Читать книгу More Than A Vow: Vows of Revenge / After Their Vows / Vows Made in Secret - Michelle Reid, Dani Collins - Страница 15

CHAPTER EIGHT

ROMAN SWORE, SNAPPING Melodie from a doze.

“What’s wrong?” she asked sleepily.

“Can’t you hear it? Does he think he owns you?”

She lifted her head off his chest, where the steady thump of his heartbeat had lulled her. She heard the distant hum of her phone vibrating in the other room. Glancing at the clock, she said, “He’s probably worried I’ll miss the flight.”

Roman’s arm tightened on her.

She rolled onto him, growing addicted to the feel of his body against her own, loving the freedom to be like this: more than familiar or intimate. Close.

Nuzzling her nose into the fine hairs at his breastbone, she hid the dampness that rose behind her eyes as she drank in his scent, murmuring, “I have to leave soon. Not should,” she clarified. “Have to.”

“I heard you,” he grumbled, massaging her scalp through the thick fall of her hair. “I still want you to stay.”

“I’m glad,” she said with a crooked smile, thinking of the way he’d thrown her out the first time. The remembrance didn’t hurt as badly now. She had this incredible memory to replace it. “But I think in the long run we’d wind up in conflict. I do want love and marriage and kids, Roman. You were right about that.”

His caress gentled to a light comb of his fingers through her hair. He didn’t say anything. Didn’t try to convince her he was a changed man, that they had a future. The silence caught at her tender heart, telling her she was making the right decision.

“But I could shower here,” she suggested, lifting her head to offer a sultry look through tangled lashes, a smile pouted with invitation. “Rather than in my own room, alone.”

“Deal.”

* * *

Roman was jealous. He wasn’t just annoyed on Melodie’s behalf that her boss thought he had first call on her time. He was illogically threatened and nursing an uncomfortable state of rebuff as he walked away from her closed hotel room door and forced himself back to the elevator and his own room.

Emotions.

He eschewed them at every opportunity. Hope, happiness, pride. Those were all harbingers of a fall to come. That was what he’d learned through a very hard childhood. Better to focus on sensory pleasures and external goals that had a hope of being accomplished than seek some sort of inner fulfillment.

Melodie was right in saying they would run into conflict in the long run. She might act tough, but she was very sensitive, and he would wind up hurting her with his active attempts to feel nothing.

Which was exactly what he tried to do after walking her downstairs and returning to his empty suite. He was exhausted from lack of sleep, muscles aching from their night of marathon lovemaking, but he wasn’t interested in crawling back into their wrecked bed. It looked too cold and empty. Unwelcoming.

Finding his scotch from the night before, he sipped it. It wasn’t yet six and he hadn’t slept, so that meant it was still last night, right?

One night. Since when did he feel depressed about any woman leaving, whether it was within hours of their coming together or months?

Forget her, he insisted, thumbing across the screen on his phone to check his emails. Just as quickly he swept that screen aside and flicked to Melodie’s contact card. Her number was still there. It hadn’t accidentally been erased. Checking was completely juvenile, but asking her for it had been even more adolescent. He didn’t chase women. He wouldn’t call her. He had just wanted to know if she was willing to give it to him.

He wished he’d taken another shot of her this morning, clean faced and wearing a hotel robe, ball gown slung over her arm as she’d slowly closed the hotel room door on him. Her expression had been soft with sensual memory, her smile sweet and wistful.

How the hell did he even know what wistful looked like?

It looked like wanting what you couldn’t have, he supposed, which was something he understood all too well. His childhood had been nonstop wishing. As an adult, he’d learned to get what he wanted or stop wanting it, very seldom coming up against a situation such as this.

I do want love and marriage and kids, she’d said. He turned that over in his mind, thinking how determined he’d been to find her in Virginia and take care of any child they might have conceived. There hadn’t been any hesitation in him on that score, but what would things look like now if she had been pregnant? Would they be married?

He supposed there were conditions under which he would seek a lifetime commitment, but those conditions weren’t love. His chest started to feel tight just thinking about opening himself up to that depth of emotion.

Damn it! Why the hell couldn’t she have simply forgotten her pearls again and given him an excuse to call? She’d taken them off at one point, but had asked for his help after her shower to put them back on.

He wandered the suite, scanning for forgotten items, finding only the hotel toothbrush she’d left in a glass next to the sink. Leaning in the bathroom doorway, staring at himself wearing his tuxedo pants and the shirt he’d been too lazy to close all the way, eyes dark with sleeplessness, shoulders slumped in defeat, Roman faced the fact he wasn’t going to forget her. Ever.

Which tightened the vice in his chest a few more notches.

You don’t tell me what you’re thinking. He heard female voices complain from the past. You go through the motions, but I don’t feel like you really care.

He cared. Cautiously. When it came to Melodie, he cared quite a bit. She was too sweet a person to deserve the battering of the Gautier gauntlet. He wanted to protect her from them, and he didn’t care for this new, overbearing boss of hers one bit, either. He should have given her his number, told her to call anytime. For any reason.

Not bothering to overthink it, he dialed her number to tell her exactly that.

A male voice answered.

“Sadler?” Roman guessed, even though it didn’t sound like him.

“This is his aide. Who’s calling?”

“I’m looking for Melodie. It’s Roman Killian.”

A muffled conversation, then a voice he recognized. “Killian,” Sadler said. “Melodie is no longer with us.”

The worst emotion, the one she seemed to bring out in him most and which weighed the heaviest—guilt—descended on him. “You fired her,” he deduced instantly. “For spending the night with me.”

“I need my employees to be accessible at all times,” Sadler said.

“But you told her to be nice to me,” Roman said with false conciliation. The man was lucky the sounds of traffic and car doors were coming through behind him, or Roman would be hunting him down in this hotel right now.

“Sluts become a liability,” Sadler said. “You know that.”

Roman closed his eyes, fighting the fire of rage that roared alive in him. Too intense. It had the power to murder. “I think you fired her because she wasn’t nice to you. You’re going to be very sorry you were not nicer to her.”

Roman ended the call and strode out of his room, straight to Melodie’s.

She didn’t answer his knock, so he took the stairs down to the registration desk, asking them to ring her room.

“She’s checked out, sir.”

He bit back cursing aloud, his fist so tight on the marble desktop he could have shattered the stone with a single pound. She was probably in a taxi heading to the airport and back to Virginia—

Wait. A woman sat in the lobby restaurant wearing a fitted business suit. She had her shiny brown-gold hair pulled into a clip at her nape. Coffee steamed next to the tablet she had propped before her.

She was going to splash that coffee into his face, he thought, but went straight over anyway.

* * *

Roman threw his disheveled form into the chair opposite her. He’d showered with her, still smelled faintly of hotel soap, but he hadn’t bothered shaving and, Lord, he was sexy with that stubble and hair that had dried uncombed. His shirt was still a deep, open V down his chest, the sleeves rolled back to his elbows. He was every woman’s walking fantasy.

And he wore the most thunderous expression.

“Really?” he demanded. “I got you fired again. Really.”

“It’s like a gift, isn’t it?” she said, thinking she ought to be more furious, but the relief was too profound. “Trenton phoned you to tell you? God, that’s just like him. He waited until I was down here, you know. So he could do it in front of everyone. He didn’t expect me to call him a hypocrite. Nice and loud, too. They all do it. I guarantee you all the other aides were picking up women in the bar while I was working the ballroom with him last night, but just because I’m a woman, I’m a slut. Men are such pigs.”

As Roman turned his face away, his expression falling into weary lines, she found herself feeling sorry for him.

“Present company excluded, of course,” she said.

He shook his head as if he couldn’t believe what had happened. “I didn’t mean to do this.”

“You didn’t,” she said wearily. She was the one who had stayed in the penthouse with him, putting her physical gratification above her job, but she didn’t get a chance to say so. The waitress arrived with her breakfast special.

“I’ll have one of those,” Roman said.

“Take mine,” Melodie replied, snagging the fruit cup off the plate and nodding for the waitress to put the rest in front of Roman. “But he needs his own coffee.”

He nodded agreement to the waitress, then looked at the plate of eggs and hash browns before him as if he couldn’t face it. “You’re giving me your breakfast? After I got you fired?”

“I had a voucher, but this was all I really wanted.” She gently stirred the fresh berries into the yogurt beneath.

“How are you this forgiving? Because I want to slash the guy’s tires. I want to slash my own,” he added with self-disgust.

She shrugged. “I guess because I’d do it again,” she said, hearing the poignant rasp in her voice as she recalled their night together.

“Would you?” He lowered his cutlery as he pinned her with a green stare as brilliant as the heart of a flame.

“I meant...” Wow. This wasn’t going to be easy. He only had to look at her. Focusing on chasing a blueberry with the tip of her spoon, she said, “I mean that, given the chance, I wouldn’t have made a different decision last night. But the decision I made this morning still stands, Roman.”

“Why?” he challenged immediately. “You don’t have a job to go back to.”

“I’m aware,” she said tersely, glancing at the tablet that had gone black, but had conjured a handful of weak prospects a few seconds ago. “Rent is covered for next month, at least,” she muttered. “But everything else is going to be a challenge.”

Paris was out of the question for the foreseeable future.

“Melodie, you have to let me help you.”

She shook her head. “I’ll manage. I’m just bummed about Paris. I feel as if I’m letting Mom down.” When her mother had refused treatment, had declined in such slow pain, the promise of Paris had been the only thing Melodie had been able to offer as comfort.

He reached across to take her wrist, thumb caressing the back of her hand. “Let me take you.”

“Roman...” She turned her hand so she was gripping his fingers. “I can’t.”

“You can. You just don’t want to.” He pulled his hand away, jaw thrust out belligerently. He took up his fork with an air of impatience.

She acknowledged he was right with a jerk of her shoulder, wondering how he’d managed to make her feel guilty.

They ate in silence, breaking it only to thank the waitress when she cleared their plates.

Melodie took her last swallow of coffee, but struggled to get it down without choking as she realized this really was it. The end.

“Will you do something for me?” he asked, not letting on what was going on behind his aloof expression. “Will you come up and let me show you something in my room?”

“Etchings?” she guessed facetiously. “I really should get to the airport. I’ll be flying standby, so...”

“Please.” He stood and shouldered her travel bag.

“You can’t just tell me what it is?” She followed him to the elevator where she studied his enigmatic expression the whole way to the top floor. “You’re being very mysterious,” she said when he slid his key card into the reader.

“I’m really not,” he said with a disparaging smirk, leaving her bag just inside the door. Moving to the bedroom, he jerked his chin at the bed.

“What?” She stood beside him to look at the rumpled sheets and indented pillows.

“We’re both exhausted.” He turned his head to give her a somnolent look. “Let’s not make any decisions right now. I’m not asking for sex. I just can’t think when I’m this tired. I become very one track, and all I know is that I want you there.” He pointed at the bed.

“You really aren’t mysterious, are you?” she said, struck by a wave of emotion that maybe came from tiredness, but also from what sounded like an oddly revealing statement from him.

She was tired. Stupid Trenton had waited for her to check out before cutting her loose, so she couldn’t go back to her room and her own bed. She’d already been dreading the wait at the airport, trying to stay awake to hear if she’d been given a flight... It all began to look too overwhelming to face when there was a comfortable bed right there and a man peeling his shirt from his powerful chest.

She opened the button on her jacket, glanced at him with a small scold.

He said, “Thank you,” in a quiet voice that was strangely soothing. She removed her jacket, gave it a shake, then folded it and laid it over the back of a chair. The rest of her clothes went neatly folded onto the seat. She kept on her underpants, but shed her bra, never comfortable sleeping in one. Instead, she picked up his shirt from where he’d dropped it on the floor and slid her arms into it.

“Do you mind?”

“Not a bit.”

Closing a couple of buttons, she rounded the bed as he got in the other side. He held up the covers and she slid in beside him, feeling his arms close around her very comfortingly. Their bare legs braided together, and his lips nuzzled her hairline before he stole the clip from her hair and tossed it off the side of the bed.

Feeling secure and warm, Melodie let out a deep sigh. Roman’s arms grew heavier on her, and that was all she remembered.

* * *

She woke to feel his erection straining the front of his shorts and pressing into her stomach. He was still asleep, but she couldn’t help tracing the shape of him, already feeling liquid heat pooling between her legs in anticipation.

With a long inhale, Roman rolled onto his back, eyes opening to catch her gaze. They flashed with surprise and immediate desire.

“Come here,” he said in a sleep-rasped voice, lifting his hips to push his boxers down and off before drawing her to straddle his thighs.