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Her stomach growled, and she realized she’d missed lunch. She washed the flour off her hands, put the unused cookie dough in the fridge, and went out to the front. Nik was rearranging some of her pastries, moving them closer to the glass in place of those he’d sold.
“Lunchtime,” she said. “I close down and go home for a quick bite every day. Just wanted to thank you for all your help. You can go back to Vegas now with a clear conscience. Everything is good here.”
She turned the sign on the door around so Closed was pressed against the glass.
Nik’s eyes sharpened on her face. “Why do you keep trying to get rid of me?”
“We had an understanding, Nik. I had sex with you one last time, and that was supposed to be it. I was supposed to get my life back.”
“And you have.” He turned his sexy grin on her, the same one he had used on her female customers all day. “But you also have a new boss. For the moment, I own this little bakery, and you know I never walk away from a challenge.”
So true. The harder someone tried to push Nik out of a deal, the more insistently he clung to it. If she wanted to get rid of him, she needed to try another tactic. What was the one thing that scared this new version of Nik?
Commitment? Although he had proposed to her a little over six years ago, he had become a die-hard bachelor during her absence. The women working for him agreed on that—they’d been happy to tell her so—and the media never tired of reporting on it. They wrote about his many, many women, the parade that marched through his bedroom door for one night only to march back out the next day. Those women didn’t return for a second night. Nik made sure of it.
She didn’t know if he told them upfront that it was a onetime thing or if he let them know when they were on their way out the door. A few reporters had mentioned a parting gift in the form of a diamond bracelet. One of them even suggested people in Vegas keep a lookout for thin diamond tennis bracelets on the arms of female companions. It was like Nik had marked them.
Another reporter suggested he did it so he wouldn’t hit on the same woman twice.
Chloe lowered her eyelashes in a demure way and glanced up at him from beneath. “I’m not trying to get rid of you, silly.” Her fingers playfully walked up his chest. “I just think you should go back to Vegas and get things ready for us.”
He blinked. “Get things ready? For us?”
“Of course. I almost gave up on you, but every day that passed without hearing from your lawyers kept me going. You obviously want to stay married. You want this to work, and so do I.”
She leaped into his arms with a squeal of delight, buried her face in the groove of his throat, and locked her arms around his neck. She clung to him. Her feet kicked in the air. “I love you!” she squealed.
He peeled her off him and put her feet back on the floor. “Are you out of your mind? We are not married.”
“But, Nicky.” She stuck her lower lip out the way she saw her daughter do when she wanted something. “If you don’t want an annulment, you must want to be my husband.”
“I assure you that I only want the bakery.”
She scoffed. “Right. The Andropolis empire desperately needs a little bakery that doesn’t make enough to pay your bar bill for one week. I’m not an idiot. You don’t give a fig about my business, so you must be here because you still have feelings for me. Confess.”
His lips formed a grim line.
Then he shrugged and surprised her with an admission. “The real reason I’m here is to get to know you again. When we were together overnight in Vegas, I realized I couldn’t have been that wrong about you. You are sweet and honest, not a calculating bimbo.”
“Too bad you couldn’t have figured that out when your mother was accusing me of cheating and blackmailing her for half a million.”
“I was too hurt and angry to think straight.”
She huffed. “You should have trusted me.”
“It wasn’t entirely my fault. I’d never seen a love like ours before, and I kept expecting it to implode. When it did, I wasn’t surprised.”
His words reignited the flame she had carried for him over the years. For a ruthless businessman, he had a poetic heart. Once, after making love in front of a roaring fire, he had read poems to her. Love poems. Those glimpses of his softer side made her fall in love with him, despite her fear that his family would eat her alive.
He placed his hands on her shoulders and stared deep into her eyes. “I’m sorry I didn’t trust you. It may prove to be the biggest mistake of my life. Can you possibly forgive me?”
The glass door swung open, and five-year-old Mia ran into the bakery. “Mommy!”
Silence, the sort of silence after a bomb went off and everyone close to the explosion was temporarily deaf.
A friend usually picked up Mia and took her home with her and her own little boy until Chloe got off work. Of all the days to go off script without giving her a warning call first.
Chapter Fourteen
