Chapter 17 #2
He wanted to stall, to travel around the block a few times to make this drive take longer, but Kate was leaning forward, her dress hitching up distractingly against her slender legs. “You can go down that one-way street. There’s a back entrance to the hotel, for staff.”
He didn’t want to think of Kate using a staff entrance to anything but he nodded curtly. He was in no position to start arguing with her over something so minor.
“What’s your event tonight?”
She turned to face him. “I think it’s better we don’t talk about it.”
“I don’t—” his breath burned in his chest. He tried to think straight, jammed on his indicator and took the street she said, but he went slowly. So, so slowly. “I’m interested.”
“It’s a Christmas party for a bank.”
“Who’s your client?”
“Actually, it’s not work, strictly speaking.”
He was very careful not to react. Not to show even a hint of jealousy, of possessive heat. “No?”
“I’m doing a favour for my boss,” she said, after a beat. “Her cousin is the CEO. He got divorced a year ago. She said the Christmas season is hard for him, so…”
Roman pulled over, staring straight ahead, knowing he couldn’t say anything. He couldn’t. He was jealous and he hated the thought of it, but he had to let her go. Even when any red-blooded man with more than two brain cells would spend five minutes with Kate and want to hold onto her forever.
She turned to face him slowly, almost against her will. “You’re Roman Hayes.”
He stared back at her, not understanding.
“I know you could walk into this thing and no one would bat an eyelid, but please, don’t.”
It was like being kicked, hard, when he least expected it.
She was calling exactly the kind of play he might have wanted to make, once upon a time.
To stake his claim, to hell with what she wanted.
But he’d learned his lesson in double-quick time.
One brutal mistake was all it had taken for Roman to see how much he needed to change.
If anything ever happened with Kate and him, it had to be because she chose him. Because she came to him. “Scout’s honour,” he promised, lifting two fingers in the air.
“Yeah, right,” she murmured, with a flicker of her lips that made his whole body catch fire. “There’s no way you were a Boy Scout.”
“Damn straight, and don’t act like you don’t love it.”
He’d gone too far. Her eyes widened and her smile dropped, her hand instinctively reaching for the car door handle.
“Kate?” It was a breathless plea, under it: please don’t go, yet. She just stared at him, halfway out the door.
“Do you want a ride home?”
Another smile, this one almost sympathetic.
“I’ll be fine, Roman. I’m a big girl, I can take care of myself.
You’re off the hook. Go home.” And it was clear she didn’t mean his hotel; she meant America—far, far away from her, and the new life she was building.
He watched her disappear into the building, more goddess than woman, and felt every foundation stone of his life crumble.
He no longer remembered who he was, nor what mattered, beyond Kate.
She was everything, and he’d lost her. Through his own actions, he’d lost her, and he’d never recover from that.
It was the unequivocal proof she hadn’t really needed.
But spending an evening with Benjamin Grey, CEO of one of the biggest investment banks in Australia, a man who was objectively an incredible catch—and quite clearly charmed by Kate—should have been enough to stir even the deadest of hearts.
And yet she spent the night with him, going through the motions, making small talk, laughing at his jokes, completely aware that she felt absolutely nothing.
Nothing. Not a single stirring of desire, not a single twist of need.
And as the night wore on, the absence of feeling for Benjamin turned into outright anger at Roman.
He’d done this to her. He’d ruined her for all other men, more than she’d been ruined before they’d met.
He’d become an impossible comparison, and he was also an impossible equation.
They didn’t work. They were oil and water.
Both messed up beyond repair, a trainwreck waiting to happen.
At the end of the night, when Benjamin walked her to a waiting cab and slid a fifty-dollar note to the driver, he pressed a kiss to her cheek and she contemplated shifting her face a little, to take his lips with hers and see what happened.
She contemplated touching his chest and seeing if the beating of his heart stirred the beating of hers; but she knew.
It would have been a futile experiment. And so she slipped into the backseat with a little wave and left the city behind.
At least, that was the plan. But as the cab slipped through the streets, towards her suburb, she leaned forward. “Actually, change of plan. Can you head to the Kernshaw?”
“No problems, love.”
She closed her eyes and blotted out her brain, trying not to think about what she was doing—and what she’d say when she got there. One way or another, though, things with Roman had to come to a head. For both their sakes, this had to end.
“I’m terribly sorry to bother you, but there’s a woman here to see Mr H.”
Mr H, she thought with a flick of her eyes. Talk about discretion.
“Says her name is Kate Darcy.”
Says her name, she thought, as though Kate was lying, when he’d seen her ID.
“Very good.”
The snooty man behind the reception counter replaced the phone receiver and levelled a gaze at Kate over the rim of his glasses. “Take a seat, Miss Darcy.”
Her heart began to pound now and she ignored the older man’s suggestion of a seat in favour of pacing.
She paced towards the sliding doors, close enough that they swung open, then away, then back towards, and this time, she contemplated walking straight out of them and taking a cab home.
After all, what was she doing here? Why had she come?
She had a nebulous cloud of things she wanted to say, but they were exactly that: nebulous and cloud-like, shifting through her without taking proper shape, so she couldn’t order her thoughts, let alone determine what would make her feel better.
But confronting Roman had become an itch she needed to scratch.
She’d been feeling that since their horrifying argument, since the awful things he’d said, and it had been building up like a pressure gauge ever since.
Now, it was unbearable. Still, she took another step towards the doors, the fresh air calling her name. Tempting her.
“Kate.” It was not Roman’s voice, but rather, a woman’s. Kate spun, surprised but not shocked to find Tia stalking towards her. “Don’t you dare leave.”
“Channelling your inner-Roman?” Kate responded, standing still.
Tia didn’t smile. Instead, she wrapped Kate in a huge hug, as tight as any Roman had ever given her, crushing her to her chest. “I am so damn glad to see you.”
Kate ignored the spasm in the region of her heart, the aching sense of belonging that she knew she needed to contain.
“I didn’t know you were in Sydney.” And the second she heard the guardedness in her tone, she knew what a hypocrite she was.
She knew, because the barb of jealousy that speared through her was the same jealousy she felt whenever she was with Tia and Roman—whenever he talked about Tia in the context of ‘we, us’.
It had been destroying Kate since she’d first met the other woman.
True, she hadn’t gone ballistic on Roman the way he had on her, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t wanted to.
“I had some meetings.”
“You’re staying with Roman?” There it was again. Sharp as a knife blade.
“No, honey. I’m staying in the same hotel as Roman; there’s a difference.”
“Why did the concierge call you?”
“I was in his room. We were hanging out. Fully clothed,” Tia winked. “I knew he wouldn’t want me to let you get away. He’d just jumped in the shower when the phone rang. Come on.”
But Kate looked towards the door, uncertainty tightening like a noose around her.
“Kate, you guys need to talk. Just…sit across a table from him, see what he has to say, how you feel, then work out if you want to bolt or not.”
Kate hesitated for a long minute and then nodded, tersely.
“Yeah, okay. I did come here for that.” She knew it wasn’t her most eloquent sentence; eloquent felt a long way behind her.
But she let Tia guide her to the elevators and swipe her keycard, then punch the number for Roman’s floor.
Unlike his penthouse, these opened onto a hallway with other doors, not direct to his room, and she was glad. It gave her longer to rally herself.
“Okay, this is his room,” Tia nodded to a door at the end.
“And I’m just over here, if you need me,” she nodded to the room beside it.
Nice and close. Kate quelled the jealousy.
Academically, she knew it wasn’t based on anything.
Tia had been nothing but supportive of Kate, almost from the beginning.
She swiped Roman’s keycard, which Kate noted Tia kept a copy of for herself, then stepped back. “You’re up, hon. Good luck.”
But there was nothing but support and encouragement in Tia’s voice as she moved to her own room. Kate sucked in a breath and pushed the door inwards, calling out, “Hello?”
No answer.