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“Well. Exactly.”
“They are not worthy of you. I do not believe she ever inquired about your whereabouts. Though I think you did tell her that you had gone off to be with me. Likely, she’s jealous. As I believe her greatest conquest during your trip was to shag a backpacker in a sad hostel.”
She couldn’t help it. She laughed. “That is so mean. But you know, Jaia probably enjoyed that.”
“Indeed.”
“I guess I shouldn’t feel terribly proud of myself that when I decided to shag someone, he happened to be a billionaire.”
He chuckled. “You didn’t know,” he said. And his eyes went molten. “You didn’t know who I was.”
“I didn’t know you were rich?”
“No. The way that we met, it was not obvious.”
“I’m... I like that.”
She did. She loved the fact that she had simply met him and it had been right. This thing had bloomed between them.
They were whisked off to a penthouse apartment in the center of the city and what was practically a motorcade of their household help, and all of the baby items that they required.
The penthouse was yet another angle of beauty. Ultramodern, rising high above the classical architecture of Paris.
All glass and crisp clean angles high above lovely stone scrollwork.
It was unbelievable.
And she couldn’t help herself, she twirled in the open space of the living area, with the Eiffel Tower behind her, and when she stopped, she was breathless, and he was right there. And she felt... Like it would be the most natural thing in the world to close the distance between them and kiss him.
And she knew she had done it before. Suddenly, she was overcome with the conviction that she had kissed that mouth hundreds of times.
There was heat in her belly that felt familiar, that same sort of certainty that clicked into place when sheknewsomething about him that transcended a specific moment or memory.
But there on the heels of that heat was something...dark.
Something that held her back.
Suddenly there was a pain in her chest that felt so real she couldn’t breathe past it, and it held her in place.
Kept her from touching her lips to his.
“What is it?”
“Nothing,” she said. “I’m just... So excited to be here. With you.”
She pushed the pain aside. She pushed the heat aside.
What she had, all she had with any certainty, was this moment.
She would choose to live in that.
They took a walk through the city. With Soriya in her pram, they saw the Eiffel Tower, the Champs-élysées, and they walked along the Seine. She was delighted and overwhelmed in the best way by all of the artists on the street selling their wares, and the bustle of the people around them. It wasn’t only that she hadn’t been to Paris, it was that she had been to very few major cities in all of her life. She was used to the pace of a small town.
And the speed and intensity of both Rome and Paris were a revelation.
After they were done with their walk, one of his beauty teams appeared, and ushered her into her suite, where she was given a facial, had her hair styled, and was wrapped in a haute couture gown—red and draped over her curves.
She looked in the mirror, and she didn’t know herself.
