Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 73233 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73233 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
She should have walked away. She was a person who walked away. She was a person who said thank you and have a nice day and didn’t make eye contact with strangers on the bus.
“You haven’t eaten today.”
The words came out of her mouth without permission. She heard herself say them and wanted to dissolve into the terrace stone.
His gaze traveled up. All the way up, from her throat to her face, and the journey across those few inches of skin left a trail of heat so acute she felt her flush climb in its wake, pink blooming from her collarbone to her ears. His eyes registered her. Not her uniform. Not her tray. Her. The red hair she’d pinned back. The freckles across her nose that no amount of concealer could conquer. Her face, which she knew wasn’t a face that belonged at Haven Country Club, because the women here had cheekbones that could cut paper and skin that cost more monthly than Katy’s rent.
“I’m not hungry,” he said, his voice pitched so low she almost didn’t catch it. He seemed to hear the drop himself, because his nostrils flared and he turned away, annoyed at his own body for betraying him.
“The kitchen does a really good club sandwich. Turkey, avocado, no mayo unless you ask. I probably shouldn’t be recommending things, it’s my first week, I don’t actually know if it’s good. I haven’t tried it. Staff eats in the back.”
She knew she was rambling, but somehow...she just couldn’t stop.
“But it looks good? When it goes past me on the tray?”
His mouth moved. Not a smile, but close, his lips tugging up for a fraction of a second before he killed it. That half-second of warmth made him appear younger, less guarded, and the beauty of it hit her so hard she lost the rest of her sentence.
“You memorize the menu, too?” Low. Almost amused. The roughness was still there, underneath.
“They make us. First week thing.” She was a girl who barely spoke in class, who let group partners present without her, who once whispered her own coffee order so softly the barista asked her to repeat it three times.
And yet here she was, chattering at Julian Ventura about club sandwiches while he contemplated her with those gas-flame eyes and his voice did things to her nervous system that should require a medical disclaimer.
“Sorry. You said you’re not hungry. I’ll stop.”
“And the ice preference?”
He’d noticed. That she’d noticed. The two cubes, not three.
She read his face as he said it. His focus was absolute, almost predatory, and she understood, in the wordless way a body understands heat or gravity, that he was cataloging her the same way she’d been cataloging him. Every detail. Every tell. He knew she’d been observing him and he’d been aware of her observing him and the knowledge sat between them like a live wire, crackling.
Katy felt the flush climb her neck, felt the heat of it bloom across her collarbone and up to her ears, and she could have lied. Could have said oh, I just guessed or the last server told me. She was standing in front of a billionaire in a polyester uniform and the gap between them was the width of a tax bracket and the depth of the Pacific Ocean and the smart thing, the safe thing, was to play dumb and walk away.
“I pay attention,” she said. And then, because her mouth had apparently seceded from the rest of her body and was now operating as an independent nation with no regard for self-preservation: “To you. I pay attention to you.”
The moment she said it, she wanted to take them back. But when her gaze flew to his to assess the damage—
One second he was Julian Ventura, billionaire, recluse, a man who wore his composure like a second skin, and the next his eyes were burning over her face, her hair, her mouth, her throat, with a raw hunger so open and so helpless that she felt it against her skin like heat from a fire. His hand on the table had gone rigid. His jaw was locked. His whole body was held so tight she could see the tension in his shoulders, his arms, the tendons of his neck, as if the only thing stopping him from reaching for her was the table between them.
“Julian.”
She couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
“It’s Julian. Not Mr. Ventura.”
A first name. An open door. Such a small thing, and it went through her like spring through frozen ground.
“Julian,” she found herself repeating, self-consciously, but also...helplessly. Like finally having her first taste of something she had been craving for so long, and finding it even better than she could ever have imagined.
Katy had been saying his name in her bedroom for a year, into her pillow, into the dark, a name she kept like a secret. But this was different. This was his face three feet away, and when she said his name, his eyes dropped to her mouth and stayed there, and she noticed his throat move as he swallowed. Hard. Like the sound of his name in her voice had hit him somewhere he hadn’t braced for.