by Dani Collins
“I’ve cut way back on my drinking,” he continued as if he hadn’t heard her. “Not that I was ever a mean drunk. I hate losing my temper. I wouldn’t so much as raise my voice to you. Are you afraid for Zoey?”
She could see genuine agony in him. Perhaps the only glimpse anyone would ever get of him with shaken confidence.
Natalie shook her head emphatically. “I don’t think you would ever hurt me or Zoey. But, Demitri, that woman you met in Paris, that’s not me. You won’t find me as fun or accessible as I was. I can’t play pretend again.”
* * *
Demitri was feeling his way on very thin ice. Relief had deflated a lifelong tension in him as he realized that his father hadn’t favored him because he saw something of himself in his son. That black mark on his soul was lifting, thanks to Natalie’s insight, but it didn’t mean he was reformed into the kind of man who would fit into her life. He respected that she’d engineered her personal world so she was self-sufficient. He admired her for it. And God knew he had never measured up to anyone’s expectations unless they were basement level. He didn’t blame her for her lack of willingness to take a chance on him.
But if there was a way he could keep seeing her, he wanted to find it.
“What do you want from a man, Natalie?”
“Why do you think I need anything from a man?” she challenged lightly.
“You don’t need anything?” he asked with a skeptical cock of his brow. He swept her blushing cheeks with a masculine gaze of interest that hovered on lips she nervously dampened with her tongue.
“You seduced me in France because I allowed it,” she asserted, adding blithely, “I can seduce myself if I want to.”
“Flirt,” he accused, delighted when she was cheeky and suggestive. “You know I’d like to see that.” She never, ever bored him. He adored that about her.
“I’m not flirting,” she lied, mouth twitching with rueful amusement.
“It was a challenge, then?”
“No,” she said firmly. “And don’t think for a minute I don’t know how to say that word when I need to.”
“Cute of you to think so, but you’re the biggest soft touch going, Natalie.”
“I have a daughter to think of,” she countered with a shift in her mood to grave sincerity. “As weak as I might be as a woman, as a mother I would lift cars and tear grown men apart to protect her. That’s what I’m trying to say, Demitri. That’s who I am here. Mom first. Woman second.”
He pondered that, asking cautiously, “Do you want a father for her?”
“She has one,” she said with a pragmatic shrug. “He’s not perfect, but she gets more from him than I got from mine.”
“Love, you mean.” The word hurt to say because it was an emotion so foreign and incomprehensible to him, he doubted he could ever offer such a thing.
Natalie didn’t laugh or mock. She didn’t light up and say yes. She pursed her mouth as though trying to school her lips from trembling. He watched her throat work as she swallowed, and he sensed pain. It made his throat hurt.
“Love is nice,” she said with a flicker of a smile. “But it doesn’t mean anything. Heath tells me he loves me all the time. I still can’t live with him.”
“Does he?” Demitri began to fall, pushed so abruptly into a chasm of darkness he couldn’t see or feel or breathe.
“He says it after he feeds Zoey junk food all day, or gets her from school but forgets her backpack. As if he’s this great guy capable of loving me even though I’m angry with him. I thought my father loved me and he left because life got hard. Love isn’t enough. I want someone I can count on.”
She looked up at him, but he couldn’t reply. What could he say? They both knew Demitri Makricosta could only be counted on to do what he shouldn’t.
“Natalie...” He found himself laughing bitterly at what a mess this had become. He’d flown up here thinking he could fall into bed with her and stop feeling this angst and dismay with his life. Instead, he was baring his soul in a fight for a place in her life. “The way I’ve always behaved... I don’t want to be that man anymore.”
The persona he’d cultivated had worn thin even with him. No one ever gave him credit for the level of control he exerted, and he was tired of being underestimated.
“I can appreciate that, Demitri. I can,” she said, so earnestly she moved him, giving him hope yet gently rejecting him. “But I can’t afford to be your guinea pig. I can’t invest my time and heart, my daughter’s heart, while you figure out if you really want to stick around.”
Was she asking for a deeper level of commitment? Marriage?
The thought should have put him firmly on the run, ending dinner before they’d eaten the appetizer that arrived with a waft of buttery garlic and salty tang.
He wasn’t repelled by the idea of marriage to her, though. He liked sharing space with her, waking next to her, eating across from her. In France, he’d wanted to make her his mistress, but he could easily see something more permanent. Given how hard she’d had it, he would feel really good if she’d let him provide for her.
The stumbling block was her daughter. Maybe Natalie didn’t expect a father for Zoey, but he would never convince her to let him infiltrate her small family if he remained estranged from his own.
* * *
Natalie picked at food so exquisitely prepared she ought to be moaning aloud, but her heart was weighted by Demitri’s silence and everything tasted like cardboard in her mouth.
When their waiter came to remove the plates and ask after the next course, she was surprised that Demitri ordered entrées. He’d gone so quiet she had assumed the date was over.
“Really?” she asked when the waiter had left. “I thought you might want to call it a night.”
“Natalie,” he chided. “When I said I want to change, it doesn’t mean I’ve lost my taste for getting what I want. I won’t slink away and die because you expressed a few doubts about my reliability. Count on me to be persistent, at least.”
She shouldn’t laugh at that, but a mixture of relief and alarm twitched her lips.
He intended to pursue her. The scent of danger sharpened in her nose and her heart rate kicked up. She shook her head, fearful she wouldn’t be strong enough to resist him if he had his mind set on possessing her.
She wanted to be possessed. Therein lay the problem.
“Don’t make this hard for me, Demitri.” It was a plea.
He picked up her hand, smiling ruefully as he drew it across the table and leaned forward to kiss her knuckles. “I could say the same to you.”
He was asking her to allow him to break her heart. She must be the biggest soft touch going, because she sat there and let him continue to hold her hand, incapable of arguing.
“How’s work?” he asked, taking her by surprise. “Catch me up on the gossip.”
“Seriously?” she asked with a disconcerted laugh. “Why?”
“We’ve had enough of the hard conversations for now, haven’t we? Let’s remind ourselves why we enjoyed each other so much in Paris. Tell me if that idiot Laurier is still rewriting all of my carefully worded campaigns when he translates them into French. That always annoyed the hell out of me.”
Oh, he was a magnetic man. Far too capable of disarming and engaging. She found herself admitting, “Laurier’s losing his mind at all the shake-ups in that department since you left, thinking he ought to have been promoted over Sanjit.”
They wound their way through a million topics over dinner, taking their time, lingering over specialty coffee and crème brulée while the restaurant emptied. When he said, “Tell me about Zoey,” she hesitated.
“What do you want to know?”
“Anything you would have told me in France if you hadn’t been afraid to.”
She shrugged, thinking of all the moments she’d almost said, “One time Zoey...” Wrinkling her nose, she admitted, “Last week she asked me where babies come from.”
“Wow,”
he said, chuckling at the wry panic she recreated for him. “What did you say? Stork or cabbage patch?”
“I was close to my mom because she was always honest with me,” she said with a helpless lift of her hand. “I had to tell her. It was a very basic version, of course. I skimmed over a lot.”
He grinned at her, so much admiration in his look she had to glance away from the intensity of its glow.
“You’re a good mom, Natalie. Contrary to what I made you think our last night in Switzerland, it’s actually one of your most appealing qualities.”
Tears sprang to her eyes and she swallowed, deeply moved. She tried really hard to be a good mom, wished daily that she had her own mother to ask for advice and second-guessed herself all the time. Demitri was hardly an expert, but it still meant a lot to her that he’d said that. No one ever did.
“Thank you,” she murmured shyly.
“I would never try to get between you. I hope you believe that,” he said solemnly. “What you have with her is precious. I’d do everything I could to preserve it.”
Perhaps he wasn’t an expert on good parenting, but he was very well versed in terrible. The flimsy defenses she had against him wavered and fluttered like the walls on a house of cards.
“I should pay before they turn the lights out on us,” he said, reaching into his pocket.
A few minutes later, he held her chair and kept his hand at her back as he steered her toward the door. His touch sizzled through her dress and she knew there was only one way she wanted this evening to end.
Weak, weak Natalie. Was he playing her in his expert way, seducing her to his will? Or was this real?
When he’d helped her with her coat earlier, she’d caught a look so tender on his face, she’d been completely beguiled. Still, it surprised her when he turned her in the elevator and made no effort to disguise the warmth and desire in his gaze. He curled his fists into her lapels, then paused as though waiting for permission.
She looked at his mouth and licked her lips, sexual yearning swirling into her middle as she anticipated his kiss. “Yes, please,” she heard herself whisper, and cringed inwardly at how blatant and needy that sounded.
He reacted with a look of aching hunger and lowered his head, covering her mouth with the hot mastery of his own. Where she expected to be crushed, he caressed, then gradually deepened the kiss into the sort of seductive coaxing he was so devastatingly good at delivering.
Her breath shuddered out in a warm hiss against his cheek and she leaned into him, increasing the pressure of their kiss, encouraging him to gently and thoroughly ravage her. Relearning all the hard muscles of his back and shoulders beneath his open jacket.
He made a growled, grateful noise in his throat that the staff must have heard, because the elevator had opened just then. She didn’t care any more than he seemed to. He delicately plundered for every last dreg of her response and she gave it to him, recognizing that she’d been aching for this since four-fifteen outside the hotel two days ago. Since about five minutes after he’d walked out of the room they’d been sharing in Switzerland.
The doors started to close, and they reluctantly eased back, loosening the death grip they’d taken on each other. He stopped the door, but kept his gaze locked to hers. Her blood continued to sizzle in her arteries and she had to consciously lock her trembling knees. No way could she look at anyone as they exited, fingers linked, breaths hot enough to cloud the winter air as they climbed into the limo.
“Are you spending the night with me?” she asked in the safety of the darkened car. She refused to ask—beg—will you?
“I want to,” he said, head turning toward her as he spoke.
She heard the unspoken but, and her heart went into free fall. This was why she had accepted their casual relationship in Paris. The minute she expected more from him, she risked being grossly disappointed.
“But?” she prompted, trying to pull her hand away from his warm grip.
He tightened his hold. “But if I spend the night, I spend the weekend. And next weekend, you come to New York and Adara’s party with me.”
She’d already told him Zoey was away until Sunday night, but “Next weekend I have Zoey. I can’t go away.” This was precisely what she’d been trying to warn him about. She wasn’t footloose and fancy—
“She can come. You have a passport for her, don’t you?”
“I...” She did, and she was saving up to take her to the amusement parks in Florida, but “That’s not the point.”
“It’s not any kind of point. We don’t have to sleep together in New York if you think it would confuse her. Share the spare room in my apartment with her or I’ll get you a hotel room if you prefer. And I’ll pay for the flights. You won’t be out of pocket.”
“Demitri, I can’t,” she protested, forced to bring up the real issue. “There’s no way I could throw myself, us, in your family’s faces like that.”
“What does that mean? You’re embarrassed to be seen with me?”
“No! But our affair created a huge headache both at work and in their family life. The last person they want to see is the woman who caused it all.”
“You didn’t. I did. And I assure you, they’ll be far more welcoming to you than they will be to me,” he predicted in a rancorous mutter.
“They think I want to sue them for sexual harassment,” she reminded, vehemently getting down to brass tacks.
“Exactly. And your turning up will reassure them that you’re not holding a grudge.”
She hadn’t thought about it that way, but “It would still be awkward.”
“Natalie,” he said from between clenched teeth. “If I show up alone, Gideon will have me kicked out before I reach the elevator. If I have a date, someone he respects, he’ll show some manners and give me a chance to apologize to my sister. You can rest assured that I will be bearing the brunt of the awkward.”
“Still—”
“Damn it, Natalie. I don’t like them thinking I was only seeing you to hurt them. They were the last thing on my mind. I want them to see we’re a serious couple.”
Was that what they were?
Because she strongly suspected that was what she was really shying away from, she acknowledged darkly to herself. It was one thing to invite him in for the night, relive the fantasy and feel desired for a few hours. It was quite another to let a man occupy a more permanent space in her life. She might start to depend on him. Want stuff. Yearn for love and completion and other things that she secretly feared were never meant to be hers.
They didn’t speak again until the car parked in her driveway. Demitri climbed out to walk her to her door, where he lightly cupped her face and said, “I can tell you want time—”
“No,” she interrupted, grasping at his arm where he lightly touched her jaw. “If there’s one thing Gareth taught me, it’s that time is finite. Tomorrow might not come. You have to live today as best you can. I want you to stay. I do.”
“Yeah?” His touch on her gentled and he drew her forward so he could press his lips to her forehead.
She closed her eyes, enjoying the simple gesture for a moment before drawing away with a smile and opening her front door. She stepped through and held it, inviting him in.
He hung back, making her frown in confusion.
“I’ll just get my bag,” he said.
* * *
“Of course you have a bag,” Natalie snarked when he returned. She had the box of chocolates open and was unwrapping a truffle. She glared at him as she bit into it.
He stopped in his tracks, recognizing that perhaps there was something distasteful in the fact that he’d thrown it into the car without really thinking about it, packing it as routinely as he had a thousand times when leaving for an evening with a woman he desired. But her condemnation caught him off guard, making him shoot back, “It’s called being prepared. Do you want me to get you pregnant?”
She paled and choked, covering her mouth before chewing and swal
lowing audibly. Closing the foil on the truffle, she placed it back in the box and said a firm “No.”
For some reason that stung, even though it hadn’t been a real question. He’d meant tonight, not someday, but her answer seemed to encompass both. It was a painful rejection.
He cursed and ran a hand over his hair, knowing what the real problem was here.
“I’ve slept with other women,” he said flatly, continuing despite the injured glance she flashed at him. “But I’ve never slept with anyone who knows anything about me. If you think this is something I do all the time, it’s not. Getting naked with someone is easy when you feel like the smartest, strongest, least-invested person in the room. I don’t right now. Not with you.” He glared at her, resenting how much guilt accosted him over those easy, meaningless hook-ups when he realized what he wanted from her. “I don’t want sex from you, Natalie. I want to feel you and smell you and be inside you. I want to know you’re mine.”
* * *
He looked like a pirate. A sultan. A marauder bent on stealing her from her home. Or, at the very least, stealing her heart from her body.
“I’m scared,” she admitted. “I don’t want to start believing you’ll be here and then find out the hard way that you won’t.” He hadn’t even met Zoey. How could he be so sure they were a serious couple when he hadn’t really seen her as a mom?
He opened his hands, coming forward to take her elbows as she draped her fingers on his biceps, surrounding her in his masculine scent and aura of command. “I don’t know how to reassure you except to be here when you wake up.”
Of their own accord, her fingertips moved restlessly on the stiff fabric of his jacket, wanting the man beneath.
He read her receptiveness in the betraying little motion.
He slid his hand down her forearm, linking their fingers as he canted his head toward the stairs. “Take me up with you.”
This was how he did it, she thought as she led him to her room. He made her think she was in control when he was the one guiding the whole thing. Except, as they started to undress each other, he watched her closely, not rushing her, seeing if his caress against the side of her breast was welcome, stealing a kiss, but a soft, sweet one.