can announce our engagement to all of New York.”
“It’s a mistake!”
“Let me worry about that.”
“Okay, but…”
“But what?”
A shadow crossed her face. “But I don’t love you anymore.”
He felt a strange emotion, deep down inside. He crushed it down before he could identify what it was.
“I do not need your love. I can assure you that you’ll never have mine. Love is for children. I just need your compliance.” When she still hesitated, he took a deliberate step back. “Or I can walk out that door and go straight to my lawyer.”
Letty looked wistful in the gray light from the small window. She sighed sadly. “Have it your way.”
“You’ll marry me?”
She nodded.
He felt a surge of smug masculine triumph. “Good choice.”
Pulling her roughly into his arms, he did what he’d yearned to do for six months and kissed her.
From the moment he felt her lips against his and tasted her sweetness—her mouth, her tongue—he was lost, and at the same time, found. Her lips parted, and as she melted against him, he savored her surrender. His body and long-dead soul roared back to life.
Letty wrenched away. “But first, you’ll take me to your charity ball tonight. And see firsthand what it would be like to actually have me as your wife.”
“Good—”
“Just remember.” She gave him a crooked smile. “You asked for it.”
LETTY ALMOST DIDN’T leave a note for her father. Her anger at his betrayal was too high. But in the end she didn’t want him to worry, so she scribbled a note and left it on the counter.
Out with Darius, and I’m never talking to you again.
Darius had taken one look at her closet and told her he was taking her shopping for the ball. She’d tried to protest, but he’d retorted, “There’s no point in announcing our engagement if you turn up at the ball dressed in rags. No one would believe it.”
“Fine,” she said sulkily. “Waste your money on a ball gown. See if I care.”
But she had the sudden disconcerting feeling that her life was no longer her own.
As she climbed into his sports car, her stomach growled with hunger. But she vowed she wasn’t going to say a word about it. It was bad enough he was buying her a dress. She wasn’t going to ask him for food, like a beggar!
But as Darius climbed into the driver’s seat beside her, all her senses went on high alert. Having him so close did strange things to her insides. As he drove through the busy traffic, she glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. His dark hair wasn’t even mussed, and his powerful body was relaxed in the leather seat. He looked so much calmer than she felt.
But why wouldn’t he be relaxed?
He’d won.
She’d lost.
Simple as that.
Or so Darius thought. Letty clasped her hands together in her lap as she looked out the window. Once he actually saw what life would be like for him with her at his side, he wouldn’t be able to get rid of her fast enough. Maybe she and her father could still be on that bus to Rochester tomorrow.
Darius didn’t yet see that her family’s scandal wasn’t something he could master or control. That was why he’d been so angry that she’d protected him ten years ago with her silence. He still somehow thought, if he’d known the truth back then, he could have prevented disaster.
She looked up through the window, seeing flashes of blue sky between the skyscrapers like a strobe light. Darius would get a dose of reality today. He’d discover how toxic the Spencer name was, even now. It had been even worse at the time of her father’s arrest and trial, when reporters and angry, tomato-throwing hecklers had camped outside her father’s pied-à-terre on Central Park West!
Let Darius get just a glimpse of what he would have been up against if she’d actually followed her heart and married him ten years ago instead of setting him free. He didn’t appreciate the way she’d tried to protect him? Fine. Still staring out the window, she wiped her eyes hard. Let him just see.
The rain had stopped. The sky was blue and bright on the first of September. As they drove through Manhattan, puddle-dotted sidewalks were full of gawking tourists, standing still like islands as a current of New Yorkers rushed past them, coming up from the subway, hurrying back to work after lunch.
When their car stopped at a red light, Letty glanced at a fancy chauffeured town car stopped beside them. In the backseat, she saw a man speaking angrily into his phone and staring at a computer tablet, totally wrapped in his own bubble. Rich people lived in a separate world. Letty hadn’t fully realized that.
Not until she’d fallen out of it.
After her father’s confession that awful night long ago, after she’d tried her best to protect Darius and his father by getting them away from the manor, she’d begged Howard to go to the police and throw himself on their mercy.
He’d loved her, so a few months later he’d done it.
The police and Feds had descended on him like the hard-case criminal they believed him to be. Within six months, he was in prison on a nine-year sentence.
Letty had tried to remain in one of the exclusive small towns on Long Island near Fairholme. But it proved impossible. Too many people recognized her and didn’t hesitate to yell or even—more than once—physically take the few dollars in her wallet, saying her father owed them. Manhattan had been even worse, and anyway was way out of her price range. So she’d moved to a working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn where she could be anonymous. No one bothered her. Mostly, people were kind.
But without money or family or friends, Letty had learned the hard way what it meant to struggle and always have too much month at the end of her paycheck.
No one likes self-pity. Help someone else, baby. Letty could almost hear the whisper of her mother’s voice, so kind, so warm, so loving. Almost see her mother’s eyes glowing with love. The best way to feel better when you’re sad is to help someone who’s hurting more.
Good advice.
Taking a deep breath, Letty turned to Darius in the sports car. “So tell me about your charity, the one benefiting from the Fall Ball tonight.”
Driving, he glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. “It provides college scholarships for foster kids.”
“Nice,” she said, surprised. “But I never pegged you as the society-ball-hosting
