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I cleared the crowd and made it to the bottom of the steps. “Come on,” I said to her.
“Fifty-five thousand.”
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” I snapped.
The man holding up the paddle stood in the front row. He must have been pushing eighty, at least an entire foot shorter than me, and as far as I could tell, didn’t have many teeth left. But his suit screamed wealth, as did the neatly pressed pocket square.Old money.
Literally.
“Sixty-five,” I shot back. I climbed the steps, my patience waning.
“Please don’t spend that much money on me,” Ava said as I stepped up beside her. “You can talk to me after, just don’t?—”
“Any more offers?” David asked, his voice practically booming through the speakers as he leaned a little too close to the microphone. The man in the front who’d held up his paddle shook his head, turned, and pushed back into the crowd. “Sold, then, for sixty-five-thousand dollars to Adrian Stone.”
————
“You didn’t need to spend that much money to fucking talk to me,” Ava said quietly. I had one hand wrapped around her fingers and the other on her waist as we moved in time to the music.
Thankfully we weren’t the only ones on the dance floor, and I felt like I could breathe for a second without every single eye on us. There were still a few stares, though, of course. It would be hard for anyone not to notice her, not when she looked as beautiful as she did, not when she seemed to be the talk of the evening due to how much money I’d dropped on her.
I didn’t quite understand it—others had spent hundreds of thousands on auctioned stocks.
“Are you saying you would have answered the phone if I tried to call your real number?” I challenged, raising one brow at her.
Her cheeks, which had finally returned to a somewhat normal color, began to turn pink again. “Probably not.”
“Then I’d say sixty-five thousand dollars to speak to you was a decent enough purchase price when you’re clearly avoiding me,” I said.
Her lips thinned as she glanced up at me. “I…look, it must have been jarring for you when you realized, and I’m sorry about that. But we don’t need to speak about it.”
We shifted, and for a second, David Riley’s form came into view. He was deep in conversation across the room, his back to us, and I took my opportunity to ruffle her feathers a little without worrying about his reaction.
I leaned down closer to her, bringing my lips to the shell of her ear.
“Did you think I didn’t know who you were that night?” I asked, my voice barely more than a whisper. “Did you genuinely believe that you were fooling me by pretending you didn’t know me?”
Her hand squeezed mine like a fucking vice as we spun again, but my position held firm with the occasional glance at the back of David’s head. “You knew?”
A laugh bubbled up from my throat. “Of course, I fucking knew, Ava. You look different but not like an entirely different person.”
“You should have said?—”
I lifted my head, stretching my neck as I took her in. “You knew the moment you saw me. There’s not a chance you didn’t. Andyoudidn’t say a word.”
Her mouth parted before shutting again, her jaw steeling. Even annoyed, she looked like a fucking dream. “I should have.”
“Maybe we both should have,” I shrugged. “It wouldn’t have made a difference.”
She took an unexpected step back, her eyes widening and twinkling due to the chandeliers above us. “It absolutely would have made a difference, Adrian. None of it would have happened if we had been honest with one another.”
I slipped my arm around her waist instead of just holding it gently with my hand, pulling her body closer until it was flush with mine. “Liar,” I hissed. “It would have ended exactly the same. Don’t pretend like you wouldn’t have let me touch you just because I knew who you were.”
She swallowed, her throat bobbing as her eyes flicked up to meet mine. Her nose and her cheeks were turning a bright fucking red, and if I wasn’t surrounded by a sea of eyes, I probably would have done something far more drastic than just watching her.
“Do you want to lie again and tell me you haven’t thought about it?” I challenged, my lips tugging upward as I slowly released her hand. I let the fingers of my free hand brush against the front of her neck as I swept a lock of hair off of it, and the way her breath caught sent my blood rushing to my cock. “God, you have.”
She didn’t say a fucking word, but her eyes narrowed at me, turning almost to slits as she stared me down.
