Seven years earlier …
“Want to dress up tonight?”
Alicia gave MJ a questioning look and tucked the fluffy white hotel towel a little tighter between her breasts, and he thought that the gesture was an unconscious betrayal.
Of her increasingly urgent inner questions about where this relationship was going. Of the fact that the variety in her wardrobe was getting thin.
“I want to go someplace really special,” he added, so that she’d know he had plans.
“I’d love that,” she said, then warned him with a slow and almost cheeky smile. “But you’ve seen the dress before.”
“That’s okay. Gives me confidence. You’ve never yet worn anything I didn’t like.”
He suspected that most of her wardrobe came from charity stores, because even he, with no interest in fashion, could see that her carefully put-together outfits weren’t at the forefront of style. But she wore them with the aura of an Oscar-winning actress on the red carpet, as if she knew that she looked stunning, and as if she was wearing fifteen thousand dollars worth of fabric and design on her upper body alone.
He admired the bravado of the performance, and that she was successful at it. She was an astute shopper, and you had to really look closely to see that she wasn’t wearing a designer label after all, or that if it was, it was “vintage,” aka secondhand, rather than new.
Few people, male or female, did look that closely. They were too busy being struck dumb by her lush bow of a mouth, her dazzling blue eyes, her dynamite figure and her perfect bone structure.
With the towel still carefully wrapped around her, she walked across the carpet to the mirror-fronted closet that ran along one side of the narrow entrance to their hotel room, and he couldn’t take his eyes from her prettily manicured bare feet, which appeared to react with a sensual delight to the lush thickness, as if they were more accustomed to walking on nails.
This was rapidly becoming one of MJ’s favorite leisure-time activities—lying on a king-size bed surrounded by a heap of snowy pillows while he watched Alicia dress. The hair and makeup routines he could skip. Those took place in the secrecy of the bathroom, they were too arcane and technical, and the blow dryer was noisy. In any case, he considered that she looked just as good with no makeup, bed hair and a pillow-crease mark across her cheek.
But the way she shimmied her breasts into a pushup lace bra, or let a sheath of silky fabric slide down her body …
In the month since they’d started sleeping together, Alicia getting dressed was a process that frequently reversed itself before it was even finished and transformed into a completely different activity in a very satisfactory way.
Not today.
Today she was a little coy.
She did that sometimes—went inexplicably distant as if she didn’t want him to have too much of a good thing. When he reached out his arms for her—now, for example—she did that smile again and shook her head. “Later.”
“Why?” he lazily asked.
“Because later I’ll taste of chocolate.”
He didn’t point out that they could have now as well as later. He thought he understood why she needed to keep a hold of the reins in their relationship sometimes, and it didn’t bother him.
Tonight, especially, he’d been quite sincere in what he’d told her. He did want this to be a really special, unforgettable evening. He’d bought her something. His anticipation about seeing her face when she opened the gift almost outweighed his anticipation about her tasting of chocolate.
Forty-five minutes later, she was ready to go, wearing a splashy, strappy floral dress that showed off the light golden glow of her newly tanned shoulders. She’d spent most of the afternoon out by the pool, catching the March sunshine that was so much stronger here than it would have been in New York, while he’d gone off on his covert shopping mission.
While she was in the bathroom just now, he’d slipped the gift into the inside pocket of his suit jacket and he hoped the bulge didn’t show. He didn’t want to give it to her yet. Before dessert, maybe, when they were both replete with good food and just pleasantly mellow from a glass or two of wine.
He curved his arm around her bare shoulders as they walked into the five-star restaurant together. Her shoulders were sun-warmed and touched with pink and perfectly smooth. He wanted to pull her close, but this was a public place and he hadn’t been raised to feel comfortable about full-on displays of affection in front of strangers. Instead, he let his hand slide down to the small of her back and recognized his own sense of proud possession.
She turns every head in the room, and she’s with me.
He was dizzy about it. Even dizzier an hour and a half into their meal, after a little more wine than he’d planned.
“I’m having a great time,” he told her.
“Me, too.” She smiled. “You can be pretty funny, do you know that?”
“So can you.”
He’d never felt like this before. An ambitious young doctor didn’t have much time to devote to finding the right woman. Of course he’d dated. During his internship, three years ago, he’d been quite serious about a fellow doctor whom he’d met on his rotation through the E.R.
But it had been a nightmare, in the end. Adrienne was a single mother. She did a really great job with it but juggled the most horrific schedule. The deeper he went into the relationship, the more it appalled him. They went weeks without spending any kind of quality time together, and he wasn’t comfortable in the role of instant dad. As the eldest son in the McKinley family, he shared his father’s perception that they were building a dynasty, and he wanted kids of his own.
If Adrienne hadn’t had her own mother close at hand, she couldn’t possibly have managed motherhood and the demands of medical study, but it meant that MJ felt as if he was taking her mom on board as well as her son. Cynthia was a nice woman, but the countless hours of help she gave her daughter made her feel entitled to comment and judge and interfere at will about everything. He couldn’t blame her for that, but it didn’t mean he liked it.
To cut a long story short, the relationship hadn’t worked, and he’d come away from it after six months feeling as if there just wasn’t room for both people in a partnership to have such a full schedule and so many emotional demands.
He’d made a conscious decision at that point only to get involved with women who had a little less ambition and drive, and preferably not much baggage. A relationship shouldn’t be harder and more demanding than his career, for heck’s sake. A relationship was about downtime and emotional nourishment.
He’d only known Alicia for four months and wasn’t yet asking himself any questions about the future, but so far she gave him more emotional nourishment than any woman he’d ever met.
Just that smile …
“Dessert menu?” she asked.
“Wait a moment. I have something.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out the square, dark blue velvet box.
She saw it in his hand, went completely still as if in shock, put her fingertips against her mouth and swallowed. “Oh, MJ …” she breathed.
“Open it,” he said softly and passed it to her. She couldn’t take her eyes off it, and cradled it in her hand as if it was as fragile as a quail’s egg.
“Yes,” she said, half-laughing, almost in tears. “Oh, yes!”
Her fingers were shaking. It took her a good thirty seconds to get the box open, and there it was, the diamond hair clip dazzling white and gold against the deep blue. He’d had a private, hour-long session in the back room of the very exclusive Vegas jewelry store this afternoon, where