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I wish I’d had a voice like hers when I was younger—or at least a voice like that speaking up for me.
The waiter shuffles away, leaving us alone as dinner is served around us. After the thousand-dollar-a-plate meal, the auction will start.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” Stella questions, shifting her weight uncomfortably in her seat. “You know it will be frowned upon if you take me right here on the table.”
My brow raises in consideration. “How badly will it be frowned upon?” I muse, and she laughs. “I’m just thinking how much I wish I’d known you when I was young,” I answer honestly.
My answer piques her interest.
“Oh? Do you think we would have been high school sweethearts?” she jokes. “You would have taken me to prom?”
“I would have pinned more than a corsage on you if I had,” I quip back. “But that’s not what I mean. I mean… you have a way of speaking and making people hear you.”
Her eyebrows shoot up so high, they’re almost lost in the loose tendrils hanging from her classic bun on top of her head. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Gabe, but you don’t strike me as the kind of guy who ever had a hard time getting people to listen to him.”
Through the speakers, a new, hit R&B song pipes through the speakers, the DJ warming up for the auction.
“That’s funny,” I snort, reaching for my wineglass. “My parents never seem to have heard me.”
Sympathy clouds her pretty eyes. “Family can be complicated,” she sighs.
“Especially when you have an older brother who can do no wrong,” I agree, raising my glass in faux toast to Luke, wherever the hell he is. Probably off saving orphans on his yachtsomewhere in the Ivory Coast. It was hard to keep up with my older brother’s accomplishments.
I part my lips to say more about the golden child, but Stella isn’t looking at me but over my shoulder.
The fucking cameras!
“Can I help you?” she asks as I turn around. All the blood drains from my face as a handsome, immaculately dressed couple stands behind me, their scowls identical and familiar. I stand as their frowns deepen, and Stella asks again. “Do you know these people, Gabe?”
There’s a distinct alarm in her voice, but I can’t bring myself to look at her.
“Not really,” I growl, avoiding her eyes as my parents’ disapproving frowns deepen. “Stella, meet my mother and father. Mom, Dad, to what do we owe the pleasure?”
CHAPTER 21
Stella
For a second, I think I’ve misunderstood.
Gabe’s parents are here, at the very event where we are being filmed?
My head automatically whips toward the director, who grins like the Cheshire cat, and I want to throttle Anya with my bare hands. Of course she planned this. Why would she let us have one evening when we just have a peaceful, non-dramatic event?
Because it’s no good for ratings that way.
Jessie is conspicuously absent; I notice for the first time that the producer’s assistant is nowhere near us to warn about this shocking revelation. But blame is the least of my concerns at the moment. Mr. and Mrs. Hanson are unleashing on their son.
“You must be joking, Gabriel,” his father growls, looking from me to the cameras and back to his son. “Have you absolutely no shame at all?”
I bristle at his condescending tone, but that’s not what’s bothering me the most. Even though his back is to me, I see my bold, lion-hearted Gabe shrinking almost imperceivably under the withering glowers of his parents. The sight of him faltering angers me.
“I think we established that I don’t a long time ago,” Gabe chirps in his usual, semi-sarcastic way.
“I thought this was an awful joke,” his mother moans, placing a dramatic hand on her forehead. “Just when I thought you couldn’t humiliate us more…” She waves the other French manicured hand around the ballroom as if her son were wading around in a sewer at the ends of the earth somewhere.
“I’m Stella,” I offer, trying to diffuse the situation by inserting myself between Gabe’s irate parents and my tensing lover.
They ignore me completely, their chins upturning, and my hand falls back to my side.
