Chapter 3

Kimani

Secretly dating your brother's best friend sounded like the plot of a book when I said it in my head. Something dramatic and exciting and slightly scandalous that happened to other people, the kind of situation you read about and thought well that girl should have known better. And it was all of those things. It was also how I ended up flat on my back on my own bed with Roan King hovering above me like the concept of personal gravity had simply never applied to him and he saw no reason to start respecting it now.

He had carried me up those stairs like it cost him nothing. One hand on the back of my thigh and one arm braced across the back of my legs and I had spent the entire trip up telling him to put me down in a voice that kept betraying me by not sounding serious enough. He pushed my bedroom door open with his shoulder and crossed the room and dropped me onto my mattress with a gentleness that was almost insulting considering the confidence with which he had tossed me over his shoulder downstairs.

I bounced once against the mattress and before I could roll over and get upright he was already there. Hands planted on either side of my head, body hovering over mine, close enough that I could smell his cologne and feel the warmth coming off him and my brain made a very quick and very poor decision to start cataloguing all of that information instead of focusing on the problem at hand.

The problem being that my brother was going to be back in less than thirty minutes and he was going to walk through that front door and potentially up these stairs and I needed Roan King off me and out of my bedroom before that happened.

"Get off," I said. I looked him in the eye when I said it so he would understand I was serious. "Jaxon is going to be back any minute and if he walks in here and finds you like this in my room I will not be the one dealing with that conversation, it will be you."

Roan looked at me without getting off.

He shifted his weight instead, redistributing it in a way that somehow made the whole situation more comfortable for him specifically and more difficult for me, and his eyes moved over my face with that particular quality of attention that he gave only me. Slow and unhurried when he thought I was being particularly interesting to him.

I hated how much I liked being interesting to him.

My body was not behaving itself and I was fully aware of that. There was this involuntary thing my back had started doing, this small arch upward toward him that I had not consciously decided to do and could not seem to stop doing, and I could feel my own heartbeat moving through me in a way that was embarrassingly obvious if he was paying attention. Which he was. He was always paying attention.

This was the thing about Roan that nobody who had not been on the receiving end of it could fully understand. He did not come in loud. He did not push or pressure in any way you could name and point to and call out. He just got close and got quiet and turned all of that focus on you and waited, and your own body did the rest of the work for him without your permission.

His hand came up to my face.

I watched it come and I did not move away from it and I was not going to pretend that was because I could not.

His finger traced my lips. Just one finger, the pad of it, dragging slowly across the line of my mouth from one corner to the other, and something in me went very still and very loud at the same time. My breath caught. I felt my lips part slightly under the pressure of his touch and for one moment, one genuinely humiliating moment, I almost pulled his finger into my mouth. I was that close to doing it. The only thing standing between me and that particular loss of dignity was one tired brain cell waving a small flag somewhere in the back of my skull.

"Why did you block me, Lia?" His voice had gone low. Not cold, not hard, just low. Deliberate. The voice he used when he already knew what he wanted out of a conversation and was simply navigating toward it.

He knew exactly what he was doing to me right now, and he was doing it on purpose and there was only one move I had available to me which was to grab the front of his shirt and pull him closer and stop the slow, careful torture he was running on my nervous system.

So I tried to pull him down.

He did not budge. Not even slightly. He stayed exactly where he was, weight balanced, completely unbothered by my hands fisting in his shirt, and looked at me with that expression that said he found me both adorable and deeply transparent.

I closed my eyes because looking at his face was making the situation significantly worse for me.

He was going to do this until he got what he wanted. That was how Roan operated. He did not get loud, he did not get impatient, he just applied steady, unhurried pressure until you gave him the answer he came for. It was one of the most infuriating things about him and also one of the things I had decided I was extremely attracted to while simultaneously hating myself for it.

"You didn't reply to my text for six hours," I said, keeping my eyes closed because I was more articulate when I was not looking at him directly. "I sent you a message and you left me waiting for six entire hours, Roan."

He did not say anything immediately.

His finger left my mouth.

It moved down slowly, tracing my jaw, then the side of my neck, and I felt his whole hand flatten against my collarbone before it moved lower and his palm cupped my breast through the thin fabric of my sleep shirt and my entire thought process derailed completely.

"Did you consider," he said, perfectly calm, perfectly even, like his hand was not currently dismantling my entire ability to think, "that I might have been in a meeting? That I might have been occupied with something at the office that I could not step away from?"

"You are never too busy for me," I pressed on, ignoring the heat climbing up my throat, shifting my hips in a way I could not help. "You made sure of that. You spoiled me with your attention and you have been doing it for a year and you do not get to suddenly take six hours to reply to a text and act like that is normal. You don't get to do that."

I finally opened my eyes.

He was looking at me with dark eyes, darker than they had been a few minutes ago. His jaw had done that thing it did sometimes, that small tightening, the one that meant something I said had actually gotten somewhere under that composed exterior even though he was not going to announce that.

His thumb moved. Just once, just slightly, pressing gently through the fabric and my hips shifted against the mattress completely without my input.

"You spoiled me," I said, and my voice had gone quieter now, softer than I wanted it to, my fingers finding his shirt again and gripping it. "You have no right to snub me after that. You built this and now you want to act surprised that I reacted?"

"And you actually thought," he said, and his voice had dropped rough at the edges now, not smooth anymore, not controlled, something real moving under the surface of it, "that I was going to reply to that message?"

His mouth came down to my neck.

I felt it press there warm and slow, his breath against my pulse, and my brain shut down the production of coherent thought entirely and just started running on sensation.

"I…" I lost whatever I was going to say.

His teeth grazed the skin just below my jaw and my hands stopped pulling at his shirt and started holding onto it instead, fingers twisted in the fabric, and I was arching again, I could feel myself doing it, my back coming up off the mattress toward him completely without my permission.

This was exactly why I needed him off me before Jaxon got back. Because I had no willpower in this man's hands. None. I had checked and it was not there. My whole body just decided independently that Roan was the most important thing in any room he was in and acted accordingly and I was simply along for whatever that meant.

"Let's break up," I blurted out.