Chapter 2
SHE WAS DOING IT AGAIN.
Julian tracked Katy Gates from Table Nine as she carried a tray of champagne flutes across the terrace, her red hair catching the afternoon light, and he hated that he knew exactly how the light would catch it.
Three fifteen. Golden. The jacaranda breaking it into purple-warm pieces that turned her hair from red to copper to something that didn’t have a name in any language he spoke, and he spoke four.
He knew the light because he’d been studying her for three weeks. He knew the hair because he’d been thinking about it for a year.
She’d been eighteen the first time. Dionne’s sister, birthday lunch, a nothing introduction on the terrace.
He’d taken one glance and his body had done something his brain hadn’t authorized, a full-system response that he’d shut down in under two seconds because she was eighteen and Dionne’s sister and facing him with green eyes that were so wide and so startled and so completely unguarded that he’d felt it like a hand reaching into his chest and closing around something vital.
He’d walked away. He’d made himself walk away. He’d gotten in his car and driven home and stood at the window of his penthouse forty-three floors above Wilshire and thought: No.
A year later she was standing on his terrace in a polyester uniform and the no hadn’t worked.
She moved through the members with her eyes down and her voice soft.
She said sorry when she didn’t need to. She smiled without showing her teeth.
She stood apart from the other servers at the staff station, her shoulders pulled in, her body a small, apologetic shape that the world had taught to stay invisible.
And then she’d turn those eyes on him.
It happened every time. She’d be mid-task, mid-pour, mid-step, and her attention would find his across the terrace, and the shy girl would vanish.
In her place was someone who contemplated him with such open, helpless want that it hit him in the chest like a fist. A girl who rambled about club sandwiches and narrated her own exits and blushed so hard her freckles disappeared and couldn’t stop herself from telling him the truth, even when the truth was reckless, even when it stripped her bare.
She’d told him she paid attention to him.
She’d told him to his face, pink-faced and fearless beyond anything he deserved, and the memory of it kept him up at night, replaying in the dark, her voice and her flush and her eyes, and he was a twenty-nine-year-old billionaire who hadn’t slept properly in three weeks because a teenage server had been honest with him.
Only around him.
Only ever around him.
He closed the laptop. The quarterly projections for Gubat’s Southeast Asian expansion could wait. Everything could wait, apparently, when Katy Gates was within fifty feet.
He knew her break schedule. He knew she took her lunch at the staff table closest to the garden wall because it had shade.
He knew she brought food from home in a container with a cracked lid and ate alone because the other servers were college students who talked about things she couldn’t afford, and she listened to them with a small smile and said nothing.
He knew she had a scar at the edge of her left eyebrow.
He knew she tucked her hair behind her ear when she was nervous and bit the inside of her cheek when she was trying not to say something.
He knew she was nineteen and still in high school because she’d lost a year, and he knew why, because Dionne had mentioned it once, casually, over drinks: Katy had to take time off, family stuff, you know how it is.
And he’d filed it and researched it and discovered what “family stuff” meant, which was a mother in rehab and a fifteen-year-old girl holding down a household alone, and the knowledge had lodged in his chest like a splinter he couldn’t reach.
He knew too much about her. He thought about her too often.
He was Julian Ventura, who had built Gubat from nothing at twenty and turned it into an empire by twenty-five and had never once let another person past the perimeter he’d been constructing since he was thirteen years old and discovered the documents in Tita’s closet and learned his name wasn’t real.
The documents. The birth certificate with Salvatore where Ventura should have been.
The newspaper clipping about El Diablo, his biological father, a man whose reputation made grown men cross the street.
And the careful, faded letter from his brother Luciano, written to Tita when Julian was still a baby, that explained everything: the theft in the night, the new name, the new life.
A fourteen-year-old boy stealing his infant brother from a monster and handing him to the only woman he trusted.
Julian had never spoken to Luciano. Had never broken the silence his brother had built to protect him.
But he’d read every article. Tracked every public appearance.
He knew his brother the way astronomers knew distant stars: by the light they threw, by the gravity they exerted, by the space they held in the dark.
And he knew this about his father: El Diablo Salvatore had never searched for his stolen son.
Never hired investigators. Never placed a single call.
A man with the resources to find anyone on earth had let his youngest child vanish, and the silence that followed was not mercy.
It was indifference. It was a man for whom a baby was a possession, and a possession that removed itself from the collection was simply no longer worth the inventory space.
Was I not worth finding?
The question had lived in Julian’s chest for sixteen years.
He’d built Gubat on top of it, poured concrete and code and capital over the wound until the empire was so large and so visible that no one could ever overlook him again.
You could not discard a billionaire. You could not lose a man whose name was on buildings.
But you could want a girl with red hair and green eyes who carried a tray across a terrace, and wanting was the thing that made you disposable, because wanting gave someone the power to hand you back.
She was walking toward him.
Three fifteen. His water. She carried it across the terrace with her eyes down and her shoulders pulled in and her whole body doing the invisible thing, and then she reached his table and set down the glass, two cubes, and glanced up, and her eyes collided with his, and there it was.
The collision. The shy girl gone. In her place, a girl whose green eyes locked onto his face with a directness that went through him like voltage.
“You’re here early today,” she said softly.
“I had a meeting cancel.”
“You’ve been here every day this week.” She bit her lip.
He followed the teeth sinking into the lower lip, pink going white, and his hand tightened on the table edge.
“That’s not a question. That’s a statement.
I’m stating a fact. About your schedule.
Which I apparently track now. I’m going to stop talking. ”
“Don’t.”
The word came out before he could catch it, low and rough, and her eyes widened.
He should not have said that. He should not have said anything that sounded like an invitation, because invitations were doors, and doors opened both ways, and this girl walked through every door he left even a crack ajar.
“Walk with me,” he said.
She blinked. “I’m on shift.”
“Your break started two minutes ago.”
Her lips parted. “How do you know my break schedule?”
He didn’t answer. He stood, and she fell into step beside him, because that was who she was around him.
The girl who said yes when she should have said no, the girl who ran toward things instead of away from them, and they walked off the terrace and into the garden path where the jacaranda grew thick and the light went purple and the sounds of the club faded to nothing.
She was quiet for eleven steps. He counted. Then—
“Can I tell you something?”
He should have said no. Every rational impulse he possessed was telling him to say no, to turn back, to close his laptop and leave and not return until she’d moved on to a different job or a different obsession that didn’t involve walking too close to him under a jacaranda tree with her face tilted up and her heart visible in her eyes.
“Tell me,” he said, his voice dropping lower than he’d intended.
“I think about you all the time.” Her voice was barely holding together at the edges.
Her face was crimson, and her hands were clasped in front of her like she was trying to physically hold herself together.
“I know that’s crazy. I know you’re...you, and I’m.
..me, and I know there’s no version of this that makes sense.
But I can’t stop. I’ve tried for a year now.
I’ve tried really hard, and I can’t, and I thought you should know because I’m a terrible liar and it was going to come out eventually anyway, so. ”
She squeezed her eyes shut. “Please say something so I know you haven’t left.”
“I haven’t left.”
She opened her eyes. He was closer than he’d been a moment ago. He couldn’t remember deciding to move.
“You should stop,” he rasped. “Whatever this is. You should stop.”
“I know.” She didn’t move. “I can’t.”
“Katy.”
“I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say I’m nineteen and you’re twenty-nine and I work for you and this is inappropriate, and you’re right about all of it.” Her chin lifted, and her eyes were bright and terrified and utterly unguarded. “I don’t care.”
She reached up and touched his face.
Her fingers grazed his jaw. Light. Trembling. The softest pressure he’d ever felt, and it went through him like a detonation. Her thumb grazed the edge of his mouth, and the expression she wore was half courage and half terror, and she whispered, “Is this okay?”
He didn’t think.