Chapter 12 #3
“Come and see.” Roman’s voice had taken on a strange quality, thickened by the sort of emotion he usually repressed.
Before she could stand, Roman was at her side, lifting her to his chest and staring down at her for a long beat, his temple throbbing as his lips tightened.
Kate’s breath hitched in her throat. Desire throbbed heavily in the air.
Her hand lifted to his shoulder, her fingers digging into the warm skin.
“I can walk,” she murmured.
“I know.” Her heart turned over in her chest; how could it not?
“God, you two,” Tia rolled. “I’ll be out of your hair soon enough, don’t worry.”
It seemed to puncture their bubble, albeit slowly. “You can stay over.”
“I have early meetings.”
“You’ve been drinking—”
“Garrett can take me home, Roh. Relax.”
But there was nothing relaxed about Roman or Kate as he carried her across to the enormous glass sliders that led to the deck.
Tia pushed them open and a moment later they were outside.
Where only hours earlier, with Tia around, Roman might have settled Kate on the sofa and moved to the other side of it, this time, he sat down and kept her cradled to his chest, in his lap, close, and Kate expelled a soft breath for how perfect it was to be near him.
Tia moved across the space, which Kate now realised wrapped around the whole penthouse.
What a space! When Tia returned, she was carrying two folded blankets and as she wrapped one around Roman’s shoulders, enveloping Kate in its warmth as well, Kate wondered if she’d ever known a fabric quite so soft.
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.”