like he wanted these photos flashed around the corridors of The Hollywood Hills Clinic. At least, not all of them. Which begged the question of why he hadn’t just tossed the more questionable pictures.
Why? Because he didn’t trust his own judgment, that’s why. He could be seeing things that weren’t there. Things that were remnants of days gone by. Maybe Mila would glance through them and not bat an eye. It wasn’t like there was anything suggestive about them.
They just looked...cozy. Not a word he would use to describe their current relationship.
Strained. Awkward. Difficult. Those were much more accurate terms. And if Mila didn’t desperately need the funding that his medical center could provide, he had no doubt she would have refused to work with him in the first place.
All of this was because of Freya.
He eyed the entry plaque of the Très Magnifique with its gold-plated edging for the fifth time. Still no sign of his dinner date. He had always been punctual to the point of an obsession, while Mila had taken on the characteristics of the Brazilian people she’d worked with over the years. With them it was about relationships and not about the hands on a clock.
And exactly which relationship was she cultivating this time? The one with that firefighter she used to date? Was she seeing him again? If so, what did the man think of his girlfriend going out to dinner with a former lover?
It wasn’t dinner. It was a business date.
And yet it made his skin chill to think of Mila as anyone’s girlfriend. But he’d given up the right to that title—or the title of fiancé—a long time ago. One stupid lie had changed everything. And it hadn’t even been his lie. But that, combined with his father’s dark suggestion, had made him rethink the direction his life had been taking.
Everything with Mila had happened so fast, a flare-up of emotions he’d never realized he’d had.
But Mila was all about family and helping those in need. Maybe because her parents had died, and she’d been left alone.
Family, unfortunately, was the exact thing James hoped to avoid. His own family had been a disaster. Between the tabloids, the violent arguments and his father’s very real infidelities James had always been leery of steady relationships. Then Mila had come along, and he hadn’t been able to resist anything about her. For the first time he’d started thinking about forever.
Until Cindy and his father had destroyed the fairy tale. And that’s all it had been. Mila had never tried to contact him once he’d ended things. Never really tried to ask why he’d backed out of their wedding at the last minute.
If she’d truly loved him, wouldn’t she have wanted to probe a little deeper? Instead, she’d accepted his “it just won’t work between us...we want different things out of life” explanation at face value.
“Sorry to keep you waiting.” The breathless voice rushing toward him brought the gavel down on his thoughts.
Tightening his hold on the attaché case he carried, he turned to look at her. The fact that the first place his gaze parked was her lips, looking for any signs that she’d been kissed recently, irritated him. He focused on what time it was instead. “I see some things never change.”
That soft mouth he’d been staring at tightened in warning. “I had a patient.”
Damn. She was a doctor. Why had the possibility she’d gotten delayed due to a case never crossed his mind?
Maybe for the same reason that he saw coy glances passing between them in those pictures.
And she was only six minutes late. It only felt like he’d been waiting for her forever.
Hell, he remembered thinking almost those exact same words at their first meeting. The one where she’d called him a toad.
Unfortunately for Mila, he’d never really perfected the transformation into a prince. And she’d discovered far too late that she should have bypassed kissing him altogether.
Except he hadn’t given her much of a choice, insisting that she dance with him.
Forcing himself to come back to the present, he motioned toward the door. “They’re holding our table for us. Shall we?”
Mila glanced at the sign, and then the hand-carved door, her teeth catching her lower lip.
Had she been here before?
Not likely. This wasn’t the kind of place the Mila he’d known would have frequented. So why had he brought her here?
The hostess guided them through the front part of the fancy establishment, and James tensed as his glance trailed over Mila’s formfitting dress and the staccato twitch of her hips as she followed the woman. She didn’t generally like dressing up, and when she’d heard the name of the restaurant there’d been a long pause over the phone before she’d finally accepted the invitation.
Now that they were here, he realized he should have made sure the restaurant knew this was a business dinner and nothing more—because the employee was taking them back to the table he was normally seated at when he dined here: a secluded spot in the very corner, away from prying eyes...and cameras.
He probably should have chosen a different place to eat. But they knew him here and it was generally easier to get a last-minute reservation than at the places where celebrities normally hung out. There were some of those at Très Magnifique as well, but the dim lighting, specially coated glass and tight security made it hard for the paparazzi to gain access to its patrons. Another reason why this was one of his go-to restaurants.
The distaste of having his face splashed across the tabloids was a holdover from his childhood, when his parents’ every move had made the front pages. James had seen his own mistakes—including his broken engagement—paraded for all the world to see. Because of that, he’d become adept at avoiding the places those kinds of photographers frequented.
Mila slid into her seat, setting her small clutch purse on a corner of the table. “I assume you have them with you.”
He had to smile at the way she lowered her voice, since it mirrored some of his own thoughts. Leaning forward, he mimicked her hushed tones.
“Yes. I have them. They’re in my briefcase. But I think you went into the wrong line of work, Mi.”
“Come again?”
“You should have been a spy.”
Her lips went up as well. “Am I being too paranoid about this whole thing?”
A possible reason for her behavior slid up from somewhere inside him. He didn’t know if she’d started seeing someone else since breaking up with Tyler, but it was a possibility. Or maybe they’d even gotten back together. “Will this be a problem for your boyfriend? I’d be happy to call him and explain, if you’d like.” Although the last thing he wanted to do was call Mila’s boyfriend and tell him this meeting was purely platonic.
Not when the last thing he wanted it to be was platonic.
Not with her sitting across from him in a dark green dress that hugged her form and showed just a touch of creamy curves at the neckline. Curves he’d once explored at his leisure.
