by Maya Rodale, Caroline Linden, Miranda Neville, Katharine Ashe
“Do you know why women love Pride and Prejudice?” she said. “Because it’s the fantasy of having it all, no matter how humble or poor, being smart and showing the rich guy that he’s got something to learn.” She lifted her hand and let her fingertips travel up his corded forearm to the impressive biceps. She traced the muscle’s arc. “There are a lot of guys like you that need to learn a few things. Humility. And compassion for people who are different from you. I think that’s why I applied to your family’s foundation. It’s definitely why I did an interview in the City Paper. I wanted to tell my friends’ story, so the rich guys could learn.”
He took her hand in his and turned onto his side to face her. “They did.”
“Who?”
“I read the interview.”
Her heart did a little flip. “You read it?”
“You told it straight, without sentimentality, but with wisdom and understanding. It was amazing.”
“Amazing?”
“Yeah.” Piers’s gaze was shifting back and forth between her eyes, as if looking for something. It seemed like he was about to say more, but that maybe he wasn’t sure about it. Cali’s heart beat too fast. She wanted to hear what he would say. She wanted to wrap her arms around him and ask him to hold her so close that no air would fit between them. She wanted this night to last longer than the weekend. Much longer. And she wanted it far too much.
Wedding party hookup.
Rebound sex.
She made her voice casual. “Were you and Caroline Colby ever engaged?”
He didn’t answer for a moment. “No.”
“Not after four years?”
He lifted a single brow. “You follow the gossip news?”
“Know thine enemy,” she said with a shrug.
“I was never your enemy, California.” His thumb stroked across her palm, sending shimmers of sleepy desire through her.
“Four years is a long time. Why didn’t you get engaged?”
“It was casual between us. Business. And social.”
She didn’t know how that was possible for four years. Or four weeks. Or four days. The problem she always had, the problem she’d inherited from her mother, was that when she gave her heart even a little, she couldn’t help giving it all—like to her father who’d left them repeatedly. After every abandonment, then every return and heartfelt apology, Cali had forgiven him and kept loving him. Until the doctors removed Zoe’s bandages. At that moment, she swore she would never let herself love him again.
Suddenly the room seemed airless, her lungs suffocated. Cold panic thrummed in her limbs.
She slid out of bed, fumbled with her panties and skirt, and pulled them on.
“Are you leaving?” Piers’s voice sounded strange. She couldn’t look at him. She tugged her tank top over her head and stuffed her bra into the waistband of her skirt, then jammed her toes into the flip-flops.
“Tomorrow’s a big day. Rehearsal dinner and all. I’ve got to get at least an hour or two of sleep.” She whipped her hair into a ponytail. She had to look at him. She couldn’t just use him for fantastic sex and leave without even meeting his eye. She could. But she’d have to see him again this weekend. Then maybe she would see him someday down the road, like at Jane and Duke’s tenth wedding anniversary bash or something.
Who was she kidding? After this week she would never see Piers Prescott again unless it was in the news.
She stuck her hands in the skirt’s back pockets, oh-so-cool, her back screaming from the tank top scraping over the rash. She turned to him.
He was propped on an elbow, his dark hair falling over his brow, the snowy white sheet strewn across the delicious T-bone of his hips. His very blue eyes were very intense.
“Is this because of what I said about Caroline?”
“No,” she lied. “It’s like I said, tomorrow’s going to be a big day.”
“You can sleep here. I won’t make a move on you.” The glimmer returned to his eyes. “At least not until daylight. Scout’s honor.”
“I’m a light sleeper. I’d better go to my room.” She retreated from the bed. “Thanks. I had a good time. A great time, actually,” she said, the words a little rushed.
“So did I.” He sounded dead serious, but he gave her a hint of a smile.
As she walked the hallways to her room the panic still lapped at her and she still couldn’t breathe.
Chapter Eleven
On the Lawn
A man hid in the bushes. A man with a telephoto lens camera pointed through a first-floor window.
Cali’s running shoes were silent on the thick grass as she slunk up behind him, swiping the sweat from her face. She’d slept late and gone out right away. Thanks to Piers, her body was completely relaxed. Now a run would put her head back in the right place. And after a few weeks without seeing or touching him, or breathing in his scent, or hearing his mocha latte voice, she would be completely fine again.
The paparazzo angled the camera tighter into the six-inch crack at the bottom of the window. Something was going on in the room, obviously. Or not. Paparazzi weren’t picky.
She tiptoed up behind him, preparing a rant about invasion of privacy. Jane’s voice came through the crack.
“You funded Cali’s bookmobile?”
A man responded. She couldn’t hear the words. But she knew the voice—the sexy, confident voice that had murmured romantic things in her ear before, during, and after he’d made her buck like a wild horse.
“Oh, my God, Piers!” Jane exclaimed. “This is a fantastic coincidence. Why didn’t you tell her?”
“The donation carries a legal stipulation.” He must have come closer to the window. Cali could hear his words. “If my name becomes associated with the project, the funds will be withdrawn.”
“Cali wouldn’t tell anyone. She’s the most honest person I know.”
“Which is why I haven’t told her. If she were asked who funded it, she wouldn’t be able to deny knowing.”
Her foot cracked a stick nestled in the grass. The paparazzo swung around. He looked at her face.
“Whoa, lass,” he said, his Scottish accent pronounced. “You’re not looking at me with those dagger eyes, now, are you? Because I haven’t done a thing. Yet.”
“Get out of here.” Low. Dark. Like a demon murderess.
“Will do.” He scurried away.
Nausea. Pins prickling across every inch of her skin.
Piers had been lying to her all week. She understood his justification. Her father had always had airtight justifications too. She’d believed them every single time. Until the last.
She couldn’t think. Her thoughts tripped over one another. Why would he privately fund the bookmobile? He didn’t even read books. Unless he’d been lying about that too. Guys like him—like her father—said anything to elicit a response, to charm, to get what they wanted.
Oh, God. Why was she so comprehensively a fool? Again and again?
She ran to the front door and through the house to her room. She hung out the Do Not Disturb sign.
Fifteen minutes later, when Piers knocked and spoke through the door, she didn’t answer. A few minutes later, the phone rang and then the message light blinked.
An hour after that, he returned. “California, are you there?”
She buried her face in Elizabeth and Darcy’s story and tried to pretend that she had never met Piers Vaughan Prescott Jr.
“Cali knows.” Jane took a glass of wine from a passing waiter and shook her head. Across the lawn, the band had started playing. Jane and Duke’s guests trickled out of the house for cocktails on the lawn before the rehearsal ceremony. The bride sipped her wine. “She doesn’t want to talk to you.”
“Did you tell her, Jane? Is it public knowledge now?”
“No. She said she heard it through the window accidentally. But it doesn’t matter how she found out. You should have told her.”
At Jane’s side, Duke shrugged. Beside him, Damien Knightly
offered Piers a sympathetic lift of his brows.
“Best to err on the side of too much information, I’m discovering,” Damien said.
Piers turned his eyes to the terrace again and his heart did a peculiar stuttering beat. California walked out of the house. She’d thrown off the tight, leggy style she’d adopted here and now wore a nondescript dress like the clothing he was used to seeing her in at Green Park. He started toward her. She saw him and changed direction.
He went after her. He’d screwed things up, with his life and with this woman. But his grandfather had taught him one useful thing, at least.
Never back down from a challenge.
She couldn’t escape him. She’d hidden in her room all day, but she couldn’t miss Jane’s wedding rehearsal. There had to be something between throwing herself at him and giving him the cold shoulder. He’d given the library a huge sum of money that had propelled her dream into reality. She was grateful. She would address this with dignity, self-respect, and professional courtesy.
In the late afternoon sunlight he looked like a movie star in a dark linen designer suit, with his signet ring and priceless watch and the slim gold chain disappearing beneath his collar—a chain she had discovered carried a Saint Christopher medal, patron saint of travelers.
He’d said he hated hotels. Another lie.
“California.”
She halted. “I know you’re the anonymous donor of the bookmobile.”
His face looked grave. “Is that why you wouldn’t see me today?”
“Did you know who I was before I arrived here?”
“I did.”
“How? Did you come to the library to spy on me?”
“Not the library. Every Friday morning in Green Park.”
Oh. No. The sexy hat guy. How hadn’t she realized it? But the watch, the signet ring, the designer clothes and the huge aristocratic mansion that now framed him all explained it. Out of place. Out of reality. The two worlds—hers and his—had nothing to do with each other. Without having seen his face in the park, she couldn’t have possibly realized he was that man.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she managed to say. “As soon as we met?”
“What would I have said? ‘Hey, babe, have sex with me because I gave money to your pet project. No strings attached, honest.’”
“Why not? You should have.”
“You would have believed that?”
“Yes. I think. Maybe.” She squeezed her eyes shut. “No. Probably not. I’m not comfortable with the professional line that crosses.”
He ran a hand through his hair and looked away briefly, then back at her squarely. “You’ll be even more uncomfortable when you’ve heard the rest.”
“The rest? There’s more?” But abruptly, she knew. “No. Did you buy my ticket to come here? The nurse for my sister? The dress? The limo?” She couldn’t catch her breath. “You overheard me telling Roy and the others about it that day, didn’t you?”
He held her gaze and said nothing.
Her throat clenched up. “Oh my God.”
“Don’t even try to blame me for this,” he said, his voice low. “You happily used it, even not knowing who’d sent it.”
“I thought my friends pooled their money!”
“If you didn’t want to use it, you didn’t have to.”
She backed away. “Are you one of those sick stalker guys who’s got way too much free time and money on his hands and makes women like me into psycho projects?”
“No. I don’t have any free time. I am a vice president of an international corporation. I sleep four hours a night and spend exactly two waking hours a week not working, and you know exactly where I am during those two hours.”
She felt hot all over, feverish. “You obviously spend time working out.”
“Squash meetings. Running meetings. Biking meetings. Tennis meetings. Last week I spent two hours rowing up the Schuylkill negotiating the hostile takeover of a machine company. Guys in my line of work like to show off. Half of our meetings happen while we’re playing sports. And even if I were a psycho stalker, do you really think I’d admit it?”
“That’s comforting.”
“I’m a good guy, California. Don’t make this into something it’s not.”
“What about work this week? You’re here now.”
“Until I heard you mention it at the park, I’d only planned on coming for tomorrow.”
He’d taken a week off work just to meet her, when he could’ve met her any Friday in the park? She couldn’t believe it. This wasn’t real.
“Why do you come to Green Park?”
He looked away, then down at the ground. She’d never seen him do that; look at the ground like he didn’t know what to say. A weird chill shimmied through her.
“If you expect me to believe you’re not a stalker,” she said, “you’re going to have to give me a good reason that you spend your only free time in a rundown park.”
He gestured vaguely with his hand. “Chair. Window. Fifty-seventh floor.”
“You started going to that park every Friday then?”
“Not quite. But I went there sometimes, when I needed to get away from work, and other places in the city too. Then in February I saw you at Green Park giving books to some teenagers cutting school. A couple of dealers were standing on the corner and you didn’t seem to have a clue you could be in danger. I hung around to make sure you drove away okay.”
He’d come to protect her?
“And the bookmobile?” she said through stretched vocal cords.
“When I read your interview in the City Paper and learned that the foundation rejected the grant proposal, I financed it privately.” His eyes fixed hard in hers. “I did it because I knew my grandfather hated the very idea of it.”
“You knew he’d hate it if he found out.”
“No. He won’t ever find out. I did it because I had to do something for myself, something I really believe in, or I’d actually throw the chair out that window.”
“If your grandfather despised a project to build a roller park in front of the Liberty Bell, would you have financed that?”
He frowned. “No.”
“I don’t understand why you didn’t tell me. I wouldn’t have told anyone you were the donor.”
He ran his hand through his hair, retousling the tousle. He looked incredibly uncomfortable, but still incredibly good. It was so unfair.
“I wanted you to come here,” he finally said.
“You know,” she said, her words shaky, “I’m poor. I don’t know anyone famous, important, or rich except Jane and now Duke. And I don’t wear designer clothes or drink two-hundred-dollar bottles of champagne—or any champagne at all. But I’m a person, and you can’t go around using your money to make people move around like pawns on a chessboard.”
“Sure I can,” he said. “I do it every day.”
Gut punch.
“Wow. Okay.” Gulping back the shock, she turned and walked away.
“California,” he called after her. He caught up. “California, please stop.”
She halted but couldn’t look at him.
“That’s my life,” he said. “That’s been my life for years. But not with you. I didn’t—I don’t think of you in those terms.”
“Of course you do. You thought you could throw money at me and you’d get what you wanted. It’s the Prescott family MO. You don’t even know that’s what you did, do you?”
“Maybe at first it was like that, I’ll admit. But not later. I just didn’t want you to think you owed me anything.” The sun shone in his warm eyes and on his gorgeous face and his hair was perfectly imperfect and everything about him screamed Not for you, Cali! “You came to the park every week and I liked what I saw,” he said. “I wanted more of it.”
“So you took me out of the place that makes me me to do that? I can’t deny that I wanted to come on this trip and have some fun. But I’m a little smarter than you think I am, Piers. I don
’t fall for guys like you.”
“Guys like me?”
“You didn’t like what you saw in the park. You liked what you thought I could be if I was with you in a fancy house and wearing a fancy dress, schmoozing with people like you. Well, you’ve had that. I hope you enjoyed it. I’ll leave the dress on the nightstand before I go so you can loan it to your next fixer-upper girl.” She swung around, but his voice stopped her.
“I have enjoyed my time with you. Until about ten minutes ago, it was the best time I’ve ever had.”
The words sounded like a line, but his voice didn’t. It sounded deep and real, the way he’d sounded when she’d been in his arms last night. But he was a hugely successful businessman. Guys like him were experts at selling people lines.
“I don’t know what to think.”
“California.” Her name on his lips was so completely sexy, forceful, but still a little tender. “I wanted to be with you. I still do.”
“This isn’t real.” Real wasn’t horseback rides across sprawling estates or limousines or black-tie dinners or a gorgeous guy telling her she was incredible. Real was her sister’s scars. Real was her father’s prison cell. “I realize I should jump at the chance to see more of a guy like you, but—”
“What is this guys like me? How about just me? How about seeing more of not a member of a category of men you mistrust, but the specific man that is me?”
“You don’t understand.” He’d never met her father when he’d worn thousand-dollar suits. He’d never seen her mother pop six pills at a time because even dressed up in jewels and designer clothes, she was still a waitress inside and never felt like enough. “You can’t understand.”
“I understand that you’re a hypocrite,” Piers said flatly. “You want me to see you as a person, but you’re not willing to give me the same courtesy. All right. You can’t see guys like me. I get it. I … get it.” He took a breath that visibly lifted his chest. “Okay. It’s been fun. Thanks. Thank you. See you around.” He stared at her for another few seconds. Then he turned toward the house and walked away from her. His shoulders were broad, his stride athletic, confident, and so unbearably sexy she felt actual pain in her stomach.
