was younger, and I didn’t have a home, and I didn’t have anybody. And when you said all that stuff, it was like…it was like being right back there…”

“I didn’t⁠—”

She lifted a hand in the air. Silence fell.

She stared at him, her heart twisting so painfully she thought it might give out. “I came here to tell you—you hurt me. You told me to be careful, you told me to protect myself, and it turns out, you’re who I need protecting from. I hate you for that.” Except, of course, she didn’t hate him, not even a little bit.

Chapter Eighteen

TO SAY HE WAS SHATTERING was an understatement. Roman felt as though he no longer knew himself. He didn’t recognise a single part of his body, his heart, his mind. Everything he’d believed important, everything he’d aspired to his whole life, was now just a prism of meaningless light, reflecting meaningless successes back at him.

He would have given up every dollar he possessed to take back how he’d spoken to Kate. How he’d treated her. He wanted to beg her to forgive him, to beg her to give him another chance, but how could he?