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Her breath had become shallow. He wasn’t trying to be provocative, but she was turned on anyway. He was a powerful man, a man who knew what he wanted and took it.
A man who didn’t suffer tyrants.
His father. Adam. Roman wanted to take away their power.
And it all made a kind of fucked-up sense when he said it.
Either that, or she really was losing her mind.
Or maybe both.
“And there’s nothing else you’d rather do?” Ruby asked. He was so smart, so well spoken. He could have been a CEO or venture capitalist. “Nothing else you’re interested in doing for work?”
His eyes flashed. “Don’t do that, Ruby.” There was a warning in it, but not the kind of warning Adam issued when she was toeing the line of his anger. The kind of warning that made Ruby wet. “Don’t pretend this is something I have to do. I have an Ivy League education, know more about business and economics than most of the little boys playing with imaginary money on Wall Street.” He held her gaze. “I do this because I choose to do it. It’s my business, my world. I won’t pretend to be anything else. Not even for you.”
“Is this what you would have said if I’d confronted you after Adam told me?” Ruby asked.
“It was what I was coming to say when I was shot in your apartment after you were kidnapped.”
Her breath caught in her throat. “You were… shot?”
“There were men in your apartment when I got there,” he said. “They took me by surprise.”
The realization hit her like a punch to the chest: Roman had come looking for her. He could have died.
“Are you…” She inhaled. “Was it bad?”
She’d been in such a frenzy to fuck him on the sofa that she hadn’t looked closely at his body. In fact, she’d been determinednotto look too closely at him, afraid to fall so deeply into the well of her feelings for him that she forgot all about his business.
His new wounds would have been easy to miss in the dark living room, especially since his body had been riddled with scars even before he’d been shot in her apartment.
He gave her a faint smile. “I’m fine now. But I made a mistake not telling you about my business from the beginning. It’s what I was planning to say when I went to see you, but there was never a world in which I was going to walk away from it. Not even for you.”
“Where does that leave us?”
Why are you using the wordus, Ruby? There is no us.
“That’s up to you,” he said. “You know I want you.”
The words might have sounded clinical coming from someone else, but from Roman’s mouth they were hot and heavy with meaning.
“Is that all?” she asked mildly. “You want me like a new toy? Like a satisfying fight? Like a good meal?”
He shook his head and held her gaze. “No, that’s not all, Ruby. And I think you know that.” His gaze drifted down to her tits. “Although I wouldn’t say no to eating you like a good meal.”
The moment seemed suspended between them, the murmur of conversation and music in the restaurant receding behind the rapid beating of her heart, the catch in her breath.
“I think it’s time for us to leave,” she said.
His gaze was glued to her face and when he spoke, his voice was filled with hunger and dark promises. “I couldn’t agree more.”
27
Roman
It took less than fifteen minutes to pay for the suite. Then they were in the elevator, gliding up to the tenth floor, the sexual tension thick between them.
He didn’t analyze it. Didn’t think about what it meant for them, for their future together, whether it meant anything at all.
