Chapter 17 #3
This wasn’t exactly his palatial New York penthouse but it was pretty damn special, Kate thought, as she moved down a hallway and into an open plan living area, with a kitchen, living room, dining table for ten, and sliding doors that opened onto a deck.
Hell, there was a room through a double-width doorway with a baby grand piano.
Not your average hotel room, then. A door click sounded and she spun around guiltily, but it was perhaps the door from the ensuite to his bathroom.
She still had time. She looked around quickly, working out where to stand, or sit, what to say, but in the end, Roman appeared before she could make up her mind.
He walked in wearing only jeans, his stride so familiar, but his expression locked in a mask of concentration, his gaze fixed on the carpet.
“I should have stayed. I should have at least made sure she got home okay.”
Kate’s heart throbbed. She took a step backwards, and the involuntary movement evidently caught his attention because he looked up and froze.
“Kate?” He looked like he’d seen a thousand ghosts, not just one.
“It’s not breaking-and-entering. Tia let me in.”
“I was in the shower,” he explained, pointing towards a bedroom door from which steam escaped.
“Yeah, she said that.” Silence fell, save for the humming of the hotel room appliances.
He moved across the room, and she knew now what he was doing.
She knew him, better, perhaps, than he knew himself.
He was playing for time. Assuming an air of easy nonchalance, as he opened the fridge and pulled out two bottles of water.
He didn’t walk one straight across to her, though.
He wasn’t ready. Instead, he twisted the lids off each, his shoulders moving with each intake of breath.
God, she could read him like a book now.
He turned to face her when he had mentally prepared himself, carrying the water over, eyes holding hers with a look that most people wouldn’t understand. But she did. The more impenetrable his features, the more he was hiding his vulnerability.
“How was your night?”
Had she been swept off her feet? Was she in love with someone else? Had she kissed him? He hadn’t asked the questions but they were easy to hear in his silence.
Kate sighed. “You know, I’m tempted to lie, and tell you I fell madly in love,” she said, watching the effect those words had on him.
Seeing the way his jaw clenched and his body tightened.
Seeing the way he was hurting and hating it, even when on some level, he partway deserved it.
Just a little. “To tell you that he kissed me, long and hard, and I was glad, because I didn’t want you to be the last man I’d kissed.
” She moved towards him then, staring up at him, keeping her own features guarded with the same determination he was employing.
“What about you, Roman? Am I the last woman you kissed? Touched? Fucked, as you say?”
He closed his eyes, and all of a sudden, she was slipping, the world falling away from her. She wasn’t. It hadn’t even occurred to her that he might have moved on—at least physically.
“Oh my God,” she whispered, stepping back from him like she’d been slapped. “I’m not, am I?”
“Yes.” It was a fierce rebuttal, but it didn’t reassure her. Kate’s brows drew together, uncertainty fanning through her.
“Are you lying to me?” She didn’t even need to ask. Roman wouldn’t lie. His moral code was black and white.
“No. But Kate, I wanted to. I wanted to get over you. I wanted to find someone else. I thought about it, and standing here right now, that feels like as much of a betrayal as if I’d actually done it.
” She bit into the flesh on the inside of her cheek to stop from reacting.
“The thing is, no one would ever fit the hole you left in my life. It wouldn’t be fair—to them, you. ”
“Or you,” she whispered, unsteadily, relief like a raging wave in her body.
“I don’t deserve fair.”
She dug her nails into her palms, trying not to care so much. But wasn’t that the reason she was here? “Well, my night was very nice, thanks. But I kept wondering…”
He drank from his water, eyes on her. “What did you wonder?” He moved to put the bottle down on a table, across the room. Putting space between them as though he needed that.
“Why I didn’t feel anything for him.”
Roman nodded, slowly, as if digesting that.
“He was a really great guy. Smart, funny, gorgeous, wants kids—that’s why they divorced, by the way. He did, she didn’t.”
“You really got his life story.”
“I’m a good listener,” she said, lifting a shoulder, and saw the way Roman tensed.
As though somehow she’d diminished what listening to him had meant.
Well, tough. She wasn’t going to tell him that nothing compared to what it had felt like to have Roman open up to her.
“But when he kissed me, there was nothing there.”
Roman’s head whipped to face hers so fast she felt the air reverberate. “You said you didn’t kiss him.”
“He kissed me, on the cheek. It was a salutation, calm down.”
But Roman wasn’t calm. He looked like a wild animal being forcibly restrained, his whole body shaking with the effort of keeping it together.
“I felt nothing,” she said, shaking her head, moving to sit on the edge of the sofa, then changing her mind and pacing towards the kitchen area.
“Not on a single one of my work dates, and not tonight. I’ve met dozens of lovely men, and haven’t wanted to go out for real with any of them.
And it’s all because of you. I hate that,” she said, feeling the threat of tears.
She’d unlocked some kind of floodgate, and it couldn’t be quelled.
She’d gone from being someone who never cried to having her emotions right beneath the surface.
That was because of Roman, too. He’d changed her in so many ways, made her confront her past, and he’d opened her up, in all the ways she’d opened him.
But he’d hurt her, too.
He’d treated her as expendable—or materialistic, and she was neither. She drew herself up to her full height, jutting out her chin, forcing herself to say what she’d come to say. “You had no right to talk to me like that.”
“I know.”
“I’m not finished.”
He nodded once, moved ever so slightly closer but at a narrowing of her gaze, he stopped, stood his ground, hands in pockets—a stance as non-dominant as Roman Hayes could effect.
“Before you, I was fine. I was doing fine.”
His jaw shifted as though he wanted to say something, but to his credit, he was silent.
“And then…you made me feel…things I didn’t want to feel. Things that make me…feel…like I used to, when I was younger, and I didn’t have a home, and I didn’t have anybody. And when you said all that stuff, it was like…it was like being right back there…”
“I didn’t—”
She lifted a hand in the air. Silence fell.
She stared at him, her heart twisting so painfully she thought it might give out.
“I came here to tell you—you hurt me. You told me to be careful, you told me to protect myself, and it turns out, you’re who I need protecting from.
I hate you for that.” Except, of course, she didn’t hate him, not even a little bit.