The VIP Room(62)

“Not much. I found your bio from your firm and some client reviews about how amazing you are,” he teased.

“Good. I don’t like the idea of my entire life being displayed on the internet. How do you even deal with it all?” I asked.

“You get used to it.” He lifted an arm to push his hair back, bicep flashing. “What did you see?”

“Me,” I said, looking down at my sheets between us. “I saw a picture of us leaving Valoir. I read all about all your flings with models and socialites and how you had a girlfriend in Italy and London at the same time.”

“Do you actually believe in all that?” he asked, his eyes watching me closely.

I looked at him in all of his masculine beauty, with his stubble and mussed hair. “I could believe it. You’re not exactly hard on the eyes and you can be incredibly charming when you want,” I gave him a teasing smile but then it faded. “But…no, I don’t. If I did, you wouldn’t be here right now.”

His eyes softened at my words and I wanted to melt.

I would do anything to have him look at me like this always, I thought, with just a tiny hint of alarm. It was only a small taste of the power he could have over me.

Tristan sighed. “Whenever I’m photographed with a woman, the media automatically assumes she’s a girlfriend or a lover. They try and spin it whatever way they can to make me seem like the scandalous playboy.”

“Aren’t you though?” I asked, eyebrows raised. “You did take me home from a club.”

“It doesn’t happen nearly as much as the media makes it seem. Most of those women in the photographs are friends or daughters of family friends that I need to entertain on occasion.” He shook his head. “But when I saw you, sitting at Valoir, looking incredibly nervous and out of place, there was just…I don’t know. You can call it intense attraction or lust, but it felt different somehow. And I knew I had to have you.”

“And you did,” I said softly, tracing the soft, dark hairs on his chest.

“Yeah,” he murmured, “I did. And then I ruined everything. I don’t have a reason for why I did it. I just…” He shook his head. “You scared me.”

“I’m not exactly a scary person,” I said, tone lightly joking, but my heart was pounding at his confession. I wondered if he could feel it.

Tristan blew out a breath and his eyes slid away from me, restless, before returning. He wanted to say something, but he was holding back.

“Tell me,” I whispered.

His hand pushed back his hair again. A nervous habit, I realized.

“You…made me feel vulnerable. And I hate feeling like that,” he finally murmured with surprising passion. “I absolutely hate it. It scared me. So, I acted first and lashed out at you because it was the only thing I could do, the only way I could make my world go back to how it was before I met you. And I know that it was cowardly and an awful thing to do, but at the time, in that moment, I felt like I had no choice.”

“Being vulnerable isn’t a bad thing,” I said, catching his eyes.

“It is when you’re a Blackwell,” he said, his voice harsh, bitter.

I went silent, thinking over his words, reading between the lines for what he was actually saying. My mind returned to what I’d read about his family, but I couldn’t think of anything glaringly significant.

After a moment, Tristan sighed and softened his tone, “I’m sorry. Let’s talk about something else.”

I could see the subject was uncomfortable for him, so I allowed his obvious change of subject. “Like what?”

He smiled. “I don’t know much about you either, you know. Maybe we should start there.”

“Well, we always have our business dinner,” I teased.

Tristan laughed and I savored the sound, smiling. It was husky and rich, like his voice.

“Tell me something,” he told me, stroking my hair and brushing the tips over my cheeks. “Anything. Like what you like to do when you’re not working.”

“Hmmm, well, I like to garden.”

“Yeah?”

“I have a little flowerbed and vegetable garden in the backyard. It was my grandmother’s. She taught me how. And I like to bake,” I said, shy all of a sudden. “Bread, cookies, scones, cakes.”

“Mmm, I could get on board with that,” he murmured, eyes lighting up.

The bloom of affection I felt for him was blossoming even more, rapidly expanding by the minute. My heart stuttered but I kept on talking, to take my mind off it. “I’ll usually whip up a batch of something on the weekends. Or after a bad day at work, but I don’t have too many of those.”

“You like your job?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I replied, a small smile crossing my features. “I really do. I’m lucky, I guess. You hear about people all the time being stuck in jobs they hate, dreading going into work every day. But I look forward to work. It helps that I also like my boss and my coworkers, I suppose.” I bit my lip, remembering that Tristan probably never had a choice for a career, being in the family he was in. “Do you like your job?”

A quirk of his lips and a slow exhale. “I don’t mind it actually. But I was bred for it.”

Bred for it.

Those words sounded so…awful.