of his car.
She straightened and draped her bright purple wrap over her bare shoulders, giving herself a little look in the small mirror that hung in her living room on her way to the door of her apartment.
The door opened just as she reached it.
“Were you going to leave me freezing on the front step?”
“It’s San Diego. It’s not freezing. And you’re in the temperature-controlled hallway.”
“It’s the principle,” he said.
“I had to say goodbye to Ana. Do you want to see her?”
A strange look crossed his face. Confusion, fear, then boredom. “No.”
“Oh, sorry. Most people like babies, you know,” she said, stepping out into the hall, closing the door behind her.
“I have no interest in having any of my own. I’m not certain why it would be important for me to like babies.”
“They’re cute.”
“Yes, so are puppies but I don’t want one.”
“A baby isn’t a puppy,” she said.
He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter to me for the reason previously stated.”
She rolled her eyes and pushed the button on the elevator. “Right. Well. I hope Ana and I don’t disturb you too much when we live in your home, as you don’t want a wife or a child.”
“It’s a large house,” he said, his words carrying a stiff undertone, as if he didn’t believe it would be large enough.
The doors to the elevator slid open and they both stepped inside. She’d never noticed how small elevators really were before she’d taken to riding in them with Dante Romani. He made everything feel smaller. Tighter. Because he filled the space he was in so absolutely.
It wasn’t just because he was well over six feet tall and broad, either. It was his charisma, the dark energy that radiated from him. He was so unobtainable, so uninterested in what was happening around him. It made you want to go and grab his attention. Made you want to be in his sphere. To make him seem interested. To make him smile.
To make him laugh.
At least she did, but she was good at that. Making people laugh and smile. Defusing tension with antics and jokes. And she had, apparently, not learned her lesson about unobtainable men.
She nearly opened her mouth to make one when her eyes locked with his and the breath leached from her body.
His dark eyes roamed over her curves, taking in every inch of her. And she was reminded again of their exchange last night.
What else will you teach me to like?
Oh, no, no, no. She wasn’t going there. She never had before, no reason to start now.
Besides, Dante could have any woman he wanted, on the terms he chose. He had no reason to start lusting after her pink-striped self.
She’d grown up in a small town, and every guy she knew had known her from the time they were in kindergarten together. They knew that she talked too much, and that she very often laughed too loud. That she had trouble paying attention in class. That she’d cut a boy’s tongue with her braces during her first kiss. They knew that she’d been the focus of what had essentially been the senior prank. They knew that she’d barely passed high school, that her parents hadn’t seen the point of paying for her to go to college when she just wouldn’t apply herself. They’d watched her get a job at a coffee shop instead of going away to school like everyone else.
They had all watched her grow from an awkward kid, to an awkward teen, to an awkward adult. It was like living in a fishbowl. And being the slow fish with the crippled fin. Nothing like her straight-A achieving sister and her football-star brother.
She was just … Paige. And it had always seemed like a pitifully small accomplishment, just being her. For most of her life, she’d accepted it. She’d just put on the image they’d applied to her and owned it. So much easier than trying to be anything else.
But there was a point, as she was pouring a cup of coffee for her fiftieth customer of the day, who asked her about her brother or sister, and not about her, that she couldn’t do it anymore.
A week later she’d moved. Just so she could be new to a place. So she had a hope of finding who she was apart from the painful averageness that marked her life.
It hadn’t been an instant transformation, no sudden rise to the top of the social heap. But she’d made a small group of friends. She’d found her job at Colson’s. That provided her with the first real sense of pride she’d ever had in a job.
They’d seen her raw talent and they’d hired her based on that, not based on classroom performance. Colson’s, and by extension, Dante, was her first experience with being believed in.
Strange.
She cast him a sideways glance. He was tall and … rigid in his tux. Each line of his suit jacket conforming to his physique with precision. Dante was never ruffled. She envied that a little bit. Or a lot of a bit, truth be told. She was captivated by it, really, his control. His perfection. His beauty. It was a dark, masculine beauty, nothing soft or traditionally pretty about him. It made her want to look at him, and keep looking.
The elevator doors slid open and they walked out of her apartment building and to the street. There was a black car parked against the curb, waiting for them, she assumed.
Dante opened the back door for her and she slid inside. She’d never ridden in a car with a driver before. Not even a taxi. She always drove her own seen-better-days car.
“It will be nice not being the one fighting traffic for a change,” she said when Dante got in on the other side and settled into the seat beside her.
“Mmm,” he said, taking his phone out of his pocket and devoting his attention to checking his email.
And just like that, the hot guy wasn’t looking at her anymore. Typical.
She let her gaze wander to her left hand, to her still-bare ring finger. “Oh … didn’t you … you were going to give me a ring before tonight, weren’t you?”
He set his phone down. “Yes,” he said. “I don’t know why you’re intent on spoiling the surprise.”
“Uh … because it’s not a surprise.”
“Perhaps I had something planned.”
She didn’t think he was serious. But with Dante it was hard to tell. Still, she couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like, to have a man like him do the get-down-on-one-knee thing and ask her to be his wife. To look at her with intensity in those dark eyes and …
“So, ring?” She held out her hand and tried to shut out the little fantasy that was playing in the back of her mind.
Forget a dream proposal. She should aim for a kiss that wasn’t a disaster first.
Her reached into the inner pocket of his suit jacket and produced a velvet box. “Be my wife, et cetera,” he said, opening the box, revealing a pear-shaped emerald surrounded by diamonds.
“It’s … wow.” Hard not to be completely floored when a gorgeous man was giving you a beautiful ring. “How did you know I liked green?”
“Your eye shadow,” he said.
She looked up, as if she could see it. “Oh.”
“And I thought the color and style would suit you. Sedate doesn’t seem to be your thing.”
“Uh … no. Not so much.”
“Put it on,” he said.
“What? Oh, yeah.” She looked down at the ring and a clawing sense of dread made her chest tighten.