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I know who he is. Behind him, flustered, is my PA.
“I’m sorry. I told him to wait.”
“It’s fine, Melissa.”
The man in the suit, carefully curated gray at his temples, has his eyes on Sarah. Like he knows her. Like she’s something to him.
“You must be William . . .”
“President of BNK,” the man says.
Sarah closes her eyes, suddenly pale, and William’s gaze is on me holding her hair.
She pulls it free as he steps in.
“Hello, Sarah,” he says.
Chapter Eleven
Sarah
Everything in me turns cold and my stomach turns.
Billy. William N. King. In the flesh.
It’s like a band that tightens over my chest, his smug and knowing smile. He looks older, but just as handsome. In that way I don’t like. He’s polished, like he spends even more time perfecting his look, and the suit says power which adds to it.
He puts time into appearing sophisticated and hides his true nature.
Leland doesn’t. He just is the earthy sexuality that isn’t cultivated or polished or carefully planned.
Billy gets off on having people there, on seducing girls who don’t age with him.
It’s why he lost interest in me at the old age of twenty-two. And he never signed those papers I sent him, all those years ago. Not because he wanted me, but because I was his.
His property. Possession. His.
Even now, I can feel that cloying cage he liked to keep me in, one of being watched, of tight boundaries.
And he doesn’t want me now. I’m way too old. Twenty-seven, too old. It’s almost so sad it’s comedic. Still, he refuses to let me go.
“Billy.”
I just say his name. Leland’s still right there, not touching me anymore, not giving away the intense curiosity, but it vibrates through him, and he moves just a little closer to me.
Like his very presence can protect when it’s not that at all.
A man like Billy King doesn’t need to touch to own or to have power to hurt.
He’s got money for that.
And from the look of him, more than he’d had before.
Or maybe it’s the fact I’d been so young, so enamored, and flattered that a grown, sophisticated man had wanted me at seventeen, I hadn’t truly noticed.
“I guess I’m the one who needs to introduce myself since you and Sarah seem to know each other,” Leland says, voice light, a world of questions behind it. “Leland Conley, as you know.”
I try and breathe and not look at Leland. I don’t want to see all the things I can hear and feel that are unspoken on his face.
