CAGED IN GOLD: A Dark Billionaire Romance

CHAPTER SEVEN

Sunday Morning

— AMARA'S POV —

I wake up first.

The light is different up here. Cleaner. Earlier. Like the sun arrives at forty-two floors before it reaches Brooklyn. I lie still and look at an unfamiliar ceiling and catalog the specifics of where I am and what happened and what it means and what I'm going to do about it.

His hand is on my hip.

Still. Warm. Like he reached for me in his sleep and found me and stayed.

I watch him for longer than is wise.

He sleeps the way I would have predicted if I'd ever let myself think about it. Completely still. Even unconscious he has that quality of contained presence, like his body understands that unnecessary movement is inefficient.

I think: I have made a significant error in judgment.

I think: I knew that when I put on my coat at eleven-fifteen.

I get up quietly. Find my clothes. Go to the kitchen.

* * *

— DAMIEN'S POV —

She's gone when I reach for her.

The specific wrongness of that wakes me faster than any alarm has in years.

I find her in the kitchen. Fully dressed. Coat folded over her arm. My coffee already made because she figured out the machine, of course she did.

She's standing at the counter looking at the cup like she's having a conversation with it about whether to stay.

"Don't."

She turns.

"I'm not running, she says. I'm thinking."

"What's the difference?"

"Damien. I don't know what last night was."

I cross the kitchen. I stop close. Close enough that she has to look up.

"I do, I say. It was the beginning of something. Unless you don't want it to be. In which case I will find a way to live with that. But I need you to know what I want before you decide."

"And what do you want?"

I look at her.

The specific, particular face of the only person in recent memory who walked into a room I controlled and refused to be managed by it.

"You, I say. Not the acquisition. Not ninety days. You. Whatever that looks like, at whatever pace you need, for as long as you'll give me."

The kitchen is very quiet.

She looks at her coffee. At the window. At me.

"Stay for breakfast, she says. Then stops. I mean — I'll stay. For breakfast. If that's allowed."

"Amara, I say. I had a key made for you. Last week. I haven't decided when to give it to you yet but I want you to know it exists."

She stares at me.

"You had a key made."

"Yes."

"Last week."

"Yes."

"Before last night."

"Yes."

"That's incredibly presumptuous."

"Yes, I agree. Would you like eggs?"

She opens her mouth.

Closes it.

"You're impossible."

"So I've been told."

I reach for the eggs.

"Sit down, Amara."

She puts down her coat.

She sits.

She's almost smiling. Trying not to.

I count it as the most significant victory of the month.

* * *

— AMARA'S POV —

He made a key before last night.

He made a key last week and has been carrying it, deciding when to give it to me, while I was building walls and taking long routes to the printer and telling myself that professional distance was still possible.

It wasn't.

It probably hasn't been since the conference room.

We eat. We talk. Really talk, the way we did in the penthouse Tuesday but easier now, the professional armor gone. Just two people at a counter on a Saturday morning with the city doing its quiet weekend thing outside the windows.

His phone rings during breakfast.

He looks at the screen and something crosses his face — there and gone, quickly managed. He stands.

"I have to take this."

"Go."

He moves to the far end of the room. His voice shifts — shorter, more careful, a version of him I haven't heard. I catch one word.

Harlan.

Just one word. A name. But the way his whole body changes around it tells me it's not a small name.

When he comes back, something in his face is closed in a way it wasn't ten minutes ago.

"Everything okay?"

"Business, he says. Nothing that affects the acquisition."

"That's not what I asked."

He looks at me.

"No. It's not okay. But it's something I need to handle before I can explain it."

"Okay."

He looks surprised. Like he expected me to push.

"Most people push."

"I'm not most people."

"No, he says. Quiet. You really aren't."

* * *

— DAMIEN'S POV —

She leaves at ten.

I walk her to the elevator, the way I keep doing without being asked, and at the doors she turns.

I take the key from my pocket.

Plain brass. Simple. The kind of thing that weighs almost nothing and means almost everything.

I hold it out.

She looks at it. Looks at me.

"Damien."

"You don't have to use it, I say. I'm not asking you to move in. I'm not asking you for anything you're not ready to give. I just want you to have the option. Whenever you want it. Or never, if that's what you decide."

She takes it.

She holds it in her palm for a moment.

"You had this made before I agreed to anything, she says."

"I told you. I pay attention to things that matter."

"I'm starting to understand that, she says quietly."

She steps into the elevator.

"Amara."

She looks back.

"The name. Harlan. You're going to want to know it before long."

Something shifts in her expression.

"Why?"

The elevator doors begin to close.

"Because he's already decided to know yours."

The doors shut.

I stand in the empty corridor and look at the closed doors and think about a name I've been avoiding for weeks and a woman who is now walking out of this building with a key to it in her hand.

Two things I can't take back.

I don't want to take either of them back.

* * *

— AMARA'S POV —

I ride down forty-two floors.

I stand in the lobby of Voss Industries with his warmth still on my hand and a brass key in my palm and the name Harlan sitting somewhere in my chest like something I've already decided to find out about.

Because he's already decided to know yours.

I turn the key over.

Then I walk out into Saturday morning Manhattan, clean and bright after the rain, and I think about a man who made a key last week and has been waiting for the right moment to give it to me, while I was building walls.

I think about the name Harlan.

I think about the look on his face when it came through the phone.

I close my fingers around the key.

I keep walking.

But I already know.

Whatever this is — whatever we are building in this space between a ninety-day contract and something that has no deadline — it is not going to be simple.

It was never going to be simple.

I just needed last night to stop pretending I was going to walk away from it anyway.

* * *

End of Chapter Seven