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
