Page 95 of Angels Are Falling

Kai wouldn’t have waited until he returned from a business trip to ‘talk this out.’ He would’ve dropped everything to fix things between us. I hated comparing, but it was impossible not to in our situation. Kai, with more money than anyone I knew, with multiple companies that relied on him, would have dropped everything for me. He had. We were in Beirut on a weekday. A man who was busier than God himself had chosen me with a focus that was almost incomprehensible.

I’d cataloged his possessiveness as a character flaw. The surveillance. The way he’d rearranged my workday to take me to lunch. The fact that he’d paid my coworkers to spend time with me. I had filed all of it under too much.

But now, I was reclassifying.

Stefan had given me space. Kai didn’t believe in it. The distinction showed. Because Kai wouldn’t have been deterred by a few unanswered messages. If I were angry with him, he would have moved mountains to change my mind.

Kai would have fought for me.

Kai left no room for doubt, and I always knew where I stood with him. There was something terrifying and clarifying about someone who wanted you without embarrassment, without apology, without the creeping suspicion that he was scanning the room for something better to come along. I had spent too long with people who made me feel like a placeholder.

“Let’s go,” I told him.

I glanced back at the window one last time. My mother had already returned to the conversation with her new family. It didn’t bother me. I cried my eyes out when she decided not to fight for custody. Then I spent my childhood fighting for my father’s attention. After I found Stefan, who’d loved me completely, I thought, finally, I’d chosen someone who would always pick me in return.

He didn’t, and I was done with that version of myself.

For once, I wanted to be the object of someone’s desire, their deepest wish. I wanted someone to fight for me as if their survival depended on it. Scraps of love were no longer enough for me. Because there was one man willing to give me everything.

Kai was willing to give me ‘a totally ordinary life.’

Chapter

Twenty-Eight

AMELIE

We landed in California shortly after the nanny had brought the kids home from boarding school. Kai came up beside me with the bags and the same unhurried quality he brought to everything and then looked at me.

Our gazes caught as the air thickened around us, and my skin went hot. For some reason, I felt incredibly coy around him now. It was terribly illogical, considering how he had collared me against the en suite bathroom door on his private plane and fucked me just a couple of hours ago. It was rough and left marks, even though he had kissed me softly afterward like a gentleman. For the entire ride home, I couldn’t think of anything but him.

Bella launched herself at me before I had both feet inside. She hit me somewhere around the sternum, which was the height she was at, and I caught her and held on tight and breathed into her hair. It smelled like the strawberry shampoo I had bought her.

“I missed you,” she announced into my shoulder.

“I missed you more,” I said.

She pulled back and looked at me with the evaluative gaze of someone conducting an inspection. “You look orange.”

“I was in the sun.”

“Where?”

I glanced up and found Kai watching us from the doorway. His expression had the quality it got when something was happening that he had not prepared to find moving.

“A place far, far away,” I told her.

“Where’s Stefan?”

“He won’t be back for a few more weeks.”

“Oh.”

Bella forgot about Stefan as soon as Kai showed her the gifts we bought for her. The twins were quick to join as he produced their presents as well.

The jet lag settled warm and heavy over everything like a blanket, and I sidled up to the couch as they tore into the boxes. Kai was on me within seconds, reshuffling me so my head landed on his lap. Somewhere close by, I could hear the twins in the middle of an escalating dispute over one of the gifts that was quickly resolved by Kai. My eyes were closed as they bickered over dinner, Kai telling them they needed to finish their homework first, while Bella demanded that we play Pictionary.

It felt like a dream, but it wasn’t. It was just an ordinary life.