a woman who could give Lee the confidence he needed to take his place in the O’Ryan empire. So Dell had sacrificed her to his cousin, and everything that had happened afterward was on his conscience.
He opened his mouth to tell her so.
Instantly she leaned closer. “Don’t do that O’Ryan thing,” she told him.
Dell blinked. “Excuse me?”
Regina placed her palms on the burgundy tablecloth. “Dell, I know how much responsibility you have. The O’Ryan Gemstone Gallery is only one arm of O’Ryan Enterprises and it must take an amazing amount of work to manage something like that. You don’t have to take responsibility for my problems, too. What happened to me this year wasn’t your doing.”
He drew his brows together, preparing to object.
“I need to get past it myself,” she continued, not allowing him to cut in.
“All right, we’ll drop that subject.” Dell blew out a breath and sat back in his chair. Not that he was agreeing with her, but if she needed to claim responsibility, he would allow her to do that. This time.
Silence set in. Regina looked around her, surveying the elegant surroundings, the tapestries on the walls, the string quartet playing softly, the tuxedoed waiters. She fidgeted with her spoon and squirmed on her chair. “This is nice,” she said.
Dell noted that she still hadn’t eaten much. He smiled. “Not your style?”
“It doesn’t have to be my style. It’s your style. I don’t really have a style, so at least one of us should have one,” she said.
Dell couldn’t help chuckling at that.
Regina smiled. He realized then that he hadn’t seen a genuine smile on her face since their whole fiasco of a marriage had begun. And it had been her sunny disposition that had first told him she would be right for Lee.
Dell brushed that thought aside, but his gaze drifted to her lips nonetheless. She had pretty lips, plump but not overly so. The kind of lips a man would like to feel beneath his own. He could see why Lee had let things get out of hand.
But his staring was making her uncomfortable. A trace of delicious pink climbed up her throat.
“You should smile more,” he said, almost without thought.
She gave an almost imperceptible nod. “I’ll try to remember that. Smiling at each other should be part of our plan, shouldn’t it?”
Oh, yes, the plan.
“I suppose we’d better start brainstorming,” he agreed, glad that she had been thinking straight while he had been ogling her mouth. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a small black notebook and a pen.
Her eyes widened.
“What?” he said.
“You’re really very good at what you do, aren’t you?” she asked. “I mean, of course, you are. You run an empire, you hire and fire people, you date fabulous women and command the attention of important people. Politicians and lawyers and media types and such.”
“All that because I took out a pen and paper?”
“No. It was more the way you did it. You’re going to make a plan and we’re going to carry it out and you have no doubt that everything will go according to that plan. It comes naturally. You’re an O’Ryan, and controlling the universe is in your genes.” She said that as if it were a new discovery she had just made after having been married to him for many months.
“You seem concerned. Am I pushing you?”
She studied him for a minute, then slowly shook her head. “No, it’s more a matter of you being so sure that things will turn out a certain way and me being nervous that I’ll mess it up. I tend to just let loose and do things and sometimes that doesn’t work so well. Although—” she lifted one shoulder in a shrug “—I’m not sure even I could mess up your game plan once you’ve set the course.”
Ouch. He had worked hard at learning to be organized and in charge. Barreling through with a logical plan had helped his parents’ disaster of a marriage survive, it had enabled him to overcome an early heartbreak and had kept him ahead of his competition in business, but he supposed that to someone like Regina he might appear overbearing.
“You’re frowning. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said…whatever I said.” Regina’s voice was soft.
He held up one hand. “You should say what you think. That’s part of being married.”
“How do you know?”
He smiled and shrugged. “I’m guessing.”
She returned his smile. “Well, you probably are right about us needing a blueprint. And…everything.”
He raised a brow.
“Okay, almost everything. I’m sure you’re not perfect.”
Dell’s smile grew.
“Well, you must have some flaws,” she reasoned.
“Doesn’t everyone?”
She looked so deliciously flustered at her frank words that he couldn’t help chuckling.
“You are amazing,” he said.
Pale pink tinged her cheeks again. Why had he never noticed that she was a blusher before yesterday? There was something wickedly delicious and erotic about a woman who blushed. “Amazing? Maybe your judgment isn’t as good as I thought,” she said, still visibly flustered. “Take your pen. Let’s get to work. How do we go about trying to get started on our marriage plans? What should we do?”
Kiss was the first thought that came into his mind, but he quickly squelched it. This had been a difficult year for Regina, including an unexpected pregnancy, the betrayal of a man she had trusted, a hasty wedding and a devastating miscarriage. The two of them had started married life in a rush. He knew the mailman and the valet at the parking garage better than he knew her. When they finally touched, if they ever touched, he wanted her to know who she was kissing. Trust had to be established, and given her past, that would be impossible if he pushed her too fast. They needed time and more.
“I’d like to visit you at work again,” he said, scribbling that down.
She looked startled. “Why?”
Because she had friends there who cared about her and would protect her even if he did something foolish. “I’ve never seen you at work,” he said, and that was the truth as well.
“I’ve never seen you at work, either.”
Dell thought of his office. Sophisticated, expensive, oppressively dull. He loved his work, but the offices were the same as they had been in his father’s time and his grandfather’s before that. They reeked of the O’Ryan legacy and would be considered stuffy by modern standards. Regina was the epitome of modern with her cute little shockingly gaudy shoes, her digital cameras and her creative spirit.
“You might find it boring,” he said, surprised that it mattered to him what she thought. He’d never cared for people’s opinions before.
She crossed her arms, obviously trying to look firm. Instead she looked like an adorable kitten trying to wield control. “Fair is fair,” she said. “If you visit the Belles, I should visit O’Ryan Enterprises.”
“You’re right,” he conceded.
“What else should we do? I suspect that being a normal, married couple in my world and yours is a bit different. What do normal, married people do in your world?”
They sleep together, he thought. They make love. The thought brought instant heat to his body, and he forced himself to push it aside. “I think we should make our own rules. We’ve both agreed that we don’t have a conventional marriage and what we’re each looking for is…a