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Her mouth popped open but shut just as fast, her head whipping toward the restaurant and back to me. “The OnTheGo?”
I nodded. “Yeah. Black, right?”
She shifted side to side on her feet, weighing up my offer. “Why do you have to fucking tempt me?”
“Because my dad has too much money and I have nothing to spend it on but silly stuff,” I said, feeling her imminentyesand the relief it brought. “And because I’m desperate.”
She groaned as she took a step back, nearly slamming into a man in the most boring suit I’d ever seen. “Fine,” she said. “Meet by the bull in one hour.”
————
Emily stood on the edge of the corner by the bull, just off to the side of the crowd of people desperate to take their photograph touching its bronze testicles.
With her arms folded across her chest and the binder tucked beneath them, she looked around anxiously as I approached, the carrier bag from Louis Vuitton clutched in my grasp. It didn’t fill me with the extra reassurance I was hoping for, but all I could do as I stood on the other side of the street waiting for the pedestrian crossing to activate, was pray that maybe she was just nervous about Adrian being in the same area and potentially seeing me.
The light turned green, and I crossed with the crowd, making a beeline directly for her.
“How was it?” I asked, passing her the bag in exchange for my binder. I flipped it open, glancing at all the little notes she’d made as she started to speak.
“It went fine,” she said, but there was tension in her voice. “He called me Ava and answered all of the questions. He was really nice.”
I looked up at her over the edge of the binder, clutching the sharp edge as a tourist bus with an open top drove past us, kicking up the cold air and battering the both of us. “You’re not telling me something.”
She hadn’t even opened her bag yet. And that look on her face, the worry in her voice, whatever it was, it was fucking obvious—something had gone terribly wrong, and once again, bile burned at my esophagus.
Her lips pressed together as she pushed the little tendrils of blonde curls out of her face. “When I went to leave,” she started, her eyes shifting from me to the people around us, “he stopped me. He said, and I quote, ‘tell Ava that I know who she is, and I don’t like these games’.”
Chapter 8
Adrian
The ballroom at Cipriani was completely packed to the brim with men and women and everything in between, in expensive attire. Golds, blacks, and maroon seemed to be the most popular choices. I assumed it had more to do with the logo for the charity being those colors than any kind of organized collaboration with the attendees as I stood at the far end of the room overseeing my staff. I blended right in with my all-black, three-piece tuxedo.
Everything seemed to be running smoothly so far. The managers were running a tight ship and handling every instance of stock shortages or payment troubles, and my presence was almost unnecessary.
I would have gone home if I wasn’t positive that Ava would be in attendance tonight.
She hadn’t dared to reach out following the meeting with whomever she’d sent in her place. I’d considered calling the number her father had given me, but I knew that she couldn’t avoid me forever—even if she had her assistant sending all of her correspondence to me. And she absolutely couldn’t avoid mehere.
“Almost done, folks. The next item for auction is a three-night stay at The Peninsula in London,” the man across the room announced. He stood in the middle of the stage behind a podium and in front of the massive, curtained window, the music at the back of the room almost drowning him out. He was older, maybe nearing seventy, with almost shoulder-length hair and small glasses on his nose as he read out from the sheet below him. The crowd in front of him raised paddles in response to numbers I didn’t pay attention to—my thoughts were far too focused on Ava.
I could have let a sleeping dog lie if it hadn’t been for the stunt she’d pulled last week. I could have gone through with the meeting, played my part, and maybe mentioned in passing that we would never speak of what happened. But she had made a mountain out of a fucking molehill, and I was prepared to challenge her on it.
I just had to find her first.
After grabbing a glass of wine from the bar, I crossed the patterned marble floor toward the other end of the hall through the sea of people. I kept my eyes alert for a head of auburn hair, but each time I spotted her hair color, the person was either too old, too tall, or too wide to be her. But David had confirmed with me that she’d be in attendance, and I was fucking counting on it.
“Sold for two-thousand, eight-hundred, and fifty dollars.”
The projected display to one side of the man presenting, showed a tally of how much money the auction had raised for charity so far, but the gauge had already met its peak. The goal had been met and exceeded by nearly two hundred thousand. I doubted there was much more that would sell for exorbitant prices, but my curiosity got the better of me.
Until a flash of perfectly waved, deep red hair snagged my attention from the side of the stage on the right.
There she is.
She was standing beside her father in a deep emerald, satin dress that clung to her upper body like a second skin before cascading down from her hips. There was a slit up to the middle of her thigh, and her hair fell pristinely around her shoulders with little sections pinned back from the front. She made me lose my fucking breath.
She’d looked beautiful when I’d seen her at the museum. But this…this was another level.
