THE BILLIONAIRE'S CONTRACTED VIRGIN

Chapter Three: The Ring

He didn't come back to the terrace.

I sat out there for another twenty minutes, the glass doors reflecting nothing but my own outline against the dark, and told myself I wasn't waiting for him. I was. When the cold finally won, I went back to my room and lay awake replaying the way his voice had changed there are things about this arrangement I haven't told you until the sentence stopped sounding like words and started sounding like a warning I didn't have the shape of yet.

By morning, he was gone. A note on the kitchen counter, same neat handwriting as the one on my nightstand: *Meeting ran long. Simon will take you for the ring. R.S.*

No mention of the phone call. No mention of the sentence he'd left hanging in the dark like a door he'd shut on purpose.

I told myself it didn't matter. I told myself a lot of things that week.

Simon picked me up at ten, and I spent the ride trying to decide whether asking him about the call would look like curiosity or something closer to what it actually was, which was fear I didn't want to name yet. In the end I asked about neither. I asked what Ronan Steele was actually like, before all of this before the fiancées and the contracts and the notes left like small quiet apologies.

Simon's hands tightened slightly on the wheel. "That's not really my place to say, Miss Reyes."

"That's a very diplomatic way of telling me it's complicated."

"It's a very accurate way of telling you I like my job," he said, and something in his tone told me I wasn't going to get further than that, not today.

The jeweler's was the kind of place that didn't have prices on anything, which I was learning was usually a bad sign for my nerves and a good sign for whoever was footing the bill. A woman with silver hair and careful hands laid out a velvet tray of rings that all looked, to me, indistinguishable in their brilliance, and asked which one spoke to me, like I was choosing a piece of my own life instead of a prop for someone else's.

I picked the smallest one. Not because it was modest nothing in that case was modest but because it was the only one that didn't look like it was trying to announce something. Simple band, a single stone, nothing performing for an audience.

The jeweler seemed surprised. "Most women in your position go for something a bit more"

"I'm not most women in my position," I said, and didn't explain further, and she had the sense not to ask.

He was home earlier than the note had promised, waiting in the living room when Simon dropped me back, jacket off, sleeves rolled, a stack of papers in front of him that he wasn't reading so much as staring through. He looked up when I came in, and something in his face shifted at the small velvet box in my hand not relief, exactly, but close to it, like he'd expected me to come back angrier than I had.

"You picked the plain one," he said.

"You've seen it already?"

"Simon sends photos. I like to know what I'm agreeing to before it's on your hand." He nodded toward the box. "May I?"

I didn't know what to do with the question with the fact that he'd asked instead of simply reaching for it, the way I'd braced for since the conference room. I opened the box and held it out, and he took the ring with a care that didn't match anything else I'd seen from him, turning it once in the light like he was memorizing it.

"Give me your hand."

My pulse did something embarrassing at the request, and I hated it, and I gave him my hand anyway.

He slid the ring on slowly, his fingers cool and steady against mine, and for one unbearable second neither of us moved his hand still wrapped around my fingers, the ring settled at the base of them, both of us pretending very hard that this was a business transaction and neither of us quite managing it.

"It suits you," he said, quiet enough that I felt it more than heard it.

"You don't know me well enough to say that."

"I know that everything else in that case was built to be looked at," he said. "You picked the one thing that wasn't." He let go of my hand like it had cost him something to do it. "That tells me more than you'd think."

I pulled my hand back before I could decide I liked the warmth of his too much. "Is that supposed to be a compliment?"

"It's supposed to be the truth," he said. "I don't have much use for compliments. They're easier to fake."

"And the truth isn't?"

Something darkened behind his eyes, there and gone so fast I might have imagined it. "The truth is considerably harder to take back once it's said."

I thought of the terrace again there are things about this arrangement I haven't told you and the way he'd let the phone interrupt him instead of finishing the sentence. I thought about asking him now, in this room, with the ring still warm from his hands.

I asked instead about something smaller, something safer, because I wasn't ready yet for whatever answer might cost us both. "Who was on the phone last night?"

His whole body went still in the particular way I was starting to recognize the way he stilled right before he decided how much of himself to let me see. "No one important."

"You didn't come back outside."

"No," he agreed. "I didn't."

"Ronan"

"Don't," he said again, softer this time than the first time he'd said it, which somehow made it worse. He rubbed a hand over his jaw, and for a moment he looked less like the man from the conference room and more like someone tired of holding himself together in a shape that didn't fit. "There are parts of my life I keep separate from this. From you. It's not a reflection of anything you've done."

"Then what is it a reflection of?"

He looked at me for a long moment, long enough that I felt it in my chest, and I thought foolishly, dangerously that he might actually tell me. His mouth opened, the same as it had on the terrace, the same held breath before a door closing instead of opening.

"Dinner," he said instead, abruptly, gathering his papers like the conversation had never started. "There's a benefit Friday. Half the city will be there, which means half the city will be watching you. I need you ready by seven."

The shift was so sudden it felt like whiplash, like I'd been standing in one room and was now, somehow, standing in another. "That's it? You're just going to change the subject?"

"Yes," he said, without apology, and something about the bluntness of it almost made me laugh, despite everything. "I'm very good at it. You'll get used to it."

"I don't want to get used to it."

That stopped him at the doorway. He turned back, and for a second the careful control slipped again, just enough for me to see underneath it something that looked almost like guilt, or grief, or both tangled together so tightly he'd stopped trying to separate them.

"Neither do I," he said quietly. "But it's easier for both of us if you do."

He left before I could ask what, exactly, he thought he was protecting me from.

I stood there with the ring still cool against my finger, and it was only after I heard his study door close down the hall that I let myself look down at my hand properly at the plain band that suited me, at the stone that caught the light without trying to.

It was beautiful. It didn't feel like mine.

And three floors below, in a car I hadn't noticed idling outside the building all evening, someone I would not meet for another six chapters was watching the lit windows of the penthouse with a patience that had taken years to build waiting for the moment Ronan Steele's carefully separated lives finally collided, and taking notes on exactly how much it would cost him when they did.