by Lauren Layne
“How’s the head?”
Her eyes opened and her nose scrunched. “Huh?”
“You were rubbing your temple. Headache?”
“Oh, just the beginnings of one,” she said, rolling her neck a bit. “But I think it’s on its way out rather than its way in. It feels good to sit.” Then she laughed. “You must think I’m ridiculous. A wedding planner who can’t handle an afternoon of dress shopping.”
Seth smiled. “You forget that I’ve been shopping with Maya. I’m pretty well-versed in the headache and cocktails that follow.”
She smiled back even as she shook her head. “It’s not your sister. Truly. She’s great. It’s more getting used to this city. Manhattan looks so small and orderly on a map, but it’s not, is it?”
He smiled into his drink. “Definitely not.”
“You like it here?” she asked.
“Love it,” he said without hesitation. “But, that’s not to say I don’t feel the need to get away sometimes.”
“Do you? Get away, I mean?”
“Not as often as I’d like, although I do have a vacation home on the coast of North Carolina.”
“No Hamptons beach house for you?”
“Nah. When I want to get away, I want to get all the way away. The Hamptons scene is a little too happening for me.”
“Shocking, what with you being so social and all,” she said with a wink.
Seth felt a little surge of satisfaction at the playfulness in her tone. While her words were as tart as ever, he didn’t think it was his imagination that some of the antagonism between them seemed to have faded.
Brooke reached down and surreptitiously ran a finger over the arch of that damn sexy stiletto-clad foot. Seth gave her a knowing look. “You can take them off, you know.”
“Oh gosh no,” she said, sounding horrified at the prospect.
“Ms. Baldwin, you can’t tell me those five-inch spikes are comfortable.”
“Of course they’re not,” she muttered. “But I certainly can’t take them off around someone who calls me Ms. Baldwin.”
“All right, then,” he said, his voice coming out low and gruff as he held her eyes in challenge. “You can take them off. Brooke.”
Chapter Fourteen
SINCE WHEN HAD A man suggesting she remove her very stylish, very expensive, very uncomfortable shoes become just about the biggest turn-on in her adult life?
Since now, apparently.
Because when Seth Tyler was looking at her with those ice-blue eyes, and her name—her first name—on those lips, Brooke wanted to take off a hell of a lot more than her shoes.
She bit her lip and took another sip of her drink. “I really—no, I’m fine.”
He nodded once, setting his drink on a small end table. She assumed he was going to drop the topic, but to her utter surprise, he slowly bent forward, and, slipping a hand around her calf, he pulled her leg gently forward, just enough so that he could ease the shoe off.
The cramped bones in her toes immediately sighed in relief, but even as her foot relaxed, the rest of her went on high alert.
Seth reached for her other leg, not meeting her eyes as he repeated the same motion with the other foot. Only when both shoes were carefully set aside did his gaze lock with hers, and Brooke’s breath caught, not just at the warmth in his eyes, although there was plenty of that.
No, what made her heart beat just a touch faster was the shyness there. It told her that the boldness was uncharacteristic of him, and she felt . . . damn it. She felt a wave of tenderness.
Her smile felt tremulous. “A bit of a reverse-Cinderella thing we have going on here,” she said, trying to lighten the mood.
“Reverse indeed,” he said, seeming relieved at her response. “Since I’m no prince.”
“You sure about that?” Brooke said as she made a sweeping gesture at his office. “Because if where you work looks this much like a palace, I can’t even imagine where you must live.”
Seth sat back in his chair and reached once again for his drink as though they hadn’t had a moment more akin to a couple that had been together for years rather than business acquaintances who’d known each other for a few days.
He grinned a little evilly. “Ms. Baldwin, are you trying to wrangle an invitation to my home?”
They were back to Ms. Baldwin, then. That was okay though. He could call her whatever he wanted as long as he kept smiling at her all friendly and familiar like that.
“Where do you live?” she asked, taking advantage of the rare easy mood between them.
He glanced down at his drink. “My dad was big into real estate. Maya and I inherited a few properties around the city.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“That’s because I hate this question.” Seth blew out a little breath. “Okay, fine. I live in one of my hotels.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
Seth blinked. “You don’t think it’s . . . cold, or impersonal?”
Brooke laughed and took a sip of her drink, pulling her feet up beneath her on the couch before she could think better of it. She felt a little stab of embarrassment, but reversing the gesture would be even more awkward, so she decided to just roll with it in the name of comfort.
“No, not really. I mean, do you like living there?” she asked.
He chewed a piece of ice thoughtfully. “Nobody’s ever asked me that before.”
“Dude, you need to get some new friends,” she said. “You seem to know a lot of people who either don’t like where you live or don’t care.”
He winced, and Brooke immediately regretted her words. She’d meant them jokingly, but obviously it had struck a nerve. “I didn’t mean—”
Seth held up a hand. “Don’t apologize. Please. And you’re right. I do need some new friends, probably. As far as whether or not I like where I live . . . I do. I don’t know that I want to live there forever. Or even next year. But where I’m at in my life right now, I like the convenience of it. I’m close to the office, I can get room service whenever I want . . .”
“And you own the building,” she said.
“Yes, there are perks to the job,” he said.
They were both silent for a moment, and Brooke let herself relax into the quiet.
Finally, however, she realized they probably couldn’t put off the inevitable, and she reached into her bag for her planner. “So, let’s talk wedding, shall we?”
He groaned. “Do we have to?”
Brooke glanced up, startled. “This was your idea, Mr. Tyler.”
“I know,” he said, draining the rest of his drink. “And at the time, it seemed like a good one. Hell, it’s still a good one. I want—need—to know what’s going on with Maya, but with you all curled up on my sofa with your shoes off, I find that it’s not what I want to be talking about at the moment.”
Brooke’s belly flipped at his words—at the picture he painted.
And even more so because he looked embarrassed by the admission.
“What do you want to be talking about?” she said, her voice a little bit lower than she was used to hearing it.
He nodded at her drink. “Another?”
She glanced down. “I better not. I haven’t eaten much today, so I should probably wait to get some food in me.”
“Is that a hint that you’re ready to get going?”
Brooke didn’t think she was misreading the regret in his voice, and she definitely wasn’t misreading what her own instincts were telling her: that she was in no hurry to leave whatever was happening here, despite the fact that every inch of her knew it was a bad, bad idea.
“Not at all,” she said softly.
He leaned forward again, his face taking on that slightly urgent look that she suspected he must get before closing a big deal.
“Would it be out of line to suggest that we eat here?” Seth asked.
“Here? In your office?”
He nodded. “We could order in. Sushi, Italian,
whatever you want. Unless of course you’d prefer something less . . .”
Intimate, she silently finished.
“If you want to go out, I’ve made reservations at a few places so we had options. I wasn’t sure what your tastes in restaurants are.”
“You, or your assistant?” she said with a smile.
“Me. Etta doesn’t manage my personal life.”
She tilted her head. “But this is a business dinner, isn’t it, Mr. Tyler?”
He smiled. “Well, it certainly feels like it when you continue calling me Mr. Tyler.”
She glanced away. She couldn’t call him Seth. Not yet. It was bad enough that she was barefoot, curled up on his couch, debating eating dinner just the two of them, in his cozy office, with nobody around, no audience to ensure they kept their distance.
“I can call the car around,” he said gruffly, misunderstanding her silence.
“No!” she said, holding out a hand. “Please don’t. The thought of putting those shoes back on . . . I’m not ready. Staying in sounds great.”
They both knew the shoes were an excuse, but he didn’t call her out for it. “One of my favorite Italian places in the city knows me. They’ll be here in thirty if I ask them to.”
“I’m betting everyone in the city knows you,” she said dryly. “But Italian sounds great. I pretty much like it all, so whatever you think are their best dishes, go crazy.”
He nodded before pulling his phone out of his pocket and dialing a number as he picked up his glass and returned to the bar to fix himself another drink.
Brooke sipped the remainder of her own drink as she studied him from the back. He was broader than she’d realized. His facial features were narrow to the point of being sharp, so she’d always sort of assumed that the rest of him was, too, but seeing him now from this angle, she saw that he had the broad shoulders of someone who knew the inside of the gym, tapering down to a narrow waist and long legs.
His brown hair curled down over the edge of his shirt collar, and she smiled as she realized that Seth Tyler needed a haircut. A strange little quirk for a man who was so exacting in every other way. Brooke somehow found it endearing that he hadn’t made time for it.
It made him more . . . human, somehow.
Oh, honey, she chided herself. You have it bad if you’re getting all panty-dropping hot about his overlong hair.
She checked her email as she half listened to him order a bunch of things she didn’t recognize. His Italian accent seemed on point, at least to her untrained ear, and she wondered how many languages he spoke. For some reason she was guessing it was at least three. If the man was this controlling over his sister’s wedding, there was no way he wouldn’t want to know what was going on with his international team.
Her phone buzzed with a text from Heather. How’d the dress shopping go?
Brooke responded, As you warned me. Completely scary.
Don’t worry, it’ll get a bit easier once they know you. Wish I could have been there for your first experience at Blanche.
OMG. Is it always like that?
Always. But some of my brides eat it up. #bridezilla
Brooke snorted. Did you just hashtag via text?
Sorry. Updating our social media accounts. Can’t turn it off. So who’d Maya end up going with?
TBD. Not Blanche though. She shut those bitches DOWN.
Love it, Heather responded. So you get a free pass on dinner with Big Brother then since Maya didn’t commit?
Brooke bit her lip, wondering how to respond. She’d told Heather about her unusual arrangement with the Tyler wedding, and her friend had seemed unfazed. And it wasn’t all that uncommon in wedding planning for the planner to run interference with meddling family members in order to keep the bride and groom happy.
And yet, somehow what she was doing with Seth felt completely different from the times she’d soothed a high-maintenance mother of the groom or sweet-talked a penny-pinching father of the bride into The Dress for his little angel.
Your silence has spoken, Heather texted before Brooke could come up with a response. And I approve. Looked him up. He’s HOT.
Brooke rolled her eyes and put her phone aside as Seth hung up his call and walked back toward her.
“All right, I lied. They said forty-five minutes,” he said.
“No problem.” She patted her planner. “I really do need to get an actual budget from you. It’s all very hypothetical at this stage, but this stuff tends to happen fast.”
“Don’t remind me,” he grumbled, setting his glass on the table and shrugging out of his suit jacket and loosening his tie.
Brooke tried to keep her eyes trained on his face and failed. His upper body, nicely accentuated by his crisp dress shirt, was, well, spectacular. “We don’t have to do this tonight. Talk about the wedding, I mean. We can reschedule for next week.”
His eyes met hers. “I’ll get there. Give me a minute.”
“Sure,” she said warily. “What do you want to talk about in the meantime?”
Seth’s gaze drifted hotly over her at the word talk, and she felt an answering surge of lust at the things they could do other than talk.
Brooke hadn’t had a casual hookup since college. She was more of a third-date kind of girl, preferring to make sure she actually liked a man before getting naked with him.
She wasn’t at all sure she liked Seth Tyler.
She also wasn’t at all sure she wanted to get naked with him.
Liar.
Okay, so she definitely wanted to get naked with him. But there were some people you just didn’t sleep with, and a client was absolutely on the list.
Seth seemed to read her mind, and the heat dimmed from his gaze as he lowered to the chair beside her. “You asked what I wanted to talk about.”
She nodded, grateful to be back on conversational rather than horizontal terms with the man.
He was studying her gaze. “What I’m about to ask might be construed as prying, so you can absolutely tell me to go to the devil.”
“Who I’m pretty sure is a friend of yours,” she joked gently.
Seth didn’t rise to the taunt.
“I’d like to talk about you,” he said quietly. “I’d like you to tell me about Clay.”
Chapter Fifteen
BROOKE STARED AT HIM for several seconds. She was surprised, although she didn’t know why. A two-second Google search of her name brought up no fewer than a dozen articles about Clay’s spectacular arrest.
For a brief moment, Brooke gave into the surge of resentment. She let herself acknowledge that it was unfair that she’d worked damn hard to build her wedding-planning career only to have it all erased by one man’s misdeeds.
As far as the general public was concerned, she was no longer Brooke Baldwin, Wedding Planner Extraordinaire. She was that poor clueless girl whose criminal mastermind fiancé got arrested at the altar.
Most of the time, Brooke accepted this. What was the point in dwelling, after all?
But sometimes . . . sometimes the unfairness of it all clawed at her throat.
Right now was one of those moments. She didn’t want Seth Tyler to look at her as Clay’s ex. She wanted to be . . .
What did she want to be in the eyes of Seth?
A competent wedding planner, certainly. The man was gearing up to fork over no small amount of money for his sister’s wedding. But she wanted to be seen as a woman, too. And not the kind that had dated a man for two years without knowing who he really was.
But . . .
She was that woman. Much as she’d like to rewrite history, she couldn’t. She couldn’t change what happened any easier than she could change the fact that the news was out there. Hell, she even had her own meme, for God’s sake.
The best she could do was convince the world that she was over it. That Clay might have surprised her, but he hadn’t hurt her.
Brooke met his eyes and smiled slightly. “You looked me up.”
“I
didn’t, actually. I’ll admit I sensed there was something amiss. But it didn’t seem my place to snoop.”
“Interesting. I had you pegged for a control freak who hated surprises.”
He gave a short laugh. “Spot-on. And true. But it was different with you.”
She blinked. “Why?”
“Hell if I know,” he said, holding her gaze.
Except he did know. They both did.
“So if you didn’t go snooping, how’d you know about Clay?”
“Grant. He thought I should know before I said something idiotic.”
She snorted. “Is that even possible?”
“Play nice, Ms. Baldwin. I’m feeding you.”
“And playing nice means spilling my guts?”
“Only if you want to.”
Brooke studied him, realizing that he meant it. He wasn’t going to badger her, wasn’t going to pry. There was simply an invitation to talk. To share.
“How much do you know?” she asked, taking a sip of her drink.
“The CNN version, I guess. I’ve never met the guy, but we moved in some of the same circles back when he was in New York. His name is familiar enough that I recognized it when I read the story.”
“You and everyone else,” Brooke muttered.
He sighed and rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. “I hated him before, but knowing now that it was you he screwed over royally . . . let’s just say that I wish we still lived in a time where it was acceptable to take a man like that out back and put him and the people around him out of their misery.”
Brooke’s lips parted in surprise. “That’s very . . .”
“Uncivilized.”
“I was going to say sort of gratifying,” she admitted. “I mean I don’t actually want Clay dead, obviously, but I’ll confess that the fact that he’s been turned into some sort of celebrity can be a bit grating.”
“Because he hurt you.”
“No,” she said quickly. “He didn’t, really. I mean I suppose he did, but I’m over it. No use dwelling on what can’t be changed, right?”