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She’d just conceded to everything he’d been angling for, but the reminder of the four-week time limit on their arrangement sure stole any sense of victory he might have felt. Slowly, he got to his feet before she bolted.
“Thank you.” He wanted to seal the deal with a handshake. A kiss. A night in his bed. But putting his hands on her now might shatter the tenuous agreement they’d come to in the past few hours.
She deserved so much better from him.
She nodded, the big T-shirt slipping off one shoulder to reveal her golden skin. “I’m going to let you watch your film now.”
Edging back a step, she moved away from him, and it took all his willpower not to haul her back.
“For whatever it’s worth—I’m proud to call you my fiancée. To my family, the media. The whole damn world.” He thought she deserved to know that much. Today had shown him that he’d taken her friendship for granted too often.
He hadn’t paid attention to her—really paid attention—in far too long.
He paid attention now, though. Enough to see the mix of emotions he couldn’t read cross her face in quick succession.
“Good night,” she said softly, her cheeks pink with confusion.
Watching her retreat, Dempsey turned on the television even as he knew the game film wasn’t going to come close to holding his attention the way Adelaide did.
Four
“Sweetheart, stop fidgeting,” Adelaide’s mother rebuked her, a mouthful of pins muffling the words.
“I’m just nervous.” Adelaide stood on a worn vinyl hassock in the one-bedroom apartment on St. Roch Avenue where she’d grown up.
With less than an hour before her first official public appearance with Dempsey, she had realized the gown she’d chosen for the Brighter NOLA foundation fund-raiser was too long despite her four-and-a-half-inch heels. She could have phoned the exclusive shop where Dempsey had given her carte blanche, but the price tag had nearly given her heart failure the first time around. She couldn’t bring herself to request an emergency tailor visit simply because she’d forgotten her shoes the day she’d chosen the dress.
So instead, she brought the pink lace designer confection to her mother’s apartment for a last-minute fix. And perhaps she also craved seeing her mom when she was incredibly nervous. She hadn’t been home since her “engagement” had become front-page news in the New Orleans paper and she hated that she couldn’t confide the truth to her mother. But she could at least soak up some of her mom’s love while she got the hem adjusted—with Evan waiting for her out front in the Land Rover.
“Addy.” Her mother straightened, tugging the pins out of her mouth and setting them in the upside-down top of the plastic candy dish on the coffee table. “You’re engaged to one of the richest, most powerful men in the state. You could have a dozen seamstresses fixing this gorgeous dress instead of your half-blind mama. You know better than to trust a woman who needs bifocals to do this job.”
Guilt pinched Adelaide more than her silver-and-pink stilettos.
“You’re not half-blind,” she argued, leaning down to kiss her mother’s cheek and breathing in the scent of lemon verbena. “And you could sew stitches around anyone working on Magazine Street. But I’m sorry to foist off the job on you last minute. I just missed you and I didn’t want a snippy tailor frowning at my choice of shoes or thinking how my breasts don’t suit the elegant lines of the gown.”
Her mother gave her a narrow look. Taller than Adelaide, her mother was a commanding woman who had worked hard to raise Adelaide after her father died in a boating accident when she was just a toddler. Della Thibodeaux had given Adelaide her backbone, but there were days when Addy wished she’d gotten more of that particular trait. Her creativity and her dreamy nature were qualities she’d inherited from her father, apparently. But it was her mother’s unflinching work ethic that had helped Adelaide excel at being Dempsey’s assistant.
“Bite your tongue,” Della said. “How will you survive your future mother-in-law if you can’t put an uppity dress-shop girl in her place?”
“I know. I’m being ridiculous.” She blinked fast, trying to control her emotions. It had been a crazy week fulfilling her duties as Dempsey’s assistant while maintaining her commitments to her new business. And now she had a role to play as his fiancée, all the while fighting off waves of nostalgia for what she’d felt for him in the past. “Living the Reynaud life with Dempsey has put my emotions on a roller-coaster ride. I’m not used to the way the Reynauds can just...order the world to their liking.”
