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er felt this way about another woman. But he didn’t. He was a master at mergers and acquisitions, and it wasn’t time for that play yet. He could wait.
“I didn’t like the way things ended between us.”
“My note offended you?”
“Of course not, you’re charming.”
She studied him, her nose scrunching up. She was hesitant, that much was obvious, and she was weighing her options. Heath had no idea which side of the scale he was falling on.
“I guess we can meet for lunch tomorrow. There.” She pointed at the café directly across the street behind him. “Be there at twelve-thirty.”
Heath was elated. He had won this round and was one step closer to his goal.
Of course, if anyone had asked what his goal was at that point in time, he wouldn’t have been able to articulate it. He just wanted to give the two of them the time and space to figure out if there really was something between them or if it was nothing, or if it was passing.
He started to turn, and that’s when he realized he had to ask one more question that had been weighing on his mind. “I saw you have children … from the picture on the Internet. They’re beautiful. How old are they again?”
It was a simple question that had a loaded answer. Sylvie ducked her head and looked away from him.
“It’s late, and I have to get the boys fed and into bed. I’ll see you tomorrow at the café across the street. Twelve-thirty.”
She began to close the door and he had no choice but to step back if he didn’t want to get a face full of wood and glass. Sylvie closed the door without looking at him and he heard the lock click into place. She turned away.
There was nothing for it but to leave.
He had been afraid of Sylvie’s answer to his question about the babies. The fact that she had avoided answering suggested she had something to hide.
And that something might mean his life was about to change forever.
He didn’t know how he felt about that yet, but he was willing to see where things were going to take him, especially if it meant Sylvie would be in it.
For now, he was cautiously optimistic. He would see her again tomorrow, and he’d get to the bottom of everything. Heath began his short walk back to his hotel, not far away, a stylishly restored multi-storied affair from the thirties.
No matter how good their mattresses, he doubted he’d get a wink of sleep that night.
Chapter Twelve
SYLVIE SET HER WINEGLASS DOWN on the nightstand and crawled into her bed exhausted but feeling good. Well, as good as she could feel considering the confrontation that had happened with Heath.
She had forced that out of her mind so she could be fully present with the boys as they went through their usual nightly routine. She had fed them, given them their baths, and gotten them dressed for bed. Then she read them a bedtime story and sang them to sleep.
That time with them was by far her favorite part of the day. Her next favorite time was waking up in the morning and hearing their coos and fussing through the baby monitor. While she wouldn’t trade that for anything, seeing Heath again had awakened other desires that she thought had long gone dormant.
Sylvie adjusted the baby monitor on the nightstand and listened to the boys’ even breathing for several minutes. She waited to hear if either of them stirred, indicating that she would need to get up to go check on them. It was a minor miracle when they both fell asleep at the same time, but that night it was as if the boys knew she needed some time to think.
If she were honest with herself, Sylvie was shaken to her core that Heath had found her. And he’d shown up on her doorstep right after she told the boys she thought he would make a great father. Was the universe trying to tell her something?
She didn’t know Heath at all, so she couldn’t say why she thought that about him. Perhaps it had to do with the little psychic tingle she felt when she thought of him. She’d always trusted that tingle and it rarely led her astray.
She sensed that Heath was a man of integrity, a man who knew how to treat a woman right. It said a lot about his character that he’d never intentionally treated her like the escort he thought she was.
Sylvie stretched across the bed and pulled her laptop off the nightstand. She sipped her wine, her liquid courage and nerve-soother all in one. She flipped the laptop open and then clicked on a folder on the home screen that she only let herself look at every so often. The folder was labeled “Chicago.”
She double clicked the folder and started a methodical review of the contents inside. Then she saw the URL that she was looking for, titled:
“The 20 Richest Men You’ve Never Heard Of.”
She clicked the link.
Only when she was feeling particularly lonely and at her lowest did Sylvie allow herself to visit the page. Sometimes, it was a mistake because it made her feel worse. But usually, it ignited memories of that night so long ago, and it made her dream of what might have been.
Sylvie scrolled down to number ten on the list. The tenth richest man no one had ever heard of: Heath Collins, reclusive billionaire, complete with a grainy picture. The poor quality of the photo couldn’t hide the good looks of the man who’d stood in her doorway that evening.
Heath Collins — not Heath Cartwright.
She wasn’t sure why he’d lied to her about his last name. Perhaps he was trying to ferret out if she had done any digging on him after their night together? But then again, why?
Sylvie knew that she couldn’t really be mad at him for lying about his last name. She had lied to him about who she was altogether. The whole situation was a mess of epic proportions.
And if the question of the hour was why did he lie, then the second question was, why didn’t Sylvie call him on it? She had no idea. She just didn’t.
She read the bio underneath his picture again, even though she had it memorized. It gave a summary about how Heath amassed his fortune. He was something of a shark when it came to acquiring companies that were in financial trouble and then turning them around.
She knew his most recent deal involved a company called Yurovize. It was probably completed by now and would shoot his net worth into the stratosphere, meaning multiple billions.
Sylvie couldn’t wrap her head around half such a sum. Most months, she was lucky to have enough money to cover her bills, bills that amounted to laughably nothing in Heath’s world. He probably spent more on manicures in a month than Sylvie spent on utilities.
She and Heath were worlds apart in so many ways. She remembered feeling that way the morning after in Heath’s hotel room; cold, harsh reality had reared its ugly head.
It didn’t start out that way. Sylvie had gotten in the shower thinking about how amazing the night with Heath had been. But as the cobwebs of sleep disappeared, she realized that her dreamy lover still thought that Sylvie was Kassy, the escort.
He’d told her the whole point of using an escort service was because he wanted to avoid romantic entanglements. And now there she was, daydreaming about getting all hella tangled up with him. She realized she’d probably made a horrible mistake by sleeping with him.
For a brief moment, she’d considered telling him the truth. She wasn’t an escort. She was just Sylvie from Zeke’s Bend, a small town girl who’d come to the big city and wound up in the bed of a drop-dead gorgeous, rich guy. Now she had stars in her eyes and wanted more … more of the incredible man who’d just given her the night of her life.
If he knew who she really was, what she really wanted, the whole fairy tale charade of her special night would crumble. He’d see she was no different from the other women who threw themselves at him, the women who expected an engagement ring after one date, as he described it.
Standing in that huge shower, being buffeted by multiple streams of water, the fixtures glimmering and the tiles shining, she felt like the country bumpkin she truly was.
She and Heath had nothing in common. How could they? He wouldn’t want anything to do with he
r, especially when he found out that she was nothing but a hairstylist from a small town in the middle of nowhere. He was the flyer; she was the flyover.
That’s when she’d given herself a harsh reality check. They came from two different worlds and there couldn’t be anything else between them. Besides, he’d said he didn’t want any commitments, and he wasn’t going to start wanting them with someone like Sylvie.
She could hear Momma’s disappointed voice moaning in her head, asking her if she had taken some drugs and gone plain crazy.
All she wanted at that point was to get the hell out of the suite before Heath discovered she’d been lying.
She hadn’t expected him to stop her from leaving, to put on a huge breakfast spread and invite her to spend the day with him. She didn’t understand that move at all.
Why he would want to spend more time with someone whose time he had to pay for to begin with? She figured he felt sorry for her, especially once he offered her money to take care of whatever phantom financial situation he’d invented for her in his mind.
It didn’t surprise her too much that Heath wanted to swoop in and save her. He seemed like that kind of guy. The only problem was that Sylvie didn’t need saving, and he pissed her off by offering to pay her, by coming too close to turning the whole encounter into a cheap and offensive exchange. That wasn’t how she wanted to remember their time together.
Sylvie knew then that she had to get away. So she’d played it cool and acted like she didn’t care what happened or if she ever saw him again, even though it killed her to see the disappointment on his face when he realized she was going to leave.
Deep down, she didn’t want to leave either. But as soon as he left the room to change, she seized the opportunity to run before she did something stupid like telling him the truth. She was afraid that she wouldn’t have been able to deal with his rejection. One break-up a weekend was her limit, thank you.
The joke was on her at the end of the day, though. She’d gotten pregnant, and the timing worked out that it had happened during her trip.
