she wondered why.
“How’s that working out for you?”
“Until today,” she admitted, “pretty good.”
He walked closer and Tula backed up. She was feeling a little vulnerable at the moment and the last thing she needed was to be too near Simon. She kept moving until the backs of her knees hit the ledge of the cushioned window seat. Abruptly, she sat down and her surprise must have shown on her face.
He chuckled and asked, “Am I making you nervous, Tula?”
“Of course not,” she replied, while her mind was screaming, Yes! Everything about him was suddenly making her nervous and she wasn’t sure how to handle it. Since she’d met him, he’d irritated her, intrigued her. But this anxiousness was a new sensation.
Tula knew everyone thought of her as flaky. The crazy artist. But she wasn’t really. She had always known what she wanted. She lived the way she liked and made no apologies for it. She always knew who was in her life and what they meant to her.
At least, she had until Simon. But he was a whole different ball game. He went from insulting her to seducing her. He made her furious one moment and hot and achy the next. For a man who had so loved his routine, he was becoming entirely too unpredictable.
She couldn’t seem to pin him down. Or guess what he was going to do or say. She had thought him just another staid businessman, but he was more than that. She simply wasn’t sure what that meant for her. Which made her a little nervous, though she’d never admit to it. So to keep herself steady, she started talking again.
“You’ve heard my story, so tell me, how did wearing a three-piece suit by the age of two affect you?”
He gave her a half smile and sat down beside her on the window seat. Turning his head, he stared through the glass at the winter afternoon behind them.
A storm was piling up on the horizon, Tula saw as she followed his gaze. Thunderclouds huddled together in a dark gray mass that promised rain by evening. Already, the wind was picking up, sending the naked branches of the trees in the park into a frenzied dance. Mothers gathered up their children as the sky darkened further and soon the park was as empty as Tula felt.
When Simon finally spoke, his voice was so soft, she nearly missed it. “You think you’ve got me figured out, do you?”
She studied him, trying to read his eyes. But it was as if he’d drawn a shutter over them, locking himself away from her.
“I thought so,” she admitted and her confusion must have been evident in her tone. “When I first met you, you reminded me of…someone I used to know,” she said, picturing her father, fierce gaze locked on some hapless employee. “But the more I got to know you, the more I realized that I didn’t know you at all. Well, that made no sense,” she ended with a laugh.
“Yeah, it did,” Simon said, shifting to look at her again, closing off the outside world with the intensity of his gaze. Making her feel as if she were the only thing in the world that mattered at the moment.
“Simon…”
“Nobody is what they look like on the surface,” he murmured, features carefully blank and unreadable as he studied her. “I’m just really realizing that.”
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