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“Now that pressing matters are out of the way, what were you saying? You were testing me?”
She pinched his side. “Yes, I was. I don’t want to be the only one who has something at stake here.”
“And what makes you think that you are?”
“Because you left,” she said. “If you’d stayed that morning…well, I would have felt more confident.”
“Why don’t you?” he asked. She was lying on his chest and toying with the light hair that covered him. Her lowered head hid her expression.
“You’re the first man I’ve felt this way about,” she said. “And you aren’t like my magazine. I can’t manage you the same way.”
“Why can’t you?”
She shrugged. “Because I care about you, Steven. I’ve really missed you.”
He hugged her tight for a minute. He was glad to hear that she cared about him. It meant a hell of a lot more than he’d thought it would.
“If you hadn’t been playing games, we could have enjoyed the last three weeks.”
She pushed herself up on an elbow and looked down at him. “I wasn’t the only one.”
“No, you weren’t,” he admitted. At first he’d been waiting for her to make the first move. After all, she was the one who’d wanted a relationship. But it hadn’t taken him long to realize what she was doing. So now he was here with her in his arms and he didn’t want to let her go. He was going to ask her to be his wife.
That was dangerous thinking for a man with no roots. A man who always moved on. He wasn’t looking for a permanent home. He reached over and turned off the light. He didn’t want to dwell on that now.
She curled on her side and fell asleep but he stayed awake, holding her as tightly as he wanted to because there was no one but the moon and stars to see him.
In the quiet of the night, he realized his half-hatched plan of an engagement wasn’t going to work. Ainsley cared about him. She was going to want the whole shebang. She wasn’t going to settle for some long-term engagement just so he could sleep with her every night.
He only knew that he wanted her by his side and he was going to have to figure out how to make that happen. He wondered if she’d stop playing games now that he’d made the first move.
He hoped so, because he wasn’t going to let her retreat back into her shell. He wasn’t going to let her use work as an excuse to keep him at arm’s length. He was in charge of this relationship and he would set the terms.
The words were strong and he knew he could say that now in the middle of the night, but in the cold light of day…he would do whatever it took to ensure that she was in his arms every night.
She stirred in her sleep as he squeezed her tight—too tight. He soothed her and then tried to go to sleep, but he held her for a long time before drifting off. He kept watching her face. He had to figure out how to keep her from meaning too much.
Ainsley woke up alone in Steven’s big bed. There was a note on the nightstand. She reached over and picked it up. She’d forgotten to remove her contacts last night so she had no problem reading it.
Steven’s spidery scrawl read:
I’m in my home office on a conference call. New toothbrushes in the medicine chest. Breakfast on the deck at 10.
She climbed out of bed, surprised by her own nudity. But as she stood there in the room, she found that she wasn’t uncomfortable. Steven loved her body and she was coming to like it, too. She was coming to realize that she was the woman she saw in the mirror. That wasn’t a facade but who she really was.
When she got downstairs, he was still on the phone and gestured for her to wait on the deck. She brought her BlackBerry with her and checked her e-mail. Freddie had sent her one saying that Maurice, the publisher of their magazine, needed to talk to her urgently.
She dialed his number in New York and was put through immediately to his office.
“It’s Ainsley,” she said when he came on the line.
“Good. Did you get Malcolm Devonshire?”
“Not yet. I’m still working on it. I did get all three of the mothers.”
“That’s great. As I mentioned before, I’m going to use your articles here in the States, as well. The Everest Group is going to relaunch the Manhattan Mega Store through an in-store event with XSU, the new group that’s just signed with Everest Records. It will be their North American CD launch.”
“Great. I assigned Bert Michaels to do the interviews with the mums. I think I might have to assign someone to do a sidebar piece on XSU. That’s a nice plus.
“Also, I wanted to make sure you know that Steven Devonshire and I are dating. Are you still okay with that?” she asked Maurice.
