by Dani Collins
His cheek ticked. “I wish I knew whether I could believe you.”
“What reason would I have to lie?”
“The twenty million I just dropped on clothes and shoes, perhaps?”
“You didn’t.” She stopped dancing. The world continued to sway and swirl. She thought she might faint as all her lifeblood dropped into her feet. “Please say it wasn’t that much.”
“With the ring, closer to thirty. It’s Paris, Luli. What did you think?”
Sequin-covered bikinis and formal evening gowns were expensive, but they were the price of pageant entry, maybe the cost of bus fare or a flight to get to the competition. They weren’t the value of a district’s worth of housing. What had she done? She clung to his sleeve to keep herself upright, vision hazy as she absorbed that she had indebted herself to him far beyond anything she could have imagined.
His arms firmed around her, supporting her. “Look at me. Are you all right?”
“I think I’m going to be sick.”
* * *
If he had wanted to create a sensation, mission accomplished. Speculation about his mysterious new wife would shift to whether she was carrying his child as she paled and leaned into him.
“Come sit down.” He led her back to their table.
She took her clutch into her lap and, he suspected, checked for her passport, judging by the furtive movement beneath the edge of the table.
“Have a sip of water,” he ordered. “Then tell me why you’re upset.” She had handled the shopping like a pro. He wasn’t complaining about the cost, only pointing out that it made for a strong motive where manipulating his emotions was concerned.
“Why would you do that?” Her hand shook as she sipped. Tears brimmed her mink lashes. “I’ll never be able to pay you back. Never.”
“I don’t expect you to.”
The waiter brought their next course and she turned her face to the window to hide her distress. Gabriel waved him off from pouring fresh wine.
The single braised lamb chop with watercress and candied pistachios was decorated with a sprig of rosemary, pearl onions and dots of orange and mint sauces. Gabriel thought it looked appetizing, but Luli looked at her plate with misery. He didn’t dare tell her that the lamb had been flown in fresh from New Zealand this morning and the six vintage wine pairings they would sample with each course were thousands of euros each.
Minutes ago, she’d been incandescent, fully enjoying herself. Her mood had started to dim when she had asked if she was a project for him.
“Luli.” He set his hand palm-up on the table, wanting her to look at him. “I told you I don’t pay for sex. I don’t buy women. You don’t owe me anything.”
“I keep thinking I’ll wake up in my room. I wish I would.” She pinched her arm.
That bare cell of a room with not so much as a family photo or a glimmer of vibrant beauty that was her? No.
“I shouldn’t have started this,” she said with a despairing shake of her head. “I wanted to take control. I thought I could handle it, even if it was difficult. It was very hard when I arrived in Singapore, but I got through it. I’m a strong person,” she insisted, but sounded like she was trying to convince herself. “This is too much.”
Her gaze finally met his and the rawness she exposed clawed at his heart.
“Whatever you think you can turn me into, I’m not.” She looked to the windows, then the other direction, then the ceiling, as though she sought escape and realized she was cornered. Her breasts rose against the binding of her dress, plumping with each shaking breath.
“Luli.” He wiggled his fingers. “Give me your hand. This is culture shock. That’s all.”
“Culture shock!” She blinked and a tear fell to glisten diamond sharp on her cheekbone. Her hands stayed in her lap.
“Culture assault,” he corrected dryly. He should have anticipated it. Even his top executives dropped their jaws and bumbled with nerves when they caught a glimpse of how he lived. “Would you like to leave?”
“Does it matter what I want? Why did I think I should fight so hard or reach so high? It’s not as though I could make myself matter by wearing new clothes and going outside. I’m still nothing.”
“We’re going all the way to existential crisis? Come on, then. We’ll take this somewhere more private.” As he helped her into the car moments later, she heard him tell his driver, “Cancel the helicopter. We’ll go to the apartment.”
* * *
“Where were you going to take me in a helicopter?” she asked twenty minutes later, when he joined her on the balcony of his modern penthouse.
The colorful reflections on the Seine were smudged lines through the sparkling cityscape below. The Eiffel Tower was so big before her, she could have reached out and touched it.
She was still overwhelmed, still feeling like she was on stage, wearing this gown, but the bricked patio was about the size of Mae’s courtyard. The darkness turned down the volume on how alien the world had become, giving her a chance to catch her breath and grapple her emotions back under control.
“I was going to take you to my château. Do you want anything? I could order take-out noodles and roast pork. That might feel more familiar.”
“You have a house and a flat here?”
“I’ve been restoring the château since I bought it two years ago. I’ve never stayed there. It was built in the sixteen hundreds as a folly for the King’s mistress and has become one of mine. I have to park my money somewhere.” He leaned his elbows on the wall and studied the city below them.
At the word mistress, she had to ask. “Why did you want to take me there?” For seduction?
“It’s pretty. I thought you’d like it. At least I thought that a few hours ago, when I made the arrangements and you were having fun spending my money.”
“Why did you let me? I don’t understand what you want from me,” she said with a throb in her voice. “Am I a white elephant, more curse than blessing? A pretty adornment for your arm? Am I supposed to sleep with you because you saved me? Because we’re married?”
“One way or another, you were going to save yourself. We both know that, Luli.” His voice was firm and strong, if a shade rueful. “All I’m doing is adding accelerant.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re a riddle. I enjoy puzzles.”
“I want to be a woman. My own woman,” she said, soft and fierce.
But she was realizing that leaving Mae’s house and building a new, independent life were two very different things. There was a wide chasm that had to be bridged and she didn’t have the skills or resources to do it.
He sighed. “If I see you as a woman, I’ll want to sleep with you.”
She hugged herself and rubbed her arms, even though she wasn’t cold. In fact, she grew warm. Empty in a way that longed for him to hold her and kiss her and fill her with all those sensations that made the world a magical place.
“What’s so bad about that?”
“You said you were saving your virginity,” he reminded. “For who?”
“I don’t know. You? You’re supposed to wait, aren’t you? For your wedding night?”
A long, tense silence.
“I haven’t,” he finally stated.
She sighed, admitting heavily, “I thought it might mean something to whoever it was. Have value. Maybe even if I was desperate—”
“Your virginity is not a commodity, Luli,” he cut in sharply. “Your body isn’t. Save yourself for a relationship that matters. Someone special.”
“So you don’t...” She swallowed. “Want me? Because I’m a virgin?”
“Have you looked in a mirror? Of course I want you. I’m saying don’t have sex with the first man you marry.”
She choked on a laugh, recognizing it as a joke, but they were married.
&
nbsp; “You talked about becoming a trophy wife and that led me to believe you were experienced. Given that you’re not...” His voice became tight with reluctant honor. “I don’t know that we should go there. You would want what every woman eventually asks for and I can’t give you that.”
“Children? I don’t want them. Not for a long time, if ever. That’s totally fine if you can’t make them.”
Another pointed silence, then a husk of a laugh.
“I was going to say love, but you continue to confound me.” He straightened and leaned his hip against the low wall. “Why don’t you want children?”
“I can’t even take care of myself!” She waved a helpless hand through the air.
“You’re so blind.” He reached out and gave a tendril of her hair a small tug. “My grandmother employed two hundred people directly, not to mention the ten or so thousand who work for companies in which she invests. Who looks after all of them? Her? No.”
“That was with her money and resources. I don’t even have pajamas. I’ll be sleeping in the clothes you gave me on the airplane.” She wondered where they were.
Wondered why he couldn’t love her. Far above Paris and freedom and all the other fantasies she had ever had was the dream that one day she would be loved. Was she not worthy of such a thing? Why not?
“Silly girl,” he said. “You have six cases of ready-to-wear in the guest room. Didn’t you hear the bell when the concierge delivered them?”
“What bell? Six? Gabriel, I can’t!”
“Don’t start hyperventilating again. Come on. I want to show you something. You’ll like it.” He took her hand in his warm one and drew her inside.
Her heels clicked on the herringbone pattern in the parquet floor of the hall. The penthouse was bigger than the bottom floor of Mae’s sprawling mansion, but this was located atop a skyscraper. It was modern, but filled with old-world touches in the wainscoting and crown moldings. A castle in the sky.
“Your room,” he said, pushing open a door into a darkened room where a half dozen suitcases stood at the foot of a wide bed. “But come into mine.”
Her heart rate picked up.
He didn’t turn on any lights as they entered the massive room with the massive bed. She barely looked that direction or took in anything else. She was drawn to the primordial glow of the floor-to-ceiling aquarium.
She gasped, pulled forward by the muted burble to feast her eyes on the iridescent blues and neon pinks, the fierce reds and flashing yellows. Spots adorned long lacy tails that swished in slow motion while striped orange missiles darted into crevices in the colorful fingers of coral and swaying blades of sea grass.
She didn’t know where to look and grew dizzy trying to take it all in. She wanted to lean against the glass, breath fogging upon it as she watched.
“You like?” His arm came around her waist and she leaned into him, overwhelmed, but this time in a way that was gentle and full of wonder.
“Your grandmother’s pond only had koi. They were pretty, but nothing like this. It’s so beautiful.”
“Can you see the tub on the other side?” he pointed. “I’ll run you a bath and you can watch the fish, then dream all night that you’re swimming with them.”
She wanted to laugh, but his arm around her felt so nice her own arms reached to encircle him on instinct, needing to cling to him for fear of going adrift.
“No one has hugged me since—” She couldn’t remember. A long, long time ago. She welled up and began to shake.
“Shh.” His hand offered a soothing caress against her ribs. “Keep it together, Luli. I’m useless with tears.”
He wasn’t, though. As she began to sob in earnest, he shifted so she was pressed fully to his front. He held her in a firm embrace that kept her from breaking into a thousand disjointed pieces and spoke against the part in her hair.
“It’s okay. You’re not in there. You’re out here. Breathe.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
DESPITE A LONG BATH after her breakdown, Luli didn’t dream of the fish. She dreamed of Gabriel’s arms around her and his soothing voice and his strong hand rubbing her back. She dreamed he was beside her in the bed, his hands on her breasts and seeking their way into other secretive places.
But he wasn’t. And she woke in a sweat, loins aching, embarrassed with herself for such erotic fantasies.
The lingering memory made her self-conscious as she emerged from her room, dreading making eye contact, but Gabriel was on the phone behind the closed door of his office—which perversely made her disappointed.
A servant invited her to a table in a nook that caught the morning sun and overlooked the Seine. She brought her a blessedly familiar breakfast of rice porridge and kaya toast with soft eggs. Afterward, Luli took her second cup of French-press coffee to the balcony where she listened to the city noises that were both the same and different from the ones she had heard beyond the garden gate.
“Good morning.”
Gabriel’s voice sent a rush of startled pleasure through her, along with a rush of memory at her subconscious yearnings. She blushed.
“Good morning,” she said shyly, turning to catch his gaze lifting from her thighs in the jeans she’d put on with a T-shirt, something she hadn’t worn in years, but that felt comfortable and right.
The way his expression flickered made her smooth an uncertain hand down her hip. “I thought we were just going to the showroom so it didn’t matter what I wore.”
“Small change of plan,” he said with a humorless smile. He tsked as his phone buzzed in his hand. “The press release is out. This is turning into something I want to drop off that balcony.” He held up the phone and nodded at the half wall she leaned against.
“What’s the new plan?” She folded her arms, bracing herself.
“Apparently newlyweds go on something called a honeymoon. I have been asked a thousand times where ours will take place.”
A pulse of anticipatory heat struck her loins. She blushed even harder, with guilt, as if he could see into her filthy mind and know what she had imagined. Could tell what she longed for.
“What I said last night stands.” His cheek ticked and he looked away, mouth tight. “But a week out of the public eye will give you time to get used to all this while the attention dies down.”
He wasn’t happy. She could tell and lowered her lashes, feeling like a burden.
“I’m s—”
His phone buzzed again and he swore. “I have to take this. They’re packing for us. We’ll leave shortly.”
“Where are we going?”
“Safari.” He swiped to accept his call.
“Safari! Where?”
“Africa. Where else do you go on safari?”
* * *
Eight hours later, his sound-barrier-defying jet landed them in Tanzania. They climbed aboard a helicopter for another hour, but it passed quickly as she kept her nose pressed to the glass, viewing herds of zebras and wildebeests, elephants and antelope and giraffes from above.
Then they were on the ground, traveling by Jeep, passing within a few hundred meters of more animals, pausing beside a waterhole where muddy hippos wallowed and yawned.
Their driver did most of the talking. Gabriel wore mirrored aviator sunglasses and stretched his arm behind her seat, both tense and relaxed. Each time she smiled in wonder at him, she found him watching her and her heart skipped and bounced in reaction.
He must think her so foolish, snapping her neck around as she tried to take it all in, but if she didn’t immerse herself in the spectacle around them, she would grow too conscious of his thigh splayed near her own. Or the way she would only have to slide down a little in her seat to nestle into that space beneath his arm.
He had told her they were staying in a camp, but despite the grass-pressed mud walls and thatched roofs, the collection of
buildings was as luxurious as his supersonic airplane. They were shown through the main lodge where a dining room was set with china and crystal. A sturdy suspension bridge took them across a wide, shallow stream where crocodiles lurked. Strange birdcalls followed them into the open air of their raised villa. It had three bedrooms, each with a bed canopied in mosquito netting and a deck with a view across the Serengeti.
As she watched the setting sun streak glorious magenta and scarlet, indigo and marigold across the horizon, she heard the noise of ice shifting in a bucket behind her. She turned to see Gabriel in the shadowed lounge behind her, heard him peel the foil from the bottle he held.
“Do you want to put the light on?” she asked.
“Not yet. You make an interesting optical illusion standing there so still. Like a black hole in the shape of a woman cut from a piece of painted paper.”
It was an innocuous thing to say, but knowing he’d been looking at her again made wires of tension tighten inside her.
“I’d forgotten what a big place the world really is.” She looked out again, watching the last of the light fade. “It’s as noisy as the city here, but in a different way, which makes it seem quiet. I feel small and remote and I should probably be terrified to be so far from civilization, but I just feel...calm.”
The cork popped.
She chuckled at the incongruous, yet perfect timing. “Maybe not that far from civilization.”
“No,” he agreed.
She had the feeling his efficient staff packed “civilization” for him the way anyone else remembered a toothbrush.
“We should take this to the plunge pool. Cool off before dinner,” he suggested as she came in to take a glass.
“I’d love that. I feel all sweaty. I’ll change and join you there.”
Not ready to walk out in, essentially, a bra and panties, she chose a tankini. The bottoms were black short shorts, the top a formfitting print that tied behind her neck. Bright swirls of neon twisted over and under the cups, accentuating her bust.