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“I’ll be a very bad boyfriend, then, and let you tempt me.” He gave me a sidelong glance as he reached for his toothbrush. “You look lovely.”
“Lovely?” I pouted and squished my boobs together. “I was going for ‘so sexy Neil comes before we get to the restaurant.’”
“You’re very close, I’ll give you that.” He winked at me, and I skittered out of the bathroom to retrieve my collar from where I’d stashed it. I stuffed it in my purse and slipped on the highest, sexiest black heels I owned.
We headed down to the car at eight. Neil looked fantastic in a black suit, white shirt, and skinny black tie. I checked us both out as we passed the gilded mirrors in the lobby. We looked so damn good together, I was beginning to doubt we actually would make it to the restaurant without tearing the clothes off each other.
“Where exactly are we going? I can’t stand the suspense anymore.” He held my door for me and leaned on it to peer into the car after me.
I ticked my answer off on my fingers. “I told you. We’re going out for sushi. Then, we’re going to do something lavish and romantic. Then, we’re going to do something absolutely filthy.”
“So, just like any other date, then?” he asked with a smirk, and I just smiled back because I knew what was coming.
I’d made us reservations—well, myself posing as Mr. Elwood’s assistant made the reservation, because Sophie Scaife wasn’t going to get a table—at Masa, a Japanese fusion restaurant famed for, among other things, being one of the most expensive restaurants in New York City. The place had been the stuff of urban legend at Porteras. Gabriella Winters had once had dinner there with Angelina Jolie, and I’d been desperate to ask her what the food was like and, hell, what it even looked like inside.
Now, I was going to an after-hours dinner in a private room. I was totally psyched.
When we pulled up outside of the Time Warner Center, all Neil said was, “Oh, I rather like this place.”
Well, that wasn’t the reaction I’d been going for. But how did one impress a billionaire?
My slight disap
pointment lifted when we actually entered the restaurant. We had one of twenty-six tables, set in a private alcove with a bamboo shade. The calm yellow light lifted my mood and heightened my appetite. By the time the first course came around—Masa offered a prix fixe menu only—it took everything in me not to scarf down the ginkgo nuts and baby shrimp heads served.
“I suspect I should not get drunk tonight?” he asked as the waiter poured out thimble-sized glasses of hot sake.
I opened my purse and flashed him my collar, just enough that he would see what was inside.
“But I don’t think you should get drunk, anyway,” I said, quietly, because the restaurant had strange acoustics and was nearly silent, so my voice seemed extra loud. “Not after what you put your liver through last night.”
The food was incredible. I’d eaten at probably seventy percent of all the sushi restaurants in New York, but they would never taste the same again. I wondered if we would come back regularly, then realized that such a thought was the extravagant raving of a newly rich person.
Once a month. Tops. Otherwise, it would just be decadence.
Because Neil has an uncanny knack for reading my thoughts, he reminded me, “Don’t become too attached to this place. We’re not going to get out as often, after we move.”
“I know. I’m going to miss it.”
After the waiter returned with the second course, Neil asked softly, with a hint of uncertainty, “But you still want to move?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I teased, to reassure him. I could imagine that buying a seventy-eight million dollar house might give anyone a need for reassurance. “Do I want to wake up every day with my amazingly hot husband and have morning sex in front of a gorgeous ocean view?”
“Yes, well, I was just making sure. You haven’t talked about the move much, except to say that you’ll miss living in the city. And at Christmas, when you said you didn’t want to make any big changes—”
“That was before I saw the infinity pool,” I corrected him. “And when I hoped I would be working in the city. Now, it just seems restrictive. If I want to go outside for fresh air, I have to share that fresh air with eight-million other people. I don’t want to do that anymore. Yeah, there will be things I can’t get in Sagaponack. But they’re not that far away. And this isn’t as big a risk as I took moving from Calumet to New York—”
“It isn’t as big a risk as you took when you planned to run away to Tokyo,” he interjected.
I was never going to live that bit of teenage foolishness down. “Touché. But what I’m saying is, I’m not afraid to take this risk. I’m not afraid to do it, because I know that if I’m miserable and unhappy, you’ll bend over backwards to fix things. Just like I would for you.”
“I rather like the idea of you bending over backwards,” he said with a chuckle. “Are there classes you can take to learn how?”
“I am sure there are.” I lifted my teensy cup of sake and raised it as if in toast. “But I guarantee they don’t teach them in Sagaponack.”
About halfway through the meal, I started worrying that we would stuff ourselves too much and not be able to move when we got to the hotel. Then I noticed Neil was only eating about half of what was being served, and I remembered his pills.
It wasn’t that I didn’t objectively understand that it wasn’t his fault he needed a little extra help in the getting-it-up department. He’d nearly died a few months ago. Doctor Grant had warned us about the sexual side effects of chemotherapy, and even without all that, Neil was fifty. It wasn’t like he was the only fifty-year-old man in the history of the world who took ED medication, but it weirdly stung my pride that I wasn’t just…enough.
