A Woman

Roman

I have been in rooms with presidents. I have negotiated deals that made grown men sweat through their suits. I have buried a woman I loved and kept my composure at her graveside because my daughter needed me to be steady and I was.

I am not steady right now.

I knew she was coming. I had three weeks to prepare for it. Three weeks from the moment I told my assistant to call her because I couldn’t do it myself. I told myself it was courtesy. I told myself it had nothing to do with needing her back here. I had rehearsed this. I knew exactly who I was going to be when I saw her.

And then the elevator opened and she was standing in my corridor being spoken to like she was nobody, everything I had rehearsed went somewhere I couldn’t reach.

She was always beautiful. Even at nineteen she was the kind of beautiful that made you look twice and then hate yourself for it. But she was a girl then. Slight and uncertain and looking at me with those eyes that didn’t know yet what they were asking.

The woman sitting across my desk right now is something I was not prepared for.

Three years have been generous to her in ways that make my jaw ache. Fuller. Curved in all the ways that a man with any sense would stop himself from noticing.

She’s sitting with her hands folded in her lap and her back straight and she’s looking at me the way she always did, like the suit and the title and the forty floors of glass and steel mean absolutely nothing. Like she can see straight through all of it to whatever is underneath.

I’ve always hated that. I’ve always loved it.

“Water?” I ask.

“I’m fine.”

“You haven’t eaten. The flight—”

“Roman.”

She said my name. Not Dad. Not Daddy. She said my fucking name.

That was a first. I almost laugh at how bold and fierce this little girl of mine has become.

And the way my name came out of her mouth, like she had already decided somewhere between walking through my door and sitting down that I wasn’t her dad anymore. Like she had filed that part away and was done with it.

“I didn’t come here to talk about water.”

I set the glass down and lean back in my chair and look at her and remind myself of every single reason I am not going to be the man I was three years ago in that bedroom. I have a list. It’s a good list.

“Why did you send me away?”

There it is. One question I am not prepared to answer.

“London was the right opportunity,” I say. “King’s College is one of the best.”

“I didn’t ask for the press release.” Her eyes are steady. “You promised you’d always be honest with me. You said that when I was twelve years old, sitting at the kitchen table, and I’d lied about breaking your watch. You remember that?”

I remember everything. That’s the problem. That has always been the problem.

I exhale slowly. “Raven…”

“Why did you send me away?”

The room is very quiet.

“Because I touched you,” I say. “And I shouldn’t have. And the only way to make sure it didn’t happen again was to put enough distance between us.”

She doesn’t flinch. She just looks at me.

“And did it work?” she asks. “Did you forget?”

I stand up. Move to the window. Put my back to her and my hands in my pockets and look out at the city because I don’t trust what my face is doing right now.

Below, Boston goes about its business. Forty floors of ordinary life. Out there somewhere are billboards with my face on them. In three weeks I am getting married.

“You replaced me,” she says quietly, behind me.

“I didn’t replace you.”

“Aria is everywhere. Vivienne is everywhere. The whole world has forgotten I existed first.”

“Don’t.” The word comes out sharper than I intend.

“Don’t what? Tell the truth?”

I turn around and she is sitting in that chair with the posture of a woman who isn’t shy anymore. She used to be. Couldn’t meet my eyes for more than two seconds without looking away. But right now she is looking directly at me and her eyes —

God help me, her eyes.

One ocean blue, one grey. The most unusual, most disarming thing I have ever seen on a human face. I have never met another person who looked like that. Like she was made from two different skies.

And those gorgeous eyes are staring into my dark ones like she isn’t afraid of a single thing she might find there.

“You are first,” I say. “You have always been first. That has never changed.

“And yet you sent me away.”

“Because I touched you, Raven,” I say it again because she needs to understand the weight of it. “You were nineteen years old and I put my hands on you and there is no version of that where I am not the one who should have known better. Sending you away was the only decent thing I did.”

She’s quiet for a moment. Then, she says it so quietly I almost don’t hear it, “Maybe you forgot. But I never did. Not one day. Not once.”

I should tell her to stop. I know I should. I open my mouth to say exactly that.

“I can touch myself properly now,” she says. “You’d be glad to know. I figured it out.”

My whole body goes very still.

“Raven.” My voice comes out low. Warning.

“You asked me to always be honest.”

“I’m asking you to stop.”

“Every morning.” She holds my gaze and doesn’t waver. “Every single morning for three years. I touch myself and it’s you I think of. Every single time. I’ve tried to make it someone else. I’ve tried very hard. But my body doesn’t want anyone else. It only ever wants you.”

The thing that happens in my chest right now I am not going to name.

My cock hardens immediately and I am furious at myself.

I turn back to the window. I press one hand flat against the glass and focus on the cold of it and breathe and think about every item on my list. She is twenty-two years old. She is my daughter in every way that has ever mattered. I am three weeks from my wedding. I am a man with more self-control than this.

I am more than this.

“You’re going to stop talking,” I say quietly. “And I’m going to have James take you home. And we are going to be what we are, family. That is all we are going to be.”

Silence.

Then her chair scrapes softly against the floor and I hear her stand. Her heels are quiet on the carpet as she crosses to the door.

“You know what’s funny,” she says, her hand on the handle. “You keep saying what we are like it’s something you have to remind yourself of.”

I don’t turn around.

The door opens. The door closes.

I stand at the window with a hard cock, trying to calm myself down before my next meeting. That takes a long time.

No woman has ever done this to me. Made me this hard and this angry at myself at the same time. Raven has been doing it since she was nineteen and apparently three years and an ocean between us changed absolutely nothing.

She is mine. She has always been mine. Just not in the way I keep having to stop myself from claiming her.

Three weeks.

I just have to get through three weeks.