He closed his own eyes. “I told you I had my once-in-a-lifetime love, remember?”
“Yes, of course I do. But what has that got to do with marriage?”
Tristan turned her in his arms and tucked her up close to his body, trying not to remember how perfectly they’d fit together when making love despite the differences in their heights. Once he’d been buried hilt-deep in her body, he’d felt the perfection of it.
He drew her back into his arms, lowering his head once more, wanting to take her mouth and stop her questions.
But she pulled away. “No more. I want you, but I want answers, too. I don’t understand why you won’t really marry me.”
“It is not you,” he said, the words spilling out. “I will never marry again.”
“Then why pretend to be engaged?”
He pushed his hands through his hair and turned his back on her. He couldn’t look at her and lie. When she’d said she couldn’t lie to him, in the office a few short weeks ago, he’d had no idea what she felt like. Now he did.
And he wasn’t giving her up. He hadn’t gotten Sheri Donnelly out of his system yet and he wasn’t going to let her go until he did.
“It’s the only way I can protect you the way I want to, ma petite.”
“Why do I need protecting?”
“Because this is my world and I seduced you without thinking of the consequences.”
“You didn’t force me to sleep with you,” she said, cheeky tone in place.
“I know that, Sheri. But you weren’t aware of what it is like to be hounded by the press and I should have taken steps to protect you and your identity from them.”
Even if she’d known how things would turn out this morning, Sheri doubted that she would have not gone with Tristan last night. Even now, sitting in a well-appointed formal living room surrounded by the entire Sabina family, she didn’t regret her decision.
Tristan sat next to her, his arm resting casually over her shoulders. He toyed with her hair, something he did a lot. Sitting there she felt a sense of rightness all the way to her soul and she knew she’d said yes to his outrageous proposal for one reason and one reason alone. She was going to find a way to make Tristan Sabina fall in love with her.
She was going to do everything in her power to keep this man who’d stayed. And she was coming to realize that Tristan gave her clues all the time about what it was that he enjoyed about her.
If she paid attention, she could be what he needed her to be for him to fall in love with her. It didn’t have to be the all-encompassing love that he’d had with his late wife. She’d be satisfied with just some kind of deep caring from him.
She settled into the curve of his body as Rene lifted his champagne flute and said something in French that she couldn’t understand. Tristan squeezed her shoulder and lifted his own flute. So she did the same, taking a delicate sip of the delicious French sparkling wine.
Tristan leaned closer to Sheri and whispered directly in her ear. “Rene said that he wishes us happiness and laughter all the days of our lives.”
She smiled up at him. “Well, I want that, too.”
Tristan’s eyes narrowed a bit but he dropped a quick kiss on her nose. She realized that he was going to fight her the entire time. Try to keep her in the role of pretend fiancée. And the only way she was going to get him to think of her as anything else was to make him need her.
He needed her body, but was sex enough? Could she hold him with sex when she’d never really tried to keep any of her previous lovers…? Okay, there hadn’t been that many, but she had to look at it from a historical perspective.
Blanche stood up next. Tristan’s sister made Lucille look like a country bumpkin. She was simply elegant and sophisticated. She spoke in a sweet tone, smiling indulgently toward Tristan.
Again the toast was in French. Tristan didn’t lift his glass this time. Instead he put it on the table and stood up, leaving the room without a comment.
Sheri felt awkward. “I’m sorry, my French isn’t good enough to know what you said.”
Blanche shook her head. “I just said that we were happy to see him moving past the pain of heartache and moving into a new love.”
But the way they were all staring at her, she realized they knew what she’d known all along. That Tristan wasn’t in love with her. It was fine for the two of them to know that lust was all they had between them. But his family…
“I’m not the love of his life,” she said.
“I’m not so sure about that, Sheri. You’re the first woman he’s brought to meet us in eight years.”
Sheri took small comfort in that. “Will you please excuse me?”
“Of course. If you are looking for Tristan, try the third floor. Fourth door on the left.”
She left the room without another word. Walking slowly through the house, she was reminded again that there was a huge difference between her and Tristan. This one—the material things—didn’t seem as big a deal as their difference in willingness to love.
Tristan was such a dominant, arrogant man, she had a hard time imagining that he was afraid of anything, especially falling in love again.
But those rumors about his first marriage…about his first wife… She needed to find out exactly what she was up against.
She climbed the curving staircase, looking at the huge portraits hung on the walls. Pictures of men who resembled Tristan, and some portraits of people who were vaguely familiar to her. His famous grandparents, she thought.
He’d grown up surrounded by a rich history, whereas she had only what she took with her. Aunt Millie’s warm memory and the cold emptiness of her father’s desertion.
She got to the third floor. At the landing there was an upholstered chaise centered under a dominant portrait of the Sabina siblings when they were younger…probably late teens, she thought.
Blanche was seated in the center and Rene and Tristan stood on either side of her. Blanche was elegant even as a teenager, smiling beguilingly out of the portrait. Rene was serious and even then looked as if he were all business. And Tristan. Her heart caught in her throat. He was laughing, very much the rebel in his casual rock T-shirt, whereas his siblings were dressed to the nines.
She had never seen an expression like that on Tristan’s face and she thought that this is the part of him that died when his wife did.
She reached out to touch his face, letting her fingers hover over the curve of his mouth. It felt like what she’d done so many times in her apartment late at night. Lusting after a man she couldn’t have.
And now that she had the Tristan she’d thought she wanted, she realized he only was giving her half of himself. The part he thought she’d accept without question.
And
