Page 5 of Give In to Me
Her sister walked toward the clubhouse. Katy kept her eyes on Dionne until she disappeared inside and felt the familiar warmth that Dionne’s visits always left. Her only sister. The one person in Harrison Gates’s orbit who’d bothered to show up for Katy at all. Monthly lunches, birthday texts, the occasional bag ofclothes from her closet. Dionne wasn’t affectionate by nature, but she wasthere, and for a girl whose father had never once beenthere, the difference was everything.
Katy turned back to the terrace.
And the air left her body.
Because Julian was standing. Laptop closed, chair pushed back, his car keys in his hand. His gaze was on the door Dionne had walked through, and then it swung sideways and settled on Katy.
Thirty feet of jacaranda shade between them. Purple light on stone.
He didn’t hide it. Didn’t shut it down, didn’t slam the door like he had on her birthday. He stood in the golden afternoon light and let her see everything. His eyes blazing, his body so still it vibrated, the force of his attention so physical she felt it against her chest, her throat, her mouth. A man who’d been drowning all afternoon and had just stopped fighting the current.
Five seconds. Six. The longest he’d ever sustained the connection without breaking.
Then his features locked down. An icy composure sliding over his face like a visor, wiping everything clean. He turned. The keys spun once around his finger, and he walked to his car without a backward glance.
But she’d witnessed it. All of it. The heat and the hunger and the losing battle behind his eyes. He wanted her. She was nineteen and innocent and she’d never been touched by a man, but she knew what wanting was because she’d just witnessed it burn through a billionaire’s composure like fire through paper, andit matched exactly what her own face felt like every time she glimpsed her reflection after seeing him.
Katy Gates stood in the purple shade of the jacaranda with her hummingbird heart and her reckless, hopeless, completely certain feeling, and she thought:He wants me the way I want him. And he’s terrified of it. And I’m not going to let him be.
Chapter 2
SHE WAS DOING IT AGAIN.
Julian tracked Katy Gates from Table Nine as she carried a tray of champagne flutes across the terrace, her red hair catching the afternoon light, and he hated that he knew exactly how the light would catch it. Three fifteen. Golden. The jacaranda breaking it into purple-warm pieces that turned her hair from red to copper to something that didn’t have a name in any language he spoke, and he spoke four.
He knew the light because he’d been studying her for three weeks. He knew the hair because he’d been thinking about it for a year.
She’d been eighteen the first time. Dionne’s sister, birthday lunch, a nothing introduction on the terrace. He’d taken one glance and his body had done something his brain hadn’t authorized, a full-system response that he’d shut down in under two seconds because she was eighteen and Dionne’s sister and facing him with green eyes that were so wide and so startled and so completely unguarded that he’d felt it like a hand reaching into his chest and closing around something vital.
He’d walked away. He’d made himself walk away. He’d gotten in his car and driven home and stood at the window of his penthouse forty-three floors above Wilshire and thought:No.
A year later she was standing on his terrace in a polyester uniform and thenohadn’t worked.
She moved through the members with her eyes down and her voice soft. She saidsorrywhen she didn’t need to. She smiled without showing her teeth. She stood apart from the other servers at the staff station, her shoulders pulled in, her body a small, apologetic shape that the world had taught to stay invisible.
And then she’d turn those eyes on him.
It happened every time. She’d be mid-task, mid-pour, mid-step, and her attention would find his across the terrace, and the shy girl would vanish. In her place was someone who contemplated him with such open, helpless want that it hit him in the chest like a fist. A girl who rambled about club sandwiches and narrated her own exits and blushed so hard her freckles disappeared and couldn’t stop herself from telling him the truth, even when the truth was reckless, even when it stripped her bare. She’d told him she paid attention to him. She’d told him to his face, pink-faced and fearless beyond anything he deserved, and the memory of it kept him up at night, replaying in the dark, her voice and her flush and her eyes, and he was a twenty-nine-year-old billionaire who hadn’t slept properly in three weeks because a teenage server had been honest with him.
Only around him.
Only ever around him.
He closed the laptop. The quarterly projections for Gubat’s Southeast Asian expansion could wait. Everything could wait, apparently, when Katy Gates was within fifty feet.
He knew her break schedule. He knew she took her lunch at the staff table closest to the garden wall because it had shade. He knew she brought food from home in a container with acracked lid and ate alone because the other servers were college students who talked about things she couldn’t afford, and she listened to them with a small smile and said nothing. He knew she had a scar at the edge of her left eyebrow. He knew she tucked her hair behind her ear when she was nervous and bit the inside of her cheek when she was trying not to say something. He knew she was nineteen and still in high school because she’d lost a year, and he knew why, because Dionne had mentioned it once, casually, over drinks:Katy had to take time off, family stuff, you know how it is.And he’d filed it and researched it and discovered what “family stuff” meant, which was a mother in rehab and a fifteen-year-old girl holding down a household alone, and the knowledge had lodged in his chest like a splinter he couldn’t reach.
He knew too much about her. He thought about her too often. He was Julian Ventura, who had built Gubat from nothing at twenty and turned it into an empire by twenty-five and had never once let another person past the perimeter he’d been constructing since he was thirteen years old and discovered the documents in Tita’s closet and learned his name wasn’t real.
The documents. The birth certificate withSalvatorewhereVenturashould have been. The newspaper clipping about El Diablo, his biological father, a man whose reputation made grown men cross the street. And the careful, faded letter from his brother Luciano, written to Tita when Julian was still a baby, that explained everything: the theft in the night, the new name, the new life. A fourteen-year-old boy stealing his infant brother from a monster and handing him to the only woman he trusted.
Julian had never spoken to Luciano. Had never broken the silence his brother had built to protect him. But he’d read every article. Tracked every public appearance. He knew his brotherthe way astronomers knew distant stars: by the light they threw, by the gravity they exerted, by the space they held in the dark.
And he knew this about his father: El Diablo Salvatore had never searched for his stolen son. Never hired investigators. Never placed a single call. A man with the resources to find anyone on earth had let his youngest child vanish, and the silence that followed was not mercy. It was indifference. It was a man for whom a baby was a possession, and a possession that removed itself from the collection was simply no longer worth the inventory space.
Was I not worth finding?
The question had lived in Julian’s chest for sixteen years. He’d built Gubat on top of it, poured concrete and code and capital over the wound until the empire was so large and so visible that no one could ever overlook him again. You could not discard a billionaire. You could not lose a man whose name was on buildings.
