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)
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.