Guarded King (Empty Kingdom #3)

Chapter 43

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

CHLOE

I stretch out on Roman’s giant bed, my pulse slowing as he runs his fingers gently down my spine. Goose bumps ripple out from his touch.

“I love how your body responds to me.” The rasp in his voice has me pressing my thighs together. He’s already made me come multiple times tonight. I should be sleeping, but I don’t want to waste a minute of this time. The small pockets of time where we’re not worried about business or being interrupted. Where there’s no need to pretend we don’t want to touch each other.

Where it’s just him and me.

I roll over so I can indulge myself in looking at him some more.

His eyes darken as they fix on my breasts, and he runs his fingertip around my nipple, his mouth curling as it puckers. “Beautiful.”

I slide my hand through his thick hair. “Beautiful.”

He looks at me through dark lashes. “I’m not beautiful.”

“I beg to differ.” I drift my fingers over his temple and along his jaw, rough with a five o’clock shadow. “Tell me something about you I don’t know.”

Brows drawn together, he looks off to one side in thought. “There’s a lot you don’t know. Anything in particular you’re interested in?”

I gnaw on my lip. Is it too soon to ask?

He uses his thumb to tug my lip free. “Ask, Chloe.”

I inhale deeply. “What happened between you and Katherine?”

There’s no hint of surprise in his expression, though he doesn’t look particularly happy either.

He rolls away from me onto his back.

My heart sinks. “If you’d rather not talk about it?—”

“Come here.” He slips an arm under me and tugs me against him. “She was my dad’s assistant,” he says. “I thought she was beautiful when I first saw her.”

As I rest my chin on his chest and regard him, I try not to let jealousy dig in too hard.

As if he senses it anyway, he holds my gaze and curls a strand of my hair around his finger. “I don’t think that anymore.”

“She is beautiful. I saw her, remember?”

He frowns, his brows lowering. “She’s an illusion. She shows you what she wants you to see. But once you’ve seen through the artifice, she’s far less attractive.”

“What is she really like, then?”

He looks up at the ceiling. “Hollow. Looking for someone or something to fill her up.”

“Someone like you?”

“Not just me.”

Suspicion niggles. How can it not with what I already know? “Your father?” I ask tentatively.

His eyes flash down to mine, but he doesn’t tense the way I expect. “Yes.”

A deep well of sorrow wells up in me in response to his simple answer. God. His father and his wife. I can’t imagine how that would feel. “What happened?”

“I was young and stupid.”

I brush my lips over his chest. “I can’t imagine that.”

One corner of his mouth turns up. “My relationship with Dad was… complicated. When I was a kid, I wanted to be like him. He demanded power and respect, and he brought me up to want those things too. But the older I got, the more his behavior bothered me.”

I listen carefully, hoping he senses my silent support.

“I didn’t like the way he treated me and my brothers or the way he played us against each other. I didn’t like the way he treated Mom, even though she’d never been particularly motherly. It still felt… disrespectful. And as much as he tried to encourage me to follow his example, I didn’t like the way he treated the other women either. The ones he screwed and discarded. I was torn between striving to be like him and questioning who he was and who he expected me to be.”

“That must have been confusing.”

His lips thin. “It shouldn’t have been.”

I push myself up on an elbow so I can look him in the eye. “He was your father. Of course it was confusing. He groomed you from a young age to look up to him. Regardless of what you learned later, that’s not easy to turn away from.”

He runs his thumb along my jaw, his mouth lifting at the corners. “Always from the heart with you.”

The organ in question squeezes so tight, my breath catches. How can there be so much tenderness hidden behind such a guarded exterior?

Hand smoothing down my back, he keeps going. “When Katherine started working for Dad, she seemed different from his previous assistants. She was beautiful, of course. Dad always surrounded himself with beautiful women. But she seemed sweeter, shyer, even when she flirted with me.” He laughs, but there’s no humor in the sound. “I knew if she was working for Dad, chances were he was sleeping with her, or was trying to, anyway. So I flat out asked him. He laughed and said she wasn’t his type—too innocent, too difficult to get into bed. He told me if I wanted to put in the effort, I was welcome to her.”

I scoff. “How kind of him.”

“Kind is not a word anyone would use to describe my father.”

Would he believe it’s a word I’d use to describe him? I wonder what he sees when he looks in the mirror. Does he see himself, or does he see what his dad wanted him to see? How has his life been colored by his dad’s emotional manipulations?

“When I started seeing Katherine,” he continues, “she seemed like the perfect girlfriend. I knew I was expected to get married at some stage, to follow in my father’s footsteps as the future CEO of the company. Dad had drummed it into all of us—that marriage should be for practical reasons, for producing heirs, for business advantage, for appearances. Anything else was a weakness.”

He pushes his hand through his hair, the skin around his eyes tightening.

“Even then, I wanted to prove him wrong. Some small, stubborn part of me hoped marriage could be more than what I’d seen in my parents’ relationship and others in our social circle. I let that hope blind me to the truth. After just a few months, I proposed. I told myself I was marrying Katherine because I wanted to, because I loved her. Because she loved me. I expected Dad to be furious when I told him—maybe I even wanted him to be. After all, I was defying everything he’d ever taught me. But instead, he laughed. Said he thought I’d have higher aspirations, but if I was truly in love, who was he to get in the way.”

A sick feeling squirms in my stomach, along with a flaring-hot hatred for his father.

“Things went downhill pretty quickly after the wedding. Katherine changed. She’d go on spending sprees with her friends, have expensive nights out on the town. The money wasn’t an issue. But I did have a problem with the way she switched from pretending she didn’t care about any of it to embracing every aspect of it. I had a problem with the way her personality and priorities changed almost overnight. As if she’d gotten what she wanted with my ring on her finger, and now she felt free to let her true self out.”

I press another soft kiss to his chest, and he strokes his hand over my hair.

“It caused tension between us.” A muscle pulses in his jaw. “If I brought it up, she’d complain about being lonely. She’d say I worked too much and wasn’t paying her enough attention, even though my work habits hadn’t changed after the wedding. When I made an effort to be home early, she’d tell me she was going out anyway. We argued, and with each passing week, the fighting got worse. One night she came home drunk, we argued, and she screamed at me, saying I was just like my dad.”

My fingers flex against his skin as my body tenses. I knew it was coming, but it doesn’t make it any easier to hear. He looks down at me, his expression shuttered. God, it must be agonizing, recounting this. I almost regret asking, but maybe it’s good for him to get it out.

“She realized straight away what she’d done and tried to backpedal, but it was too late. The next day I walked into Dad’s office and asked him for the truth. He laughed again. Said that of course he’d slept with her. That he’d started sleeping with her a few days after she started working for him and kept it up the whole time we were dating. It only stopped once I proposed to her. Probably because she didn’t want to risk getting caught once she had a ring on her finger.”

I shake my head. “I don’t understand what she was trying to achieve.”

“Apparently, not long before I noticed her for the first time, she’d asked him to leave Mom and marry her. He laughed it off—he had no interest in getting divorced. Why would he? His marriage already gave him everything he wanted. Katherine convinced herself he’d leave Mom for her, and when it became clear that wouldn’t happen, she focused on me. I guess she thought that by continuing to sleep with him, she was hedging her bets until our engagement was official.”

The simmering hatred inside me ignites. “Why wouldn’t your dad tell you that?”

His jaw works. “He said he let me go through with that farce of a marriage because I needed to learn a lesson. I needed to understand that sentimentality made me weak. That he’d taught me better. And if marrying Katherine was what it took to drive that lesson home, then he was all for it. He said I would thank him in the end. That it would make me a better businessman. A better man .”

Heart aching for him, I smooth my hand over his rigid muscles. “I’m so sorry he did that to you, Roman. You didn’t deserve it.”

He puts his big hand over mine, pressing it against him. “I walked out of his office and filed for divorce the next day. He may have taught me a lesson about relationships, but he also taught me to hate him. I swore to myself I would work my ass off and eventually take over the King Group. When I did, I’d prove that I was a better man than him. That I would take the company to greater heights than he was ever capable of.”

“How did Katherine react?”

He snorts. “Not well. She accused both Dad and me of taking advantage of her. She played the victim and swore she’d tell the world what I was really like—that Dad and I were cut from the same cloth. Except I made her settlement conditional on there being a gag order regarding our divorce.”

I scan his face, trying to read him. “Do you believe what your father said?”

Frowning, he dips his chin. “About what?”

“That sentimentality makes you weak.”

He swallows and looks away. “I think it can. If you let it compromise your commitment to your goals and priorities. But,” he says, his eyes focusing back on me. “I’ve seen my brothers give into it. It’s changed them, but it hasn’t made them weak.” He drifts his fingers down the side of my face. “I’ve seen you and your dad. It doesn’t make you weak.”

With warmth blooming in my chest, I smile, then push myself up and straddle him. His dick immediately stiffens beneath me.

“Sentimentality, compassion, love—those traits make us stronger, Roman. Fighting for the people and things you love takes real strength. Otherwise, you’re only fighting for yourself. It makes you an army of one. And sometimes, life is too much of a battle to fight on your own.”

He digs his fingers into the flesh at my hips. “Would you fight with me, Chloe?” The easy way he says the words doesn’t match the tension in his body or the intensity in his eyes.

My throat aches. I want to ask him to define what we’re doing. Talk about where it’s going. Will it ever be more than the two of us hiding from the light? But not now. Not when he’s just revealed such a personal and painful part of his life to me. So I keep my answer simple, hoping he hears the sincerity in it. “If you wanted me to.”

I barely have a chance to take a breath before he pulls me down, bringing my face to his for a searing kiss. It isn’t like any kiss we’ve shared before. It’s not filled with lust or even tenderness. It’s a desperate clash of his mouth on mine. Rough and demanding, his tongue sweeps past my lips before thrusting deep.

It feels like a claim.

I give into it—into him —completely, tilting my head to give him a better angle, to let him possess me.

His big hands mold my body to his, heat rolling off him, warming me to the bone. The world around us fades away until all I can hear is the pounding of my own heart and all I can feel is him, strong and sure against me.

Finally, we break apart, and he wraps me in his arms. I cling to him, basking in the sensation.

I’m not sure if this intensity of emotion, especially so early on, is normal. None of my previous relationships have made me feel this way. Is it the secrecy of it all making every touch, every kiss, feel like more? Or is it him? The contradiction of him. How stern and aloof he is on the outside, when inside, he’s caring and passionate and naturally protective.

“I’m getting addicted to how safe I feel with you.” The moment the words leave me, I freeze. I didn’t mean to say them out loud. It’s too early to admit such big emotions.

I attempt to pull away, not sure how he might take it, but he holds me to him. “I want you to feel safe. Safe enough to take any risk you want.”

I wet my lips. “A risk like you?”

A shadow flickers across his face. “Yes, like me. But Chloe, I don’t want to be a risk you regret taking. If being with me stops making you feel safe, promise me you’ll put yourself first. I want to know you’ll do what’s best for you.”

Instead of answering, I press my mouth to his again. He may be a risk to me, but I’m a risk to him as well. And with each passing day, I feel like not taking a chance on whatever this is might be the biggest risk of all.