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)
The color drained from her face. Her swollen mouth went tight. Her green eyes went bright and wet and then she blinked the brightness back through sheer, savage will.
She didn’t crumble. She didn’t cry. She stood against that wall with jacaranda blossoms in her tangled hair, and she regarded him with the quiet, unbearable dignity of a girl who had learned, from a father who never called, that love was something people took back, and she said:
“I don’t believe you.”
Then she straightened her polo. Smoothed her hair. Picked up a petal that had fallen onto her shoulder and let it drop to the ground. And walked past him, back toward the terrace, without another word.
He stood in the garden with the taste of her still in his mouth and the ghost of her pulse still beating against his lips and a hatred for himself so total it left no room for air.
DIONNE CALLED THAT evening.
He was standing at the window of his penthouse with a glass of whiskey he couldn’t taste and the phantom sensation of Katy’s hair between his fingers.
“I need to talk to you about something.” Dionne was obviously choosing her words with care. “It’s about Katy.”
He said nothing.
“She’s been talking to people at the club. The staff, some of the junior members. About you.” A pause. Perfectly timed. “She’s telling people you two have a connection. That you’ve been paying her special attention. One of the servers told me she said you’re ‘wrapped around her finger.’”
His grip on the glass tightened until the crystal bit into his palm.
“Julian, I know how that sounds. I know you’ve been kind to her. But Katy...” Another pause. The reluctance of a woman forced into an unpleasant truth. “She grew up differently. She doesn’t always understand boundaries, or how things look. Her mother was the same way with our father. She saw what she wanted and she went for it, regardless of what it cost anyone else. And I worry that Katy’s inherited that instinct, and she’s building a story around you that isn’t real, and it’s going to be embarrassing for her and uncomfortable for you.”
Wrapped around her finger.
He thought about the garden. His mouth on her throat. Her fingers in his hair, pulling. The sound she’d made when his teeth claimed the curve of her neck, that small ruined whimper that had almost ended him. How she’d felt against him, warm and alive, fitting against his body like she’d been designed to destroy him.
He thought about El Diablo. A man who’d had the power to find his stolen son and had chosen not to.
What if wanting her this much is just handing her the knife?
“Thanks for telling me,” he said curtly.
“Anytime.” Warm. Relieved. The good sister. “I just want to protect you both.”
He hung up. Set the phone on the counter. Surveyed the city through the glass, all that glitter and distance.
Wrapped around her finger.
The worst part was that it was true. He was. He’d kissed a nineteen-year-old girl in a garden and lost himself so completely that an hour later his composure still hadn’t rebuilt, and she’d stood there after he’d gutted her and said I don’t believe you, and she was right, and the fact that she’d seen through him, that his cruelty hadn’t worked, that she knew him better after three weeks than people who’d known him for years. That terrified him more than anything his father’s ghost had ever done.
He drank the whiskey. Poured another. Drank that too.
It didn’t help.
THE NEXT DAY HE WENT to Haven at his usual time and sat at Table Nine and opened his laptop and kept his eyes on the screen.
She brought his water at three fifteen. Two cubes. Set it on the table without a word. Or a blush. She didn’t turn those green eyes on him with her heart in them.
She was doing the thing she did with everyone else. The quiet, invisible, eyes-down thing. The thing she had never once done with him, until now.
“Anything else?” she asked. Polite. Professional. A voice for strangers.
He should have felt relief. This was what he wanted. The wall back up. The girl retreating to a safe distance where she couldn’t reach the parts of him he’d spent his life protecting.
“No,” he said.
She nodded and turned.
“Katy.”
She stopped. Didn’t turn around.
He opened his mouth. He was going to say something. He didn’t know what. Her name had come out of him involuntarily, a reflex, his body reaching for her before his brain could intervene, and now she was standing three feet away with her back to him and her shoulders perfectly straight, and he could see the faint mark on her neck where his mouth had been, a small pink shadow at the edge of her collar that she’d tried to cover with concealer and hadn’t quite managed. The sight of it sent a jolt through him so violent his hand knocked the water glass and it rattled against the table.