Chapter 1 #3
“I’m going to go now,” she announced, the words coming out croaked.
“Before I say something else I can’t take back.
Which I will, if I stay, because apparently you break whatever filter I normally have, which is already not a great filter, so.
” She picked up his empty glass. Her fingers brushed the spot where his hand had been gripping the table. The surface was warm. “More water?”
“Yes.” The word came out clipped, almost harsh. Angry at the water for giving her a reason to come back.
“Okay. Great. I’m leaving now. To get the water. That’s why I’m leaving.”
She turned on her heel and walked four steps. Professional. Collected. A girl who definitely had her life together and had not just narrated her own exit to a billionaire who’d been examining her throat like he wanted to put his mouth there.
That thought stopped her mid-step. Put his mouth there.
She didn’t know where the words had come from.
She’d never thought anything like that about anyone before.
But she’d felt his eyes on her neck, on the pulse point where her blood beat against her skin, and her body had translated the attention before her brain caught up, and the translation was: he wants to touch you there.
He wants his mouth there. And the knowledge went through her like a lit fuse, bright and fast and impossible to unfeel.
She walked back to the bar, set the tray down, and braced both palms flat on the counter until her heartbeat dropped below the threshold where she could hear it in her own skull.
DIONNE ARRIVED AT FOUR.
Her sister arrived as she always did. Immaculate, poised, smelling like the good perfume their father’s money could buy.
Dionne Gates at twenty-nine was everything Katy wasn’t.
Tall where Katy was average. Polished where Katy was freckled.
A top-notch lawyer with a corner office and a car that didn’t burn oil and a monthly lunch with Katy that she kept like clockwork.
“There you are.” Dionne’s heels clicked across the stone. She reached out and tucked a strand of Katy’s red hair behind her ear, a gesture so natural that anyone observing would think how sweet, the older sister checking on the younger one. “You look cute in the uniform.”
“It’s polyester.”
“Still cute.” Dionne’s dark eyes swept the terrace. The members, the tables, the arrangement of money and power spread across the stone. Her attention settled on Table Nine.
On Julian.
Katy studied her sister’s face and saw nothing. No reaction, no tell. Dionne assessed Table Nine with the breezy confidence of a woman who belonged wherever she stood.
“Dinner Thursday?” Dionne squeezed her shoulder. “New poke place in Silver Lake.”
“Sounds great.”
“Love you, Kates.”
“Love you too.”
Her sister walked toward the clubhouse. Katy kept her eyes on Dionne until she disappeared inside and felt the familiar warmth that Dionne’s visits always left.
Her only sister. The one person in Harrison Gates’s orbit who’d bothered to show up for Katy at all.
Monthly lunches, birthday texts, the occasional bag of clothes from her closet.
Dionne wasn’t affectionate by nature, but she was there, and for a girl whose father had never once been there, the difference was everything.
Katy turned back to the terrace.
And the air left her body.
Because Julian was standing. Laptop closed, chair pushed back, his car keys in his hand. His gaze was on the door Dionne had walked through, and then it swung sideways and settled on Katy.
Thirty feet of jacaranda shade between them. Purple light on stone.
He didn’t hide it. Didn’t shut it down, didn’t slam the door like he had on her birthday.
He stood in the golden afternoon light and let her see everything.
His eyes blazing, his body so still it vibrated, the force of his attention so physical she felt it against her chest, her throat, her mouth.
A man who’d been drowning all afternoon and had just stopped fighting the current.
Five seconds. Six. The longest he’d ever sustained the connection without breaking.
Then his features locked down. An icy composure sliding over his face like a visor, wiping everything clean. He turned. The keys spun once around his finger, and he walked to his car without a backward glance.
But she’d witnessed it. All of it. The heat and the hunger and the losing battle behind his eyes.
He wanted her. She was nineteen and innocent and she’d never been touched by a man, but she knew what wanting was because she’d just witnessed it burn through a billionaire’s composure like fire through paper, and it matched exactly what her own face felt like every time she glimpsed her reflection after seeing him.
Katy Gates stood in the purple shade of the jacaranda with her hummingbird heart and her reckless, hopeless, completely certain feeling, and she thought: He wants me the way I want him. And he’s terrified of it. And I’m not going to let him be.