Why hadn’t he seen it?
He dismissed Max with a nod and sat himself down behind his desk. The report was held in a brown leaf folder and he took a deep breath before flipping it open. It was a breakdown of Penny’s project. The building she called The Point. She’d submitted a planning application and he read through it understanding even more as he took in the layout. A whole bunch of rooms, each with an en suite, a large kitchen, a large living area, and then a playground outside. For teenage mothers maybe?
His chest tightened and he exhaled shakily, unaware till then that he’d been holding his breath.
The other documents in the file were applications to open The Point as a drop in centre for runaways and forms to register the centre as a charitable enterprise. She and her sisters had thought it all through and the band around his chest tightened until he had to hold a hand against it.
He thought of the moment he’d thrown her out. The look on her face, how she’d asked him to let her explain and he’d been so angry he’d ignored it all. Fucking idiot. How he wished he could turn the clock back. Get her back in his bed, in his arms.
Because she wasn’t a thief, she was a fucking avenging angel! And as he looked at the plans and looked in himself he knew the truth. He couldn’t deny it anymore. In the space of a long weekend, and all the long days since, he’d fallen harder than he’d even thought possible. He needed his avenging angel. Needed her in his bed, in his arms, and in his home. No their home, he amended, because it would be impossible now not to see her in every space.
The safe room where she’d kneed him in the balls, the lobby where he’d first caught sight of her emerald eyes. He should have known then, he thought. Hadn’t something made him pause and wonder and want? Penny in his bed, seated at his table, laughing in the shower—all of it ran through his mind and he dropped the sandpaper, unable to wait a moment longer. He’d waited too long already.
Penny was his. She was always meant to be and a month apart had not dimmed that feeling, had not even touched the need, the desire he felt for her.
The thief and the billionaire. He laughed, the first in so many weeks. It was time, and more, to go and take what was his.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The flat was freezing cold, again and Penny practically felt like a block of ice. Numb. Could have been because she was in a pair of shorts and a vest of course, but she suspected not. It’s not the cold making you freeze.
She scowled and picked up her sketch pad, eyeing the drawings she’d been working on for the better part of a week. Did the layout work there, for the living area? She looked at the positioning of the huge corner couch and considered moving it to the other wall, but then she was hoping to have a large television there and a games console. She’d already put an application in for some funding from a local group for that. And she could do that now because Sebastian had bought the property.
Had she done so in her own name and tried to apply for funding alarm bells would have sounded. Where had the initial investment come from? How had they found the money to buy the building? I stole it wouldn’t have gone down too well she thought, but now she could say, a local businessman, and it was smiles all round. Then there was the twenty three thousand pounds that had been in the envelope. In the end he’d made sure she got exactly what he’d promised her. The full two hundred thousand she’d stolen. Already that money was being put to use by Lyra. They’d set up a temporary drop in centre in one of the empty shops on the High Street and it was full to bursting most nights. They offered a hot meal, somewhere to rest and talk.
It wasn’t approved by the council yet. They hadn’t even bothered to apply for the necessary permissions if truth be told. Why bother with the bureaucracy when people needed them, and it was just temporary.
All because of Sebastian.
She owed him so fucking much.
“Sebastian…” His name tripped off her lips and she sighed. Just thinking his name brought back the same feelings she’d had when she stood outside of his door in the pouring rain. The heavy weight on her chest, the burn in her throat. Why was it so fucking cold?
Penny dropped the sketch pad and stood up. There was no spare money to put the heating on so she went into their bedroom and grabbed her bedspread. Wrapping it round her shoulders she felt marginally warmer, but knew in reality that it wasn’t just the temperature getting to her. Not at all.
She sat back down on their dilapidated couch, pulling the bedspread in tight around her and rested her head back against it. The applications were all in for The Point and that was good. It meant along with the temporary centre that she was kept busy, that she had lots of things to fill her thoughts. Really there were a hundred things she should be doing before Rachel came home. Rachel who was in just as bad a state as she when it came right down to it…and Lyra. Well Lyra was another matter entirely.