Chapter 5

Kimani

I had never panicked like this in my entire life and I wanted that on record.

We had been doing this for a whole year, Roan and I, and in that entire year Jaxon had never once come close to finding us alone together. Not in the same room, not in the same car, not anywhere that would require an explanation neither of us was ready to give. I had been careful. I had been so careful that it had started to feel easy, like maybe this was just how it was going to be indefinitely, this comfortable secret with no consequences.

And now my brother was at the bottom of my staircase with chocolate bars and a very straightforward question about the location of his best friend and I was lying on my bed with a hickey on my neck.

"He's coming up," I whispered, and it came out louder than a whisper because my chest was tight and my voice was not cooperating. "Get off me right now, Roan, he is literally coming up the stairs."

Roan did not move with any urgency.

He looked at me from above with those frost blue eyes that had absolutely no panic in them whatsoever, not a trace of it, like the sound of Jaxon's voice coming up through the floor was a mild inconvenience at most and not a situation that required immediate action.

"Then let him come," he said. His voice still had that edge in it from before, still carrying the weight of what he had just told me, and the combination of that and his complete lack of concern for our current situation made something hot move through my chest that was equal parts affection and genuine frustration.

"What do you mean let him come?" I pushed at his chest and this time he allowed me to create some distance, sitting back while I scrambled upright, pulling my sleep shirt down. "You want him to walk in here and find you in my room and find me looking like…" I stopped and pressed my hand to my neck, feeling the spot his teeth had found. "He will lose his entire mind, Roan, you know exactly what Jaxon is like…"

"Kim baby?" 

Jaxon's knock landed on my bedroom door and I froze for a full second, just standing in the middle of my room with my hand on my neck and my eyes wide, and then everything in me mobilized at once.

I looked at Roan.

He looked back at me with an expression that said he was going to let me handle this and he was going to find it interesting to watch.

I grabbed his arm and pulled and to his credit he got up without making me work too hard for it, and I dragged him across my room toward the walk-in closet because it was the only option I had and I needed him behind a closed door before my brother knocked again. My walk-in closet was not a small space, it was its own room essentially, more of a miniature luxury boutique than anything else because my mother had built it that way and I had filled it accordingly. There was more than enough room for one very tall, very broad, very unhelpful man to stand in without being seen.

I pushed him inside.

He stepped in and turned and looked at me with that questioning expression, one brow lifted, like he was genuinely curious about what I thought I was doing.

"Kimani?" Jaxon knocked again, and I could hear him trying the handle.

"Please." I looked up at Roan and I put everything I had into that one word. I rose up on my toes and pressed my lips to his, quick and light, just enough to be a promise and an apology at the same time. "Please just stay in here and don't make a sound. Please."

He looked at me for one moment that felt longer than it was.

Then he said nothing and I took that as agreement and pulled the closet door shut and turned around and fixed my face into something sleepy and irritated and walked to my bedroom door and opened it.

Jaxon came in immediately, already looking around the room the way he always did when he entered a space, that automatic scan that I thought he probably did not even notice he was doing anymore. I let my hair fall forward over my shoulder, making sure it was covering my neck, and I leaned against the doorframe like someone who had genuinely just been woken up.

"What took you so long?" I said, and the frown on my face was not entirely performed. "You said thirty minutes."

"The traffic, Kim baby, I'm sorry." He held up the bag and I took it from him, looking inside. Chocolate bars, the dark ones he had promised, and a small collection of supplements and throat lozenges that made me feel momentarily guilty for the whole performance I was currently running on him. "I got everything. Got the supplements too since you're still not well."

"Thank you," I said, and I meant that part genuinely.

Jaxon looked around the room again. Slower this time.

My heart rate picked up.

"Where's Roan?" he asked.

I kept my face completely neutral. "He left."

The words came out of my mouth and I heard them and immediately recognized that I had said quite possibly the worst lie available to me given the circumstances and I wanted to smack myself. He left. His car was outside. His car that Jaxon had definitely seen when he pulled up was sitting in the driveway and I had just said he left.

Jaxon's brow arched. "His car is outside."

"He probably didn't go far." I shifted the bag to my other hand and kept my voice level and even and I was genuinely proud of how steady it came out considering everything happening inside my body right now. "I didn't want his company anyway, I told you that. So I left him down there alone and came back up here. That's probably why he stepped out."

Jaxon looked at me for a moment in that way he sometimes did, like he was running the information through something internal and deciding whether it cleared.

It apparently cleared, because he exhaled and muttered something under his breath that sounded like something unflattering about Roan's personality, which was fair, and then his eyes dropped to me.

"Put some decent clothes on, Kimani." He gestured vaguely at my sleep shorts and the oversized shirt hanging off my shoulder. "It's past morning already."

"I'm in my mother's house," I said, and I let the indignation in my voice be real because that part was genuine too. "I'm sick. I can wear whatever I want in my own home, stop dictating what I should have on."

"I'm just saying…"

"You're always just saying." I pulled the bag closer to my chest.

He gave me the look that meant he had made his point and was choosing to drop it, which was the best possible outcome, and then he straightened. "I'll be in my room. Let me try calling that cold stone."

"At least he's hot," I said, and I do not know why I said it. It just came out of me on impulse, the way things sometimes did when I was stressed and my filter stopped working at full capacity.

Jaxon stopped walking.

He turned around slowly and looked at me with an expression that was flat and unamused and deeply brotherly in the most specific and threatening way.

"I'm joking," I said immediately, and I laughed, and the laugh was genuine because the look on his face was objectively funny. "I'm obviously joking, relax."

He stared at me for one more second.

Then he walked out.

I waited. I counted to five inside my head and listened to his footsteps move down the hall and then the sound of his room door, and then I walked quickly to my bedroom door and locked it. I pressed my back against it and let out a long slow breath and closed my eyes for exactly three seconds.

Then I opened them.

And saw Roan's phone sitting on my bed.

Right there. In the center of my bed where he had been hovering above me twenty minutes ago. His phone face down on my comforter in plain sight and Jaxon had been standing in this room and somehow, by some grace I had not earned, had not looked directly at the one object in this room that would have ended everything.

I pressed my hand over my mouth.

He didn't see it. He was looking around but he didn't see it. I kept telling myself that as I crossed the room and picked it up and held it and felt my heartbeat slowly begin to descend from the ceiling back into my chest where it belonged.

I walked to the closet door and opened it.

Roan's eyes found me immediately, and then they dropped to his phone in my hand, and then they came back up to my face, and the expression he was wearing was not the grateful or relieved expression of a man who had just narrowly avoided a catastrophic discovery by his best friend.

It was something else entirely.

"So you think I'm hot," he said. "But you're joking."

I stared at him.

My brother had just been in this room. His phone had been sitting on my bed in full view. My heart had not yet fully recovered from what it had just been through and this man, this thirty year old billionaire who had hacked my phone at sixteen and refused to accept a breakup and left a mark on my neck twenty minutes before my brother knocked on my door, had walked out of my closet and chosen to address the throwaway comment I made to get Jaxon off my back.

The absolute nerve of him.