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“Of course, of course,” she nodded; her face serious all of a sudden as if she knew how important work was.
“Thing is, I’m hosting a little dinner party, nothing special, just a few friends and I thought it would be lovely if he could join us?”
“You should call him,” I said with a straight face, knowing that Will would rather clean the bathroom than attend a society dinner at Amber’s house.
“Do you have his number?” She asked me.
“I’m sorry, I’m not allowed to give it out,” I smiled sweetly. “He gets so many calls, you know, from all kinds of people, wanting things.”
“Oh, I’m sure,” Amber’s eyes widened.
“I’ll tell him about it if you like?”
“Uh, sure, yeah,” she said, losing steam. She’d wanted his number, not to find a go-between. Later, when Will and I were lying in bed together, Zoë at her grandmother’s house and the two of us able to be together without any interference, I mentioned Amber to him.
“Oh, God,” he groaned. “Not that woman again!”
“What do you mean?”
“She’s been trying to get me to go out with her for ages. Earlier this year, at some party where I went to pick up Zoë, she talked non-stop about how difficult it was to meet people of a ‘certain caliber’”.
“Really?”
“A certain caliber?” I copied him. “And what does that mean?”
“It means money.” He leaned back against the pillows, pulling me against him. I snuggled into him, enjoying the luxury of being with him without having to worry about Zoë stumbling in on us.
“Lots and lots of money.”
“You don’t know that for sure, though. You’re a good-looking fella,” I said with a teasing smile.
He kissed me and then said, “No, it’s definitely that. No woman looked at me twice before all this,” he said, nodding his head in the direction of his loft. “After my first article in some tech magazine, I started getting all these calls, suddenly everyone was inviting me to parties.”
“Maybe they were interested in your work!” I protested.
He lifted an eyebrow. “It took me a while to put two and two together. All those dinner parties where I was seated next to some Harvard graduate while the mother kept asking me which part of the Ashton family I was from.”
He shook his head.
“Then there were the divorcees and the widows,” he shuddered. “More needy than Chihuahuas! All that talk about France in the summer and Switzerland in the winter and how simply awful the world was while eating caviar and drinking champagne.”
“You sound bitter,” I said, surprised.
“No… it’s just… these were the kinds of people who didn’t look at me twice when I was in school. Girls rejected me without trying to spare my feelings, they were openly uninterested. The first girl I really liked, Amelia Chu, told me to my face that she was waiting for someone else to ask her out and if they didn’t, then she’d go to the movies with me.”
I whistled. “That’s cold!”
“I was second-choice guy and that really grated on me. I decided I wouldn’t ever settle for that.”
“Good for you,” I leaned up to kiss his cheek. I wanted to ask him about Zoë’s mother but sensed that the moment wasn’t right. That was a big deal, and this was still too new.
“So, what do I tell Amber?” I asked. “Are you seeing anyone?”
He turned to me, smiling a sexy smile, the stubble on his face making him look even more dashing.
“I would definitely say I’m seeing someone,” he said, giving me a long kiss that turned into much more after that.
As we got dressed afterwards, he asked, “How do you feel about that, us saying we’re seeing each other?”
