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He was a comte. Despite his many faults, that would cut a lot of ice chunklets with her shallow mother and brilliant sister. Definitely, he was a win-win.
Now all she had to do was to find a sexy red dress!
Three
I s nothing more tempting than the bad and the forbidden? Now that Amy knew who Remy was, he fairly oozed danger with every white smile and seductive touch.
Maybe that was why the evening with him was one of the most desperately wonderful evenings of her life. Not that she wasn’t bothered by what she’d read about him or by her plan not to let on that she knew.Her senses were heightened to an extreme state of agitation when she looked out her living-room window as she was putting up her hair in a clip and saw him at the end of the block, striding up Duke Street with a single white rose. When he rang the bell, her throat closed as if a fist circled it. She tore the clip out of her hair and ran to the door.
As he handed her the long-stemmed rose, did she only imagine that his expression was darker and more haunted than it had been earlier? Then their eyes touched, and he smiled. As she sniffed the delicate blossom, he stepped across the threshold.
“I needed this tonight,” he murmured as he gazed at her. “You’ll never know how much. You’re like a breath of fresh air.”
He wore the look of a hunted man, and she imagined he must have read the ugly publicity, too. Did he have a conscience, after all?
When she turned around, he gasped. “You look beautiful.”
“I don’t usually shop in expensive stores,” she said, feeling pleased with the flirty red dress and silver strappy sandals that made his intense gaze linger until her skin heated.
Tonight he looked very masculine and elegant in black.
“You don’t look like the same playful girl I watched buying silky, see-through knickers in the flea market this afternoon.”
Blushing at the memory, she held up her new bag.
“Very nice,” he said.
The ensemble had cost a fortune, but as she’d stared at herself in her bedroom mirror, she’d been thrilled with the beautiful girl she barely recognized. For the first time she’d thought she was almost as beautiful as Carol.
“Are those shoes comfortable?”
“Naturellement.”
“But can you walk in them?”
She pranced back and forth in front of the sofas as she had in front of her mirror earlier just to prove she could.
“Wow!”
She picked up her hair clip and coiled her hair high on her head. When she secured it, he whispered, “Better down.”
She removed the clip again, and he smiled as her hair fell about her shoulders again. “Much better.”
She bit her lip and set the clip on a low table.
“What do you say we take a walk first?” he asked.
“First let me find a vase for the rose.”
Later in the gloaming twilight when he took her hand and led her across the Millennium Bridge, she enjoyed the warmth of his long fingers entwined with hers and enjoyed the feeling that for the moment, no matter what their differences, she belonged with him.
A young couple was letting their preschool children dash about blowing bubbles. Remy’s indulgent grins made her smile. Did he like children as much as she did?
The captain of a small motorboat looked up and waved gaily at the children and their parents. The children stopped blowing bubbles when gulls and a lone pelican swooped low over the gray, churning waters.
The little boy, who had blond curls in need of a trim, pointed. “Bird.”
Remy smiled. “What a wonderful age. Life is so carefree. Do you want children?”
Nervousness tightened her throat, but she nodded, anyway, thinking it an odd question from a man like him. “First I have to find a suitable father for them.”
“Not Fletcher?”
“Not Fletcher. What about you? Do you want children?”
His eyes darkened beneath his heavy brows. “I’m not sure I would make a very good father.”
“Of course you could be a wonderful father—if you committed yourself to it.”
“One would hope any man who fathered a child would do as much. But I’m afraid there’s more to it. One must have examples set early in life.”
She heard gravity and doubt and profound pain in his voice as he watched the children race ahead of their parents to the other side of the river.
“And you did not?”
He had turned away, and he pretended not to hear.
When Remy took her to the London Eye, the immense Ferris wheel beside the Thames, he hired a private gondola and then treated her to golden champagne and a box of chocolate truffles.
She wondered if he brought the beautiful women whose hearts he’d broken to the London Eye, or if they preferred lavish hotel suites.
