by Amelia Wilde
My mom narrows her eyes. “Did you just now decide the good news wasn’t so good after all?”
“Maybe.”
“Out with it.”
A skinny waitress appears next to the table and slides the pizza between us on a metal rack. She beams down at my mother and me. “Does everything look right?” Mom gives it a cursory glance, then nods her away.
I take a deep breath. “I didn’t sell everything to Levi Blake, but when I got into contact with him after the sale, he offered to host an auction. He’s—” My mom’s eyebrows are officially lost. “He’s liquidating the house.”
She leans back in her seat. “Wow.”
I’m hanging on her every word. The biggest reason I shoved my pride down to the pit of my gut and ignored it while it screamed and fought is because I thought she needed this. Now I’m not so sure. “You can’t leave it at wow.”
Mom cocks her head to the side. “An auction is better than whatever paltry amount he probably offered you.”
“I really thought you’d be pleased.”
“I am pleased.” She looks at me, suspicion in her eyes. “I just—to be honest, Ruby, I’m not sure how you pulled it off.”
“Pulled what off?”
“The Blakes aren’t known for their generosity—at least, they weren’t when your father was looking for investors, back when his company was new.” She sighs. “We looked into having an auction, but the seller’s fees were so high, and the work was so involved, that we didn’t have time. He’s going to do this all for you?”
“Yes. He’s—he’s handling it personally.”
She gives me a sly smile, drumming her fingertips on the tabletop. “He must be a different man than his father.”
“What’s his father like?”
“Nothing like your father, that’s for sure.”
I want to make some snappy comment about how Levi’s father didn’t lose all of their family’s money, but I quell the urge. Don’t be nasty. My mother is still looking across the table at me with a gleam in her dark eyes that reminds me of being in high school.
“What?”
“There’s another possibility, too,” she says.
“What’s that, Mom?” I make a show of looking at the pizza like I’m trying to decide on a slice.
Her eyes sparkle, and she leans in like she doesn’t want any of the strangers surrounding us to overhear her. “He’s smitten with you.”
“What is wrong with you?” I give her a bewildered smile. “You just said the Blakes weren’t...weren’t considerate people.” I keep talking in hopes of distracting her from the fact that my cheeks are burning.
“People can change.”
“Over the course of one conversation?”
“Maybe.”
“Well,” I say briskly, “I don’t think he’s smitten with me.”
“Oh? He just agreed to host an auction for you out of the goodness of his heart?”
“People aren’t necessarily the same as their fathers.” Why am I defending him? I didn’t like him when I first saw him—in fact, he seemed every bit as ruthless and arrogant as my mother seems to think Blake Senior is.
“You have a point. In fact, I think I’m right. There’s a strong chance that you caught the eye of a Blake, and if I know anything about Blakes—”
“I’m not sure that you do.”
She ignores me. “—then you might have a tough time getting rid of him. They tend to go after what they want. Relentlessly.”
I roll my eyes. “You’re being insane. What do you want me to do, marry him?”
“Oh, no, Ruby. I want you to—” She takes in a deep breath through her nose and lets it out. “I want you to...seize the opportunity. Have the auction. God knows we need that. Just...proceed with caution.” She says it with a smile. “Pizza?”
Chapter 14
Levi
“What are you hiding from back here?”
I straighten up from the collection of Civil War artifacts on the work table in front of me. In a not-at-all surprising twist, most of them are worthless junk, but a printed portrait of Ulysses S. Grant shows some promise. Not for the first time I’m glad I decided not to traffic exclusively in the high-end sales. You never know when you might find something incredible.
Jasper Pace leans jauntily against an eighteenth-century secretary desk with a built-in bookshelf, eyeing the pile in front of me.
“I think the better question is, who let you in?”
“Your staff loves me.”
“My staff loves getting paid, and you might as well have a sign with your net worth on the back of that suit.”
“Says you,” he scoffs. Fine—I can admit I’m also wearing a suit that was hand-constructed for me in Italy. But I don’t have the jacket on. When I work in the warehouse—or, in this case, sort in the warehouse—I do so with my sleeves rolled up to my elbows. The jacket is largely for the public.
Jasper looks around him, his eyes settling on one thing, then another. “Jasper?”
“Yeah?”
“What are you here for?”
He grins, laughing. “Right. I came to tell you that Isabella loved the piece. She’s excited about the entire room.” He rolls his eyes. “I can’t get her out of it, actually.”
“Workaholics, both of you,” I say.
“I’m here now.”
“On your way back to the office?”
Jasper checks his watch. “If you wanted, we could grab lunch.”
I put my hand to my chest. “I’m so flattered that you’d interrupt my work to ask me on a date.”
“You’re paying,” he says, unamused by my theatrics.
My stomach growls, and I reach for my jacket on the back of the chair I’ve been sitting in for far too long. “Fine. You pick the place.”
Our steaks have just arrived, elegantly plated and looking fucking delicious, when Jasper remembers what he really wanted to ask me.
“So, did you go after her?”
“After who?”
“The ice queen from the estate sale.”
I laugh out loud, cutting into the steak so the waiter can go. It’s a perfect medium, and I give him a nod. Jasper does the same, and he’s away from the table in another instant. “I didn’t go after her.”
“Too bad,” he tuts.
“She came after me.”
Jasper’s eyes light up. He’s loved gossip since I can remember, but his day-to-day at Pace, Inc. must be starved for it now that he’s married. “No shit.”
“At six in the morning.”
“Tell me she showed up in person.”
“No.” I wish she’d showed up in person. That would have been on another level. “She called me in a panic because she’d thrown away my card and wanted to know if the offer to buy the entire estate was still on the table.”
“And you said, only if you’re willing to come up to my penthouse right now and—”
I give him a look. “Yes. I’m a total sleazebag.”
He shakes his head, leaning back as if I’ve just admitted my guilt in seriousness. “You would do that.”
“We had breakfast.”
“And then went back to bed?” he says, eyebrows wiggling.
“And then went back to the house in Conyers Farm to negotiate a deal.”
“That’s when the love affair began.”
I take a bite of the steak. I don’t know what blend of spices and technique this chef is using, but it’s unbelievable. “Who did you say the chef here was?”
“My friend Marco. Don’t dodge the question.”
“I didn’t hear a question.”
“Are you in deep with her now?”
“What’s going on with you, Jasper? Are you reading romance novels in your spare time?”
“I can’t be curious about the exciting secret life my old friend is leading?”
“It’s not a secret life.” The potatoes leave absolutely nothing to be desired, either. Why didn’t I know abou
t this place? The answer comes immediately: You spend too much of your time hunting down valuable antiques in other parts of the world to find gems right here. “It’s a business relationship.”
Jasper rolls his eyes, this time in such an exaggerated fashion that by the time he looks back at me I’ve had two more bites of steak. “Yeah. I said the same thing.”
I shake my head. “Whatever that was between you and Isabella—that’s not what this is. I don’t think she’s thrilled to have had to stoop so low as to deal with me.”
He narrows his eyes. “What exactly did you get yourself into?”
“It wasn’t the typical situation, is all. She’s under pressure trying to get her family’s finances in order.” Remembering Ruby’s face, those gorgeous lips turned down in a frown and her blue eyes flashing with anger and hurt, makes a strange ache bloom in my chest. There’s not going to be a way to explain this to Jasper without coming off like a complete fool.
“Isn’t that the point of any estate sale?”
“Yes. But I had an…alternate proposal.”
Jasper looks at me out of the corner of his eye. “Marriage?”
I can’t help laughing at that. Ruby is so hot and cold—flirting with me in the car, keeping her distance at the house—that even dating her is not an option. “An auction.”
He’s mid-bite and coughs, sweeping his napkin off the table just in time. “You agreed to run an auction for her?”
“I not only agreed, I’m the one who offered it.”
“For…for what?”
“For the seller’s fee, obviously.”
He looks at me like I’ve descended to the surface of the earth from a planet so distant nobody here has ever heard of it. “The seller’s fee would be a lot less than what you could have made offering her a fixed fee for the whole estate.”
I pretend to be shocked. “You don’t say.”
He shakes his head and spears a green bean on the end of his fork. “You’re in deep, man. Deep.”
The way she looked when I first came into her parents’ house—the painful vulnerability on her face—floats back up into my mind. Hard on that image’s heels is one of her in my town car, leaning toward me, her voice husky and dripping with need. I want both of those versions of her. I want them with me right now.
But I’m not going to admit that to Jasper.
“So what was the catch?”
“Catch?” Another bite of steak melts on my tongue.
“There had to be a catch. You didn’t just offer to run the auction for nothing, did you?”
“No. I told her I wanted to be in charge of it, personally. I’m going to be all over that estate for the next few weeks.”
He levels his gaze at me. “That sounds like more of a catch for you.”
I shrug. “We’ll see.”
Chapter 15
Ruby
“So, how is this going to work?”
I’m standing in my parents’ foyer in my work clothes—a sensible pair of slacks and a violet sweater that’s just the right weight for a day in the office. Not so much for digging through an entire houseful of possessions, but by the time I thought of it, I was already pulling into the driveway in the back of Levi’s town car. The most powerful air conditioning unit on the planet couldn’t have cooled the friction between us, even though we barely spoke.
He insisted on using his driver—for the first time out, anyway—and picked me up promptly at five-fifteen outside of the building where Drawstring has its offices. Levi was absorbed in something on his tablet when he arrived. The first thing he did was turn it off and look me in the eyes, his gaze a little guarded.
“Do you mind if I finish what I was doing? If you’d rather talk, we could do that instead.”
I wanted to do a lot more than talk to Levi. There’s just no way I’m ever going to say that out loud. The disaster of the last trip to my parents’ house was almost too much to bear on top of everything else. I wasn’t about to play this any way but cool and professional, with maybe a hint of gratefulness for all the extra work he’s doing.
“No, it’s completely fine.” I pulled the latest manuscript to squeeze its way into my evening schedule out of my purse. “I’ve got work, too.”
He gives me a smile and swipes at the screen on the tablet.
For the rest of the trip, I tried to read. It was impossible. Not only was Levi’s delicious scent filling the back of the town car and making me hot between my legs, I couldn’t stop stealing glances at him. I spent too much time thinking about the way he sits in the car, as if he’s the only man alive in the entire world. The way he’s totally at ease in this situation, flipping through images on his tablet—pieces he’s thinking of collecting, I bet—and tapping notes out on the screen.
Then my thoughts moved on to far dirtier things than a suited man—even a hot suited man—sitting in the back of a car. There are just so many other options when you’re going to be in close proximity in rush-hour traffic.
The one silver lining, even though he never so much as looked at me again, much less reached out and tried to touch me, is that my thighs got a fantastic workout from squeezing them together so hard in an attempt to keep myself under control.
Levi put his tablet down the moment we pulled up to the house. “Sorry about that,” he’d said with a smile that was more professional greeting than wicked grin. “Shall we?”
Now I’m waiting for him to tell me how this whole...process is supposed to go. The moment we walked in, something tightened in my chest. It’s only been a couple of days since we were here last, but I don’t feel any better about letting any of this go, and now my mother’s words are ringing in my ears.
“I think we should start with some of the bigger pieces.”
I think we should start with your...
The thought is so filthy that heat rises into my cheeks. “Okay.”
We step into the living room, and my heart wrenches again. Maybe this isn’t a great idea. Maybe, despite how much I love the way he moves in his clothes, the way my heart thuds when he gets close to me, the way he stirs up the filthiest fantasies in my mind, I hate this too much to go through with it.
Levi pulls out his phone and brings up an app.
That’s how it starts.
We go through every piece of furniture in the formal living room. He snaps pictures with his phone and taps notes onto the screen. It reminds me of what he was doing in the car, when I couldn’t tear my eyes off him to save my life. Only now he’s cataloguing my things, making notes. Or it would have been mine, one day, if...
There’s no point in dwelling on what might have been, but when we step through to the den, the next item up makes my throat go tight.
Levi snaps the picture, starts making notes, and then turns back toward me, his lips parted like he’s about to ask me a question.
And here I am, standing in the center of the room, swallowing hard and trying my best not to cry.
He’s at my side in an instant. “Ruby?”
“Yes?” I force the word to sound as normal as possible. I’m not going to put on a show right now. I’ll save that for the privacy of my shoebox of an apartment.
He slips the phone into his pocket. “Did something happen?”
“Not at all.” The smile I manage to put on my face is probably just a hideous mockery of a real one. “Just—walking in here hit me in a weird way, I guess.”
“What about it? Was it the dollhouse?”
It was the dollhouse, but I don’t want to have to say that to Levi.
It’s an odd place for the piece to be, in what used to be my father’s den—he was in charge of decorating, and liked to sit in here to watch football on the weekends—but it must have made sense in terms of the estate sale. The antique itself is more than a hundred years old, and whoever owned it at first really dedicated themselves to making it a perfect replica of a nineteenth-century mansion in 1:24 scale. Roughly, anyway. Whatever the actual scale is, this d
ollhouse has been in my family for generations, and cared for as well as any of their other properties.
I open my mouth to say that it’s nothing and the truth escapes instead. “It’s so stupid, isn’t it?”
He wrinkles his forehead, his gray eyes mesmerizing, holding my gaze. “What’s stupid?”
“Being so in love with a dollhouse.” The sob I have to choke back is a shock, even to me. “I was going to have this one day, and now I’m not.” I laugh, but it sounds strangled and false. “I don’t even have room, you know? Anywhere I’d choose to move, I’d have to lug it around. It would be such a pain in the ass.” More laughter frees itself from my chest. “I don’t want to have to deal with it, but I was going to have to. It was going to be mine.” Mine, and maybe my daughter’s. It’s so absurd that it makes me laugh harder. I don’t have a daughter. I don’t have a boyfriend. I don’t even have one of those sperm-donor plans for when I turn thirty-five and decide not to wait any longer. But the dollhouse? That’s the thing that’ll make me crack up, right here in front of Levi.
I wipe frantically at the tears spilling over my cheeks, trying to get the hell over this, when Levi makes a decision.
Chapter 16
Levi
It’s not the first time someone’s become emotional in front of me at an auction or an estate sale—not the first time by far. But Ruby’s struggle tears at something inside of me. It tears at the professional shield that normally lets me look into a weeping old lady’s eyes with nothing but a distant compassion. That’s usually enough for them.
That’s not enough for me, and it won’t be enough for Ruby.
It was awful, riding here in the car without looking at her. Without talking to her, except for the usual pleasantries. Without reaching for her hand. Or her knee. Or her waist, to pull her in. But I had to do it. I had to give her the space for this to be businesslike. It’s possible she’s so into me one minute and so distant the next because I pushed her too hard here on Sunday. So I kept my distance, letting her breathe, even though it meant I was suffocating the entire ride.