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“I’ll text your ring size to Trevor and send him to procure something suitable. You will have it on your desk by lunch. Then … then we have a charity event to go to.”
“I don’t have anyone to watch Ana.”
“I’ll pay Genevieve to do it. She’s good with Ana, isn’t she?”
“Well, yes, but … I’ll have been away from her all day.”
“Leave early,” he said. “I’ll come here and pick you up before the event.”
“Why do you keep having answers to all of my problems?” she asked, her tone petulant.
“I would think that would be a good thing, especially since you have so many problems at the moment.”
She let out an exasperated sigh. “Granted.”
He stood, taking his glass of nearly untouched wine off the coffee table. “Good night, then. I’ll be by to pick you and Ana up at seven-thirty tomorrow morning.”
“Wait … pick me up?”
“You’re my woman now, Paige, and that comes with a certain set of expectations.”
She blinked. “I didn’t … I didn’t agree to this.”
“You brought me into this. That means you aren’t making all the rules anymore.” He turned and walked into the kitchen, pausing at the sink and dumping the contents of his glass down the drain. “That wine is unforgivable. I will teach you to like good wine.”
“And you’ll teach me to like good jewelry, and the sort of hair you deem ‘good.’ Tell me, Dante, what else will you teach me to like?” She crossed her arms beneath her breasts—rather generous breasts—and a rush of heat assailed him. Intense. Impossible to ignore.
The desire to lean in and trace her lips with his fingertip, with his tongue, was nearly too strong for him to overcome. But he would. He would keep control, as he always did.
He took one last, lingering look, at her pink lips. “That’s a very dangerous question, Paige,” he said. “Very dangerous.”
CHAPTER FOUR (#ucee2d68b-dd06-5d8e-abc6-862a58eb0486)
THAT’S a very dangerous question.
Yes, it had been a dangerous question. Only Paige hadn’t realized just how dangerous until it had come out of her mouth. And she was certain that Dante didn’t realize how much truth was behind it. How much teaching she would need.
Oh, dear.
Just thinking about it again made her feel hot, all over. And that was exactly why she wasn’t going to think about her futile, one-sided attraction anymore
She looked at the clock and shifted in her chair. Genevieve was already here, and Ana had been happily passed off to her. It hadn’t taken the little girl more than a moment to recognize her daily caregiver and the two were happily playing on the rug in the living room.
Paige sighed and realized that she was jiggling her leg. She stopped herself. Her little nervous habit wasn’t a good look with the long, silky gown she was wearing.
Yes, she was wearing a dress, to go on a date. Which was something she hadn’t done in … almost ever. She wasn’t the girl that men went after. She was the screwup, the funny one. The one with a pink stripe in her hair, although Dante was putting the kibosh on that.
She didn’t get dressed up in slinky gowns to go to fancy charity dinners with billionaires. She also didn’t get engaged to billionaires. Oh, yeah, she didn’t really marry them, either, though that was now in her future. All because her stupid, impulsive brain had spit out the most ridiculous lie at the worst time.
Desperation wasn’t her best state. She more or less had a handle on the blurting these days. When she’d been a kid, all the way up into high school, it had been really bad. She was always saying stupid things and embarrassing herself, which was one reason she’d opted for class clown rather than trying to be sexy or cool or anything like that. Letting it go, instead of wishing she could be something she wasn’t, had been much easier.
Or rather, as the case had been, she’d had one incredibly defining, humiliating moment that never let her forget that there were certain guys, who liked certain kinds of girls. And she was not one of them.
There was a heavy knock at her door and she scrambled up out of the chair, grabbing her handbag and wrap. She scurried into the living room and bent down, dropping a kiss onto Ana’s soft, fuzzy head.
“I won’t be too late,” she said to Genevieve.
“I wouldn’t blame you if you were,” Genevieve said.
Paige’s cheeks got hot and she was sure they were a lovely shade of red. “I … we won’t be late.” She had to get a handle on the blushing, too. There was no reason to blush. Dante Romani was hardly going to ravish her in the back of his car.
She straightened and draped her bright purple wrap over her bare shoulders, giving herself a little look in the small mirror that hung in her living room on her way to the door of her apartment.
The door opened just as she reached it.
“Were you going to leave me freezing on the front step?”
“It’s San Diego. It’s not freezing. And you’re in the temperature-controlled hallway.”
“It’s the principle,” he said.
“I had to say goodbye to Ana. Do you want to see her?”
A strange look crossed his face. Confusion, fear, then boredom. “No.”
“Oh, sorry. Most people like babies, you know,” she said, stepping out into the hall, closing the door behind her.
“I have no interest in having any of my own. I’m not certain why it would be important for me to like babies.”
“They’re cute.”
“Yes, so are puppies but I don’t want one.”
“A baby isn’t a puppy,” she said.
He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter to me for the reason previously stated.”
She rolled her eyes and pushed the button on the elevator. “Right. Well. I hope Ana and I don’t disturb you too much when we live in your home, as you don’t want a wife or a child.”
“It’s a large house,” he said, his words carrying a stiff undertone, as if he didn’t believe it would be large enough.
The doors to the elevator slid open and they both stepped inside. She’d never noticed how small elevators really were before she’d taken to riding in them with Dante Romani. He made everything feel smaller. Tighter. Because he filled the space he was in so absolutely.
It wasn’t just because he was well over six feet tall and broad, either. It was his charisma, the dark energy that radiated from him. He was so unobtainable, so uninterested in what was happening around him. It made you want to go and grab his attention. Made you want to be in his sphere. To make him seem interested. To make him smile.
To make him laugh.
At least she did, but she was good at that. Making people laugh and smile. Defusing tension with antics and jokes. And she had, apparently, not learned her lesson about unobtainable men.
She nearly opened her mouth to make one when her eyes locked with his and the breath leached from her body.
His dark eyes roamed over her curves, taking in every inch of her. And she was reminded again of their exchange last night.
What else will you teach me to like?
Oh, no, no, no. She wasn’t going there. She never had before, no reason to start now.
Besides, Dante could have any woman he wanted, on the terms he chose. He had no reason to start lusting after her pink-striped self.
She’d grown up in a small town, and every guy she knew had known her from the time they were in kindergarten together. They knew that she talked too much, and that she very often laughed too loud. That she had trouble paying attention in class. That she’d cut a boy’s tongue with her braces during her first kiss. They knew that she’d been the focus of what had essentially been the senior prank. They knew that she’d barely passed high school, that her parents hadn’t seen the point of paying for her to go to college when she just wouldn’t apply herself. They’d watched her get a job at a coffee shop instead of going away to school like everyone else.
They had all watched her grow from an awkward kid, to an awkward teen, to an awkward adult. It was like living in a fishbowl. And being the slow fish with the crippled fin. Nothing like her straight-A achieving sister and her football-star brother.
She was just … Paige. And it had always seemed like a pitifully small accomplishment, just being her. For most of her life, she’d accepted it. She’d just put on the image they’d applied to her and owned it. So much easier than trying to be anything else.
But there was a point, as she was pouring a cup of coffee for her fiftieth customer of the day, who asked her about her brother or sister, and not about her, that she couldn’t do it anymore.
A week later she’d moved. Just so she could be new to a place. So she had a hope of finding who she was apart from the painful averageness that marked her life.
It hadn’t been an instant transformation, no sudden rise to the top of the social heap. But she’d made a small group of friends. She’d found her job at Colson’s. That provided her with the first real sense of pride she’d ever had in a job.
They’d seen her raw talent and they’d hired her based on that, not based on classroom performance. Colson’s, and by extension, Dante, was her first experience with being believed in.
Strange.
She cast him a sideways glance. He was tall and … rigid in his tux. Each line of his suit jacket conforming to his physique with precision. Dante was never ruffled. She envied that a little bit. Or a lot of a bit, truth be told. She was captivated by it, really, his control. His perfection. His beauty. It was a dark, masculine beauty, nothing soft or traditionally pretty about him. It made her want to look at him, and keep looking.
The elevator doors slid open and they walked out of her apartment building and to the street. There was a black car parked against the curb, waiting for them, she assumed.
Dante opened the back door for her and she slid inside. She’d never ridden in a car with a driver before. Not even a taxi. She always drove her own seen-better-days car.
“It will be nice not being the one fighting traffic for a change,” she said when Dante got in on the other side and settled into the seat beside her.
“Mmm,” he said, taking his phone out of his pocket and devoting his attention to checking his email.
And just like that, the hot guy wasn’t looking at her anymore. Typical.
She let her gaze wander to her left hand, to her still-bare ring finger. “Oh … didn’t you … you were going to give me a ring before tonight, weren’t you?”
He set his phone down. “Yes,” he said. “I don’t know why you’re intent on spoiling the surprise.”
“Uh … because it’s not a surprise.”
“Perhaps I had something planned.”
She didn’t think he was serious. But with Dante it was hard to tell. Still, she couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like, to have a man like him do the get-down-on-one-knee thing and ask her to be his wife. To look at her with intensity in those dark eyes and …
“So, ring?” She held out her hand and tried to shut out the little fantasy that was playing in the back of her mind.
Forget a dream proposal. She should aim for a kiss that wasn’t a disaster first.
Her reached into the inner pocket of his suit jacket and produced a velvet box. “Be my wife, et cetera,” he said, opening the box, revealing a pear-shaped emerald surrounded by diamonds.
“It’s … wow.” Hard not to be completely floored when a gorgeous man was giving you a beautiful ring. “How did you know I liked green?”
“Your eye shadow,” he said.
She looked up, as if she could see it. “Oh.”
“And I thought the color and style would suit you. Sedate doesn’t seem to be your thing.”
“Uh … no. Not so much.”
“Put it on,” he said.
“What? Oh, yeah.” She looked down at the ring and a clawing sense of dread made her chest tighten. Was she really going to do this? To put on his ring and go all the way with this?
Yes. Yes, she was. She’d never believed in anything more in her whole life. She’d never been the goal-oriented one in her family. She’d never been the top achiever. She’d never wanted anything so much it made her ache.
That wasn’t the case now. Now there was Ana. And she made Paige want to be the best mother. Made her want to do everything she could to give her baby the best life possible. To encourage her, to love her as she was.
She took a deep breath and lifted the ring from its silken nest, sliding it onto her finger. “There. We’re engaged now,” she said.
He nodded slowly and leaned back in the seat. She couldn’t tell what he was thinking. If he was thinking.
“What?” she asked.
“What do you mean by that?”
“I was just wondering what you were thinking. I mean … this is weird.” She wondered if he was thinking of a beautiful blonde, or stunning, dark-haired beauty he would rather have given a ring to. The thought made her chest feel odd. Tight. “We don’t really know each other and … were you planning on getting married ever?”
“No,” he said, definitively. Decisively.
“Oh. Not even if you meet the right person?”
“There is no right person for me. Or at least not one who’s right for more than a couple of days. And nights.”
Dante watched Paige’s face, the confusion, the little bit of judgment. What he’d just said wasn’t true in the strictest sense. The part about marriage was true, but the way he’d spoken of his relationships made it sound like he and the women he slept with met and spent a few days locked in a passionate embrace.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
He’d had arrangements with a few different women over the course of his adult life. Women who were just as busy and driven as he was. Women who were just as averse to relationships.
The women he usually took to the charity events, the models, the actresses … he didn’t sleep with them. They were the bit of flash, the ones who looked good in pictures and who wanted to be in them.
But they were too young, many of then. Too starry-eyed and not nearly cynical enough. The women he took to bed, all they wanted was a couple of hours and a couple of orgasms. They wanted what he wanted. They didn’t want forever and fireworks; they wanted a basic need to be met. And that’s what happened. Basic, simple pursuit of release.
Still, there was no way to explain that without making it sound even worse.
