THE BILLIONAIRE'S CONTRACTED VIRGIN

Chapter Five: The Side Door

I gave it four minutes before I went looking for him.

I told myself it was three, that I was being reasonable, that a woman in my position fake fiancée, borrowed dress, a debt paid by a man I'd known less than two weeks did not go chasing after closed doors at galas she'd been dropped into like a prop. But four minutes came and went, and then five, and the side door hadn't opened, and something in my chest had started pulling tight enough that reasonable stopped being an option.

Isabelle caught my arm before I made it halfway across the ballroom.

"Don't," she said, quieter now than she'd been at the bar, all her performance stripped away. "Whatever you're about to do, don't."

"He looked"

"I know how he looked." She steered me, gently but firmly, toward a quieter corner near the terrace doors, out of the current of the crowd. "That's Desmond Cray. He doesn't come to these things unless he wants something, and Ronan doesn't go pale for just anyone."

"Who is he?"

Isabelle's mouth twisted, somewhere between amusement and old, complicated history. "Someone from before you. That's all I'm going to say, and not because I'm being cruel because it isn't mine to say, and because if I tell you and you go in there swinging, Ronan will know I told you, and then I'll spend the next six months paying for it." She studied me for a second, something almost sympathetic breaking through the glitter. "He's not a bad man, you know. Ronan. He's just very good at making sure nobody finds out."

"That's not exactly reassuring."

"It wasn't meant to be reassuring," Isabelle said. "It was meant to be honest. I find people appreciate honesty a great deal less than they claim to." She glanced toward the side door, then back at me, and something decided itself behind her eyes. "Give him ten minutes. If he's not out by then, I'll go in myself, and trust me, that's a much bigger scene than you causing one."

"Why are you helping me?"

"I'm not," she said, too quickly to be entirely true. "I'm managing a room. It's what I do." But she didn't walk away, and she didn't let go of my arm, and the two of us stood there together watching a door that refused to open, and I understood that Isabelle Cross was a much more complicated person than her first thirty seconds had suggested.

Ronan came out at the nine-minute mark, jaw tight, tie slightly crooked in a way that felt more violent than if he'd simply torn it off. Desmond Cray didn't follow him. Whatever had happened behind that door, it had happened, apparently, entirely to Ronan.

He found me with Isabelle immediately, like he'd already known exactly where I'd be standing, and something in his face eased not fully, not close to fully, but enough that I could see the difference between the man who'd walked through that door and the one walking back out of it.

"You're still here," he said.

"Where else would I be?"

"I wouldn't have blamed you for leaving." He said it low, like a confession he hadn't meant to make out loud.

"I don't leave in the middle of things," I said. "Even things that aren't technically mine to stay for."

Something crossed his face at that gratitude, maybe, or something adjacent to it that he didn't have a name for yet. Isabelle, tactful for possibly the first time all night, murmured something about finding her drink and vanished, leaving the two of us alone at the edge of the ballroom, the music and the chatter suddenly very far away.

"Desmond Cray," I said, testing the name.

Ronan's expression shuttered instantly. "Isabelle talks too much."

"She told me almost nothing. I'm telling you the little she gave me, because I'd rather you know I asked than pretend I didn't notice you walked out of that room looking like someone had rearranged your insides."

He exhaled, long and slow, and for a second he looked less like the man who ran half the buildings in this skyline and more like someone very tired of carrying something alone. "He's a reminder," he said finally. "Of a version of my life I try very hard to keep separate from this one. From you."

"You keep saying that. *Separate from you.* Like I'm something you're protecting by keeping me in the dark."

"Maybe I am."

"I didn't ask to be protected," I said. "I asked for the truth. Those aren't the same thing."

He looked at me for a long moment, and I watched him war with himself watched the careful, controlled architecture of Ronan Steele strain against something underneath it that wanted, very badly, to just say it, whatever it was.

"Not tonight," he said finally, and the words cost him something, I could tell, by the way his jaw tightened around them. "Not here. You deserve better than a hallway confession at a party neither of us wanted to attend."

"That's a very convenient standard."

"It's not convenient," he said, sharper now, though not at me at himself, I realized, at whatever version of this conversation, he kept rehearsing and failing to have. "It's the only thing keeping me from telling you something I'm not sure you'd forgive me for."

The ballroom went very quiet around me, or maybe it was just that I'd stopped hearing anything but him.

"Ronan"

"Dance with me," he said abruptly, holding out his hand, and it wasn't a deflection so much as a plea dressed up as one, and I understood, in that moment, that he needed the noise and the movement and the excuse to hold onto something, and that if I pushed any harder tonight, whatever he was holding together might come apart in a room full of people who'd feast on the wreckage.

I took his hand.

We didn't talk, this time, while we danced. He held me closer than the song strictly required, his chin nearly resting against my hair, and I felt him breathing like a man trying to remember how, and somewhere in the third or fourth turn around the floor, I stopped caring about Desmond Cray and separate lives and unfinished sentences, and just let myself exist inside the warmth of his hand at my back.

"Thank you," he murmured, eventually, so quiet I almost missed it.

"For what?"

"For not asking again tonight." A pause, his hand tightening fractionally at my waist. "I know that cost you something."

"It did."

"I'll tell you," he said. "Not tonight. But I will."

"Is that a promise?"

"It's the closest thing I have to one," he said, and something in his voice made it sound like the most honest thing he'd said to me all night.

We left not long after, Simon materializing at the door with the car already idling, and the ride home was quiet in the way that follows something unfinished not comfortable, not tense, just full, the way a held breath is full right before it's finally let go.

Ronan walked me to my door when we got back, which he hadn't done before, and lingered there a moment too long, his hand braced against the frame, close enough that I could feel the warmth coming off him even without touching.

"Goodnight, Vivian," he said.

"Goodnight."

He didn't move. Neither did I. And for one long, suspended second, I thought he might close the distance between us entirely I watched him think about it, watched something war behind his eyes the same way it had in the ballroom, want and restraint locked in a fight neither one was clearly winning.

He stepped back first.

"I meant what I said," he said, voice rougher than before. "About telling you. Just—" He stopped, the sentence catching the way his sentences always caught right before the part that mattered most. "Just not yet."

He left before I could answer, his study door closing softly down the hall a moment later, and I stood alone outside my room with my heart doing something entirely unreasonable for a fake engagement built on a business arrangement.

I was still standing there when my phone buzzed in my clutch a text from an unknown number, no name attached, sent at 12:47 in the morning.

*Ask him about the fire at Hartwell Textiles. Ask him what your father's name was doing in the insurance report.*

I read it twice. Then, a third time, my hands going cold around the phone, the warmth of the dance floor draining out of me all at once.

I didn't know who'd sent it.

But I knew, with a certainty that settled somewhere deep and permanent in my chest, that whatever Ronan Steele had almost told me tonight, it was nothing compared to what he hadn't.