The Wealthy Frenchman's Proposition (8 page)

She closed her eyes, reaching out with her mind to her aunt. She wished she could feel Millie’s arms around her once again. She was so tired of being alone. Of facing every situation on her own.

She heard the sound of footsteps and glanced over her shoulder as Tristan approached. He looked grim, and she wondered if the paparazzi had followed them and were now camped out on his parents’ doorstep.

She stood up. “Is something wrong?”

He shook his head. “Sit down.”

She sank back down onto the lounge chair. It was thickly cushioned, probably more comfortable than the old mattress she slept on at home.

“What’s up?”

“I’ve decided the best way to handle the paparazzi is to take charge of the situation.”

She liked the sound of that. “Good. Running away seems cowardly to me.”

He gave her a faint smile. “You never fail to amaze me,” he said, and for once that arrogant tone she associated with him wasn’t there.

“How am I doing that?” She usually glided through life being dependable or invisible. Which, she realized, was why the photographers had shaken her. She’d never stood out from the people she worked with or dealt with on a daily basis. How could she handle the attention of the world?

“By being calm about the photographers and my family. A quick flight out of Greece to Paris hasn’t seemed to upset you at all.”

It was sweet of Tristan to say that, but she was anything but calm. “I guess we’re going to pretend that moment at the airport where I almost bolted didn’t happen. And the time when I started screaming in front of the photographers,” she said in a teasing tone.

That startled a laugh out of him, and she felt better for it.

“
Exactly.
The solution I propose may sound a bit odd to you at first. But let me explain everything before you comment on it.”

“Okay,” she said, taking a deep breath. What was he going to say? Well, what could he say?
The board and I think you need to find a new job. And I want you to deny ever being with me.

His touch on her shoulder startled her out of her thoughts and she looked up into those deep gray eyes of his. She loved his eyes, and had often imagined him looking at her just as he was right now.

“Breathe,” he said.

“I am,” she said, with a long exhale.

He took her hand in his and held it loosely in his grip. “You have such pretty hands.”

Of course he’d notice her hands. Considering she wasn’t beautiful like the women he normally surrounded himself with, her hands were probably the only thing he’d found good-looking about her.

He lifted one of them to his mouth and kissed the back of it, then tucked his fingers around it. She smiled at the way he did it…linking them together.

She felt a bit of calm steal over her. This didn’t feel like the big brush-off. And she’d had enough experience with being shown the door that she’d know if a man was doing that to her.

In fact, her stomach wasn’t a tight knot like it had been the day that her father had sat her down to talk. She realized suddenly that her dreams were still alive. All this time, she’d thought she was a cynic and a realist but, sitting in this beautiful solarium filled with the sound from the waterfall at the end of the pool and the scents of Eden around her, she was holding her breath not because she felt like something bad was about to happen, but because she anticipated something good.

Tristan made her feel like the kind of woman for whom a man would make a grand gesture to keep in his life. And in the car, he’d all but said he wanted to continue their affair. So what could this be about? What was he going to say to her now, in this paradise?

“So what did you come up with?”

“I want you to be my fiancée,” he said.

Sheri was sure she’d misunderstood him, because she knew he wasn’t the marrying kind, but she thought he’d said
be his fiancée.

“What?”

“I want you to be my fiancée for the time being. Just until the furor of the press dies down.”

She felt the blood rush from her face and closed her eyes. Of course, it was temporary. She had forgotten the one truth of her life—she was meant to be alone.

“Why would I agree to that? That’s a crazy solution. Who’s going to care that we’re engaged?”

“The Sabina Group board, for one. They wanted to transfer you to the London office where you could hide out until this blows over.”

“Why wouldn’t that work?”

“Because I need you in the New York office,” he said. He wasn’t giving her up. She was one of the only two assistants he’d ever had that didn’t annoy him and actually made him want to go into the office, Lucille being the other.

“I’m still not following why you came up with this solution,” she said. She wasn’t belligerent or demanding, which he would have brushed aside.

“The only thing that will get the press off your back is if we take control of what they are covering. A wedding is the kind of thing they eat up.”

She tipped her head to the side and gave him a long, level stare. “So, we’re getting married?”

“No, just planning a wedding.”

She shook her head. “Do I seem that desperate to you?”

“No, you don’t seem desperate.”

“Well, then why do you think I’d settle for being your pretend fiancée?”

“Because you aren’t going to be able to stay here at my parents’ house the way I’d hoped. And your home in Brooklyn isn’t going to offer you any protection from the paparazzi. They’ll follow you from the second you leave until the moment you return. Are you ready to deal with that on your own?”

She shook her head and then turned away from him. He let her have a moment of privacy, but he could sense her weakening and he’d already decided this was best for both of them.

And he wasn’t backing down. Sheri was going to be standing in his parents’ den really soon, toasting their engagement with a smile that would convince the world that they were the real deal.

He went over to her, touching her shoulders. How he’d never noticed her before last night still amazed him. She had an incredible body. He lowered his head, dropping a soft nibbling kiss against the back of her neck. He ran his hands down her arms and drew her back against his body.

“I want what’s best for you,
ma petite,
” he said, unable to resist kissing her collarbone.

Her skin tasted faintly sweet, something he’d never noticed in a woman before. But she tasted good to him. And he brushed his tongue against her smooth skin to take a little more of that taste into his mouth.

She shivered in his arms, arching against him, tipping her head back against his shoulder. Her eyes were wide as she looked up at him. So very wide and vulnerable.

Her mouth trembled and he knew she was on the cusp of giving in to him. He leaned down and kissed her. Not softly, but with all the passion inside of him. He kissed her like a man who was hungry for his woman and wanted everything that she had to give.

He broke the kiss only when he needed to breathe and immediately came back to her again, sucking her lower lip into his mouth and drawing on it. She moaned and turned in his arms until he felt the curve of her breast brush his upper arm. Her nipple was hard; he felt it through the fabric of her maillot.

He felt a twinge of conscience at pushing her now. But in the end, he knew what he had to do to take care of her. This was all that was in his control.

“Tristan?”

“Hmm?”

“I…Why don’t you want to really marry me?” she asked, her voice so soft it was hardly a whisper.

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.”

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 she knew now she wanted more. She was falling in love with Tristan Sabina, and she wasn’t going to be satisfied with merely keeping him from leaving.

She needed him to fall in love with her. Not just to care for her, but really fall head over heels in love. She turned to walk down the hall and saw the gilt-framed mirror and the reflection of the woman there.

She was going to have to make some serious changes if she was going to win Tristan’s love.