of his daughter. The daughter whose name he could barely stand to think, even after all these years. The daughter he sometimes saw across the room, through crowds of people, growing from a child into a young woman. Without him. Without ever knowing.
The idea of being a distant father again, even if his children were in the nursery and he was downstairs seeing to his routine while they were cared for by others, was too much.
“My life will change.” He reiterated that, as much for himself as for her.
“I have a feeling mine will, too.”
“Yes. Because of all the money that I will pay you.”
“No,” she said, her tone fierce now. “Because I was naive. Because I was foolish to think that I could do this and feel nothing. That I could do this and simply walk away with a check at the end. This experience is never going to go away. I... I’m going to be changed,” she said, sounding sad now, broken. “I thought that everything would be fine because I was committed to having this life or I didn’t have ties and strings and any of those things that I was trying to avoid. But that’s not true. Everything has consequences.” She laughed. “I think I pushed that out of my mind. Because it was something that my father used to talk about. Consequences for actions. How everything you do will come back to you. How distressing to find out that not everything my parents taught me is wrong.”
“That is usually the case,” he said, her words hitting him in an uncomfortable place yet again. “Tragic though it may seem, no matter how difficult the situation, no matter how unreasonable your parents can be at times, they are often not entirely incorrect.”
She shook her head. “I’m going to bed.”
She turned away from him, and he reached out, grabbing hold of her arm and stopping her from going. “Remember,” he said, not quite sure what he was going to say. For a moment, he just stood there holding on to her, not certain of why he had prevented her from leaving. “Remember that we have to go to New York in two weeks. If you thought tonight was public, then what you encounter there will surprise you. If you need any kind of preparation in advance, I suggest you speak to me about it. Otherwise, I will assume that you know what you’re getting yourself into and I will expect you to behave accordingly.”
He released his hold on her. He knew he was being an ass, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to correct the behavior. Why should he?
Seduction, perhaps?
He gritted his teeth. Yes, that might have been the better path. To kiss her again, to soften her fears while he claimed that soft mouth of hers. And yet, he found he needed more distance from that initial kiss than another. More than he would like to admit.
“I think I can figure it out,” she said, her tone soft.
“See that you do.”
There were only a couple of weeks left until he would present her to the world as his fiancée. And at that point—his father was correct—it needed to be permanent. But Esther was hungry for experience. To see the world, to see all that life had to offer. And if there was anything that he possessed, it was access to what she craved.
He could give her glamour. He could give her excitement. He could—quite literally—show her the world.
And there was one more thing. Yet another that she would get from no other man, not in the way that he could give it. Passion. The two of them were combustible, there was no denying that after the kiss they had shared tonight. It was not a common kind of chemistry. He was a connoisseur of such things, and he should know.
Yes. New York would be the perfect place to spring his trap.
He would take her to the finest hotel, show her the finest art, take her to unsurpassed restaurants. And then when he took her back to that plush hotel and laid her on that big bed... He would make her his.
* * *
In the weeks since their engagement, they had settled into an odd sort of routine. They ate meals together—and she had none of them on the floor—and they shared polite conversation where he never once tried to kiss her.
He was interesting, and that was perplexing, because she found herself seeking him out in the evenings just so she could talk to him.
Then there were the books. Every day after work he brought her a new one. Small, hardbound travel guides. Paperback novels. Extremely strange history books that focused on odd subjects such as uniforms for different armies and the types of women’s clothing through the ages.
She’d asked him why, and he’d responded that it was so she could learn all the things she didn’t know. Just as she’d said she wanted to.
It made her feel...soft. She wasn’t sure she wanted that. She also wanted things to stay the same. In this strange, quiet lull where she felt like they were poised on the brink of something.
She liked being on the brink. It felt safe. Nothing too big, or too outside her experience.
Of course, it had to end. And she got her big shove over the brink when he came home from his office one day and swept her and all of her clothing up in a whirlwind of commands, packed her into his car and then summarily unpacked her on his private plane.
A private plane. Now, that she had not managed to imagine with any kind of accuracy. The horrors of traveling economy over the Atlantic had been something she hadn’t quite anticipated, but on the opposite end of the spectrum.
The long flight to New York seemed to pass quickly with her enveloped in the butter-soft leather of the recliner in the living area of Renzo’s plane. There was food that bore absolutely no resemblance to the meal she had been served on her crossing from the United States, and all manner of fresh juice and sparkling water.
Then, there was some kind of light, sweet cream cake that she could have eaten her weight in if she hadn’t been stopped by the landing preparation.
Renzo had spent the entire flight buried in work. That was neither completely surprising nor unwelcome. At least, it shouldn’t have been unwelcome. Except she had craved conversation but had instead settled for reading the book he’d gotten her for the flight, which strangely felt like him talking to her in some way.
She didn’t know why she was being weird about it. They were connected by the babies she was carrying, and that was it. They didn’t need to form more of a personal connection than they already had. More than that, it was probably best if they didn’t.
She did her best not to think about that kiss. She did her best not to think of it as she was ushered off the plane and into another limousine. She did her best not to think of it as they made their way down the freeway, the famous Manhattan skyline coming into view.
That helped take her focus off Renzo and the strange ache in her chest.
New York. She had never been to New York. She had hoped to make it there someday, but her first inclination had been to get as far away from her parents as she possibly could, and that had meant taking a little sojourn around Europe.
But this was amazing. The kind of amazing that she hadn’t imagined she would experience in her lifetime. At least, not when you combined it with the flight over. In some ways it was a relief to see that Renzo was making good on his promise. To show her a part of the world that she couldn’t have seen without him. The way that
