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It would have Katie.
His eyes, his heart filled at the sight of her.
She wore a strapless midnight-blue gown with a slit up one side of the long skirt. Strappy gold sandals peeped from under the hem. Her only adornment was a narrow red silk ribbon, tied in a bow at her waist, unless you saw her hair as an adornment.
He surely did.
It hung loose, shimmering like platinum as it flowed over her shoulders.
He went to the foot of the steps and held out his hand. She smiled as she came down the stairs to him. She took his hand, then went into his arms as he wrapped them around her.
Kaz shut his eyes and held her close.
Katie was beautiful. More than beautiful. She was lovely; she was what any man would want; she was what he had waited for his entire life.
And he knew, in that moment, that he was in love with her.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Dinner was perfect.
The food. The wine. The staff, from the captain to the sommelier to the waiter, were always there when needed, but never when Kaz and Katie wanted to be alone.
The room was perfect, too, lit by tiny white fairy lights, the walls draped with crimson and gold silk. A Christmas tree stood on a small balcony, its green branches hung with delicate crimson and gold globes.
But nothing was half as perfect as Katie.
Kaz couldn’t take his eyes from her.
The glow from a pair of white tapers lent a soft illumination to her face. And he couldn’t get enough of that face. Her violet eyes. Her pink mouth. The flush of color in her cheeks.
He wanted to sweep everything off the table, take her in his arms and make love to her
.
Or maybe what he really wanted was to lift her into his arms, sit down with her in his lap, hold her so close to him that their hearts beat as one.
In the end, of course, he did neither.
Instead, he watched her. Just watched her. The delightful animation in her face; the way she lifted her champagne flute to her lips. He watched, and listened, and smiled at her stories of a childhood split between Park Avenue, the Hamptons, Paris, and Sardovia.
She’d been a solitary little girl.
Her mother had loved her as a sort of adorable toy, and had left her to the care of nannies and tutors. Her father had been a cold and distant figure until she approached womanhood and he began to see her as a useful bargaining chip.
She made the stories seem amusing.
He understood the pain behind them.
It was not the same as his pain, but his childhood had also been designed for the benefit of others—his grandfather, his mother, the various ministers who had tried to use him for their own purposes.
And while he had long ago accepted what had happened to him, he could not accept what had happened to his Katie, or what was about to happen to her now.
Somehow, they avoided mentioning it.
They didn’t talk about tomorrow. The flight to Sardovia. The betrothal ceremony. But the unspoken denial of reality ended when they left the magic of the restaurant and stepped into Kaz’s Mercedes with his driver behind the wheel.
The car moved slowly through the night, past shops and streets decorated for holiday joy.
