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Except Sarah was burning with need. Impatient now to share what she knew was coming.

“Champagne?”

She stared at the bottle. Champagne. She had loved it back then. To Sarah, aspirational and twenty-two, it had represented the highlight of luxuriant fashion. To Sarah at twenty-seven, cynical and no-longer aspiring to anything other than liquidity, it was an irrelevance. She shrugged. “Sure.”

He reached for the bottle, his fingers curling around the neck and pouring it into the fine-stemmed glasses.

“So this is what you wear normally?” She asked without realising the question was coming.

He handed the champagne to her. She took it, careful to avoid brushing fingers. A silly gesture, given the purpose for her trip to New York.

“These are the royal robes of Kalastan,” he nodded.

Sarah sipped her champagne, needing no further reminder of his position in life. Royal. A prince. About as separate from destitute as it was possible to get.

“You are still working at the bar?” He asked, moving closer to her, so that he could clink his glass against hers.

She nodded, uncertainty making her eyes widen. “Yep. Only a fool would turn their back on that career.”

The joke fell flat.

“You were planning to study photography,” he prompted, his eyes scanning her face, reading every detail.

“True.” Her smile was tight.

“But you didn’t?”

She arched a brow. “No.”

“Why not?”

Her smile was a twist. After he’d left, she’d packed away her camera. She’d folded away her dreams, and the person she’d thought she was. She’d fallen into a dark hole of depression that only Lexi had brought her out of.

“Lexi happened instead,” she murmured. And then, belatedly recalling the extravagant gifts, she forced herself to meet his eyes. “Thank you for her presents.”

He tilted his head forward. “It was nothing.”

“Not to Lexi it wasn’t. She’s never had a toy that wasn’t a hand-me-down or bought at a charity shop. She still has all the boxes,” Sarah added, nerves making her more talkative than normal. “She stacked them at the foot of the bed.”

His eyes held hers. “A hundred thousand dollars will change all of that.”

Sarah’s mouth twisted but she didn’t say anything.

“Why no photography? You had incredible talent.”

She shook her head. “Not really. I had a very good camera.”

“And you do not use it?”

She blinked up at him. “I sold it.”

Something like anger flashed over his features. “For money.”

“No, I sold it for ice cream. Of course, for money. It was just gathering dust under my bed. Once Lexi came along, I thought it was better going to someone else.” She didn’t tell him the truth. That apart from a month-old infant daughter, Cameron had left Sarah with ten thousand dollars in credit card debt. Debt that was in Sarah’s name as much as Cameron’s owing to their joint bank account.

“You shouldn’t have done that.”

She sipped her champagne, enjoying the way it bubbled against her raw throat.

Source: www.allfreenovel.com
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