another way, it was disquieting.
Because it was just another way Renzo might have changed her. What if she got used to this? What if she missed it? She didn’t want that.
She shook that thought off immediately as the city drew closer.
This was what mattered. The experience. Not the lushness of the car. But where she was. She wasn’t going to change in that regard. Not that much. She had been sort of distressed when she had realized fully that her parents might have had some points when they’d lectured her about consequences.
And what she had already known was that the way they had instilled the lack of materialism in her really had mattered. It really had made a difference. And it made it a lot easier for her to pick up and travel around. While a lot of her various roommates in the different hostels had been dismayed by conditions, she had been grateful for a space of her own.
Independence was the luxury. She would remember that.
She and Renzo completed the ride down into Manhattan in silence. She remained silent all through their arrival at the hotel. It was incredible, with broad stone steps leading up to the entry. The lobby was tiled in a caramel-color stone, shot through with veins of deeper gold. It wasn’t a large room. In fact, the hotel itself had a small, exclusive quality to it. But it was made to feel even more special as a result.
As though only a handful of people could ever hope to experience it.
The room, however, that had been reserved for herself and Renzo was not small. It took up the entire top of the building, bedrooms on one end and a large common living area in the center. The windows looked out over Central Park, and she stood there transfixed, gazing at the green square surrounded by all of the man-made grit and gray.
“This is amazing,” she said, turning back to face him, her throat constricting when she saw him.
He was standing there, deft fingers loosening the knot on his black tie. He pulled it through his shirt collar, then undid the top button. And she found herself more transfixed by the view before her than by the one that was now behind her.
The city. She was supposed to be focusing on the city. On the hotel. On the fact that it was a new experience. She was not supposed to be obsessing on the man before her. She was not supposed to be transfixed by the strong, bronzed column of his throat. By the wedge of golden skin he revealed when he undid that top button. And not just skin. Hair. Dark chest hair that was just barely visible and captured her imagination in a way that stunned her.
It was just very male. And she knew from experience that so was he. His kiss had been like that. Very like a man. So different to her. Conquering, hard. While she had softened, yielded.
No. She would not think about that. She wouldn’t think about yielding to him.
“What do you think of your first sight of New York?”
“Amazing,” she said, grateful that he was asking about the city and not about his chest. “Like I said. It’s big and busy like London, but different, too. The energy is different.”
He frowned slightly, tilting his head to the side. “The energy is different.” He nodded slowly. “I suppose that’s true. Though, I had never thought of it quite that way.”
“Well, you’ve never sat on the floor and eaten your cereal in a sunbeam either.”
“Correct.”
“Noticing energy is more the sort of thing someone who’d eat their cereal on the floor in a sunbeam would do.”
“I would imagine that’s true.”
“You’re too busy to notice things like that. The real estate development business is...busy, I guess.”
“Yes. Even during slow times in the economy, it’s comparably busy if you’ve already got a massive empire.”
“And you do,” she said.
“I would think that was obvious by now.”
“Yes. Pretty obvious.” She forced herself to turn away from him, forced herself to look back at the view again. “I find cities so very interesting. The anonymity of them. You can be surrounded by people and still be completely alone. Where I grew up, there were less people. By far there were less people. But it felt like you were never alone. And not just because I lived in the house with so many other people. But because every time you stepped outside you would meet somebody you knew. You could never just have a bad day.”
He lifted a shoulder. “I am rarely anonymous when I go out.”
She frowned. “I suppose you aren’t. I mean, I would never have known who you were. I’m not metropolitan enough.”
“You’re certainly working on it.”
She looked down at the outfit that had been chosen for her to travel in. Dark jeans and a white top. She supposed she looked much more metropolitan than she had only a few weeks ago. But it wasn’t her. And none of this belonged to her either.
“The appearance of it at least.” She regarded him more closely. “I suppose you can’t exactly have a public bad day either.”
He chuckled, the sound dark, rolling over her like a thick summer night. “Of course I can. I can do whatever I like, behave as badly as I like. I’m Renzo Valenti, and no one is going to lecture me on decorum.”
“Except maybe your mother.”
He laughed again. “Oh, yes, she most definitely would. But there is nothing my parents can do to me.” He looked past her, at the city visible through the large windows. “They gave me too much freedom for too long, and now I have too much power. All they can do is direct their disapproval at me with as much fervor as humanly possible. A pity for them, but rather a win for me, don’t you think?”
“In some ways approval and disapproval is power, isn’t it?” She thought of her own family. Of the fact that what had kept her rooted in her childhood home for so long was the knowledge that if she should ever leave she would never be able to go back. That if she ever stepped foot out of line her father would disown her. Would turn all of her siblings against her, would forbid her mother from having any contact with her. It was the knowledge that the disapproval would carry so much weight she would be cut off completely, and in order to make even one decision of her own she would have to be willing to accept that as a consequence.
“I suppose.”
“You don’t believe me. But that just means that your parents’ approval doesn’t come with strings.”
That made him laugh again, and he wandered over to the bar, taking out a bottle of Scotch and pouring himself a drink. She wouldn’t have known what the amber-colored alcohol was only a few months ago, but waiting tables had educated her.
“Now, that isn’t true. It’s only that I possess a certain amount of string-pulling power myself. So what you have is a power struggle more than a fait accompli.”
“That’s what I needed,” she said, “strings.”
Of course, that was what actually hurt, she concluded, standing there and turning over what he said. The fact that she wasn’t
