The Seduction Request

by Michelle Celmer

  “We could invest in the restaurant,” Emily’s father said, but Matt shook his head.

  “I could never ask you to do that. It would be too risky.”

  “There has to be some way we can help you,” Emily’s mother said.

  The business facade slipped and Emily could see a hint of desperation in Matt’s eyes, and she suddenly understood how important this was to him. He needed to do this for the same reason she needed to build her shop.

  “There’s a simple way to solve this. You could sell me the vacant lot next to the restaurant.”

  Emily’s parents exchanged looks, and she cringed inwardly. Matt was asking for something her parents just couldn’t do. They had promised that property to her. And if it weren’t the absolute perfect location for a flower shop, she might have sacrificed the property and built elsewhere. But Chapel already had two other flower shops, both on the opposite end of town. This was the best spot for her. As a businessman, Matt would understand that.

  Her mother leaned forward and patted Matt’s knee. Here it comes, Emily thought. The big disappointment.

  Her mother gave Matt a thousand-watt smile. “Of course we’ll sell you the property.”

  For a full minute, Emily was too dumbfounded to form words. They must have forgotten they were saving the property for her. That was the only explanation. They wouldn’t sell it out from under her. Not when she’d worked so hard for so long.

  “We’ll settle on a price and I’ll have my attorney draw up the contracts,” Matt was saying, to which her father readily agreed.

  She had to put an end to this before it went too far. She cleared her throat and said, “Excuse me.”

  All eyes were suddenly on her.

  “You can’t sell the property to Matt. You promised to sell it to me. Remember?”

  There was a moment of dead silence. A sick feeling of dread filled Emily’s heart. They wouldn’t. They wouldn’t dare pick Matt over her. Their own daughter.

  Her parents exchanged a look, then her mother turned to her and sighed. “Emily, honey, be reasonable. Where are you going to get the money for that property?”

  “I’ve earned it. I’ve almost got it all. I just need another six months.”

  “Then how do you plan to pay for the building?”

  “A business loan.”

  “Honey,” her father reasoned in the same voice he would use with a temperamental child. “You have no collateral. No bank in their right mind would loan you money.”

  A slap in the face couldn’t have hurt any more. “The property is the collateral. That’s why I have to buy it outright.”

  “Emily,” her mother said in her “be reasonable” voice. “Chapel doesn’t need another flower shop. I think we’ve entertained this silly little idea of yours for long enough. Matt is a real businessman. He needs the property.”

  “You promised,” Emily said, her voice quivering. “You said you would sell the property to me.”

  “Soon you’ll be married and having children. You won’t have time to work. Then what will happen to your little shop?”

  “Your mother is right, sweetheart. It’s just not reasonable. You know nothing about the intricacies of running a business.”

  She was almost too stunned to reply. “I have a business degree. I’ve been running the nursery for three years now.”

  “And isn’t the nursery in danger of going bankrupt?” her mother snapped.

  With the accusation, Emily’s heart cracked in two. What she should have realized long ago was now painfully clear. Her parents had no faith in her—no respect for her dreams whatsoever. They had never intended to sell her the property. They were only humoring her.

  Nothing had changed. It had never been about what she wanted. Her entire life, all they had ever done was try to change her, to mold her into the kind of daughter they dreamed of having. And now they saw her as nothing more than a baby machine, put on this earth to give them grandchildren.

  She felt completely and utterly defeated.

  Tears burned behind her eyes. With trembling hands she set her lemonade down, stood on wobbly legs and walked into the cottage.

  “Emily, wait,” Matt called.

  She continued on to her bedroom and began shoving her clothes into her duffel bag.

  Matt appeared in her doorway. “Emily, I had no idea you wanted that property. You never said anything about a flower shop.”

  “You’re right, I didn’t.”

  “I need that property, Em. If I have to tear down the restaurant and rebuild somewhere different, I’ll lose my investors. If I put up all of my own money, and it fails…I can’t take that chance.”

  It all boiled down to money, and him not having enough of it. She zipped her bag shut and slung it over her shoulder. “Then you should be very happy. You got exactly what you wanted.”

  “There are other lots available.”

  “That’s really not the point, is it?”

  “I’ll match whatever money you have saved. I’ll pay the difference. You can have any property you want. I’ll even have my attorneys handle the deal.”

  Even Matt didn’t care about what she wanted. It was all about building his restaurant. All about money. The hollow ache in her chest grew larger, until she could barely breathe. “I’m going home.”

  She tried to walk past him but he stepped in the way. “Emily, you have to understand what this means to me.”

  It was always about what he wanted. About what everyone else wanted. It was never about her.

  She looked down at the hand on her arm, then up to Matt’s face. “I do understand, Conway. Some things never change.”

  “This is all my fault.” Emily buried her face against Alex’s work shirt. Tears rolled down her cheeks and she shook from the inside out. She thought she’d cried all she could over the weekend, but here she was Monday morning, still a blubbering mess. She’d cried more in the past three days than she had in her entire life.

  “It’s not your fault,” Alex said, rubbing her back soothingly.

  “It is,” she insisted. “I should have put my foot down years ago. I should have made them take me seriously. Instead I came up with little deceptions to keep them placated. I did this to myself.”

  Alex plucked a tissue from her desk and pushed it into her hand. “And what does your millionaire have to say about all of this?”

  Matt couldn’t see the forest for the trees. He had become so obsessed with building this restaurant, nothing, not even her friendship would get in his way. And as much as that hurt her, she understood it in a weird way. She pitied him even. Matt was adrift—a lost soul looking for his place. Much as she was. No restaurant or business deal was going to fill the emptiness in his life.

  Emily had spent most of the weekend at Alex’s apartment, drowning in her misery. When she finally came home Sunday night, Matt had left a dozen messages on her answering machine. She’d erased them all without listening to a single one. She already knew what he would say, and she didn’t want to hear again how much the restaurant meant to him.

  “Matt will always be Matt,” she told Alex now. “It will always be about making more money. About achieving more success. He’ll never change.”

  “You’re in love with him.” It wasn’t a question. It was a fact—one she couldn’t deny.

  “Maybe I am. Maybe we could have some sort of relationship, and for a while we might be happy. But eventually he would have to make a choice, and I already know what that choice would be. I’ll never compromise myself for anyone again. From now on, it’s about what I want.”

  “Your parents are damned lucky to have a daughter like you. If they can’t see that, they’re the ones with the problem.”

  Emily stepped up on her toes and pressed a kiss to Alex’s cheek. “If you were straight, I’d ask you to marry me.”

  “And I’d say no. Because you’re in love with someone else.”

  “Maybe it’s a good thing Matt is buying the property,”
she said. “Without it he won’t get his restaurant built, and we’d lose the account. Without the Touchdown account, the nursery would be history.”

  “You let me worry about the nursery for a while, okay?”

  “After all that’s happened, he may not want to work with me. He never signed a contract.” She felt a rise of panic. She would never forgive herself if she were responsible for the demise of Marlette Landscape. She needed to secure the account. “What if he decided to take a bid from a different nursery?”

  “That’s not going to happen, Em.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I think I do. From what I understand, Marlette was the only nursery bidding on the job.”

  Twelve

  Matt stared blindly at his computer screen, unable to concentrate on a damned thing. He hadn’t slept for days. His meticulously managed life was falling apart, yet the only thing he could think about, the only thing he cared about was that he’d hurt Emily deeply. He’d gone to her apartment four times Sunday, called and left messages begging to see her. And she’d ignored them all, making her feelings on the matter abundantly clear.

  He’d lost. He hadn’t even realized until then that this had been like a game to him. A challenge. Could he win Emily over? Could he make her bend to his will? Only when her parents offered him the property they were supposed to be saving for Emily did he realize the stakes. At first he’d actually thought he could reason with her, make her see that building his restaurant was the important thing. She could build her shop anywhere, couldn’t she? But it wasn’t about where or when or how much money it would cost. It was about faith and respect and loyalty.

  None of which he’d shown her with any consistency.

  In his life he’d never seen anyone look so defeated as Emily had when her parents had dismissed her dreams as silly then blamed her for Marlette Landscape’s financial difficulties. He knew for a fact she was one hell of businesswoman—the glue that held the nursery together—yet he’d been so self-absorbed, so damned worried about building his restaurant that he hadn’t come to her defense. And he hated himself for it.

  He’d failed her. His betrayal was no less stinging than her parents’. He didn’t deserve her friendship. But he’d give damn near anything to get it back. To get another chance.

  There was a loud rap at his hotel-room door, then he heard Emily’s voice.

  “Matt, open up. I need to talk to you.”

  He jumped up so fast the chair he was sitting on tumbled over backward and crashed to the floor. He sprinted across the room, threw the deadbolt and swung the door open.

  Emily stood in the hallway, dressed in her work clothes. She looked him up and down, frowned and said, “You look like hell.”

  He could have kissed her.

  He dragged a hand across his beard stubble, through his tousled hair. Then he noticed the puffiness around her eyes and the joy at seeing her quickly dissolved. She’d been crying. Emily, who never cried, had been hurt that profoundly. By him.

  Could this get any worse?

  He held the door open for her. “Come on in.”

  “I can’t stay long,” she said, stepping inside and hovering near the door. “I just have to ask you a question.”

  “Okay.”

  “Is it true that there were no other nurseries bidding on the job?”

  Just when he thought things couldn’t get any worse. In her present state of mind, he knew she would misinterpret his motives. “Yes, it’s true, but—”

  Her eyes impaled him like two ice-blue daggers. “I would like nothing more than to tell you to take the account and shove it, Conway. I don’t need your pity. But I have a responsibility to my employees.”

  “My hiring you has nothing to do with pity and everything to do with your competency. Yes, I knew you were having financial difficulties and the business would help, but I have a responsibility to my investors. If I didn’t think you could handle the job, friend or not, I wouldn’t even have considered you.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “That better be the truth.”

  He righted the chair on the floor and collapsed into it. “It’s the truth, and it’s a moot point now, seeing as how the restaurant may not be getting built.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “What do you mean, what am I talking about? Didn’t you get my messages?”

  She folded her arms across her chest. “I erased them all.”

  He laughed wearily and shook his head. Typical Emily. “The only solution I can find is to tear most of the building down and make it smaller, but my investors aren’t real happy about it. It’s pretty much a lost cause.”

  “But you’ll have the extra property. You won’t need to tear it down.”

  “See, if you’d listened to my messages you would already know, I’m not buying the property.”

  Emily couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “What do you mean you’re not buying it?”

  “It belongs to you.”

  “But you heard my parents. They don’t want to sell it to me. Just buy it, Matt. Save your restaurant.”

  “I can’t do that. I don’t want to do it. I already told them I’m not buying it. And I told them it was time they got their priorities straight. If they had any brains at all they would sell the property to you, as they promised. You’re one hell of a good business woman and it’s time they saw that.”

  “You actually said that?”

  “Yep.”

  “What did they say?”

  A grin lifted the corner of his mouth and his dimple dented his cheek. “They were too stunned to say much of anything. Your mom did a fair amount of sputtering though.”

  She was feeling like sputtering herself. “But you have to buy it. Marlette can’t lose this account. We’re barely hanging on as it is.”

  Matt looked at her as if she had more than a few screws loose. “What does it matter? You’re going to be leaving. You’ll have your shop to run.”

  “Don’t you see, without a job I’ll never have the money to buy the property. I need six more months.”

  “I’m sure you can work something out with your parents. Some kind of payment plan.”

  She felt torn in half. On the one hand, she wanted to build her flower shop, but to deny Matt the property, she would be pounding the final nail in Marlette’s coffin. “Why, Matt? Why would you do this for me? Do you feel as if you owe me?”

  He shook his head, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his palms. “How does it always come back to that?”

  “If that’s the case, forget about it. You didn’t love me. I got over it.”

  He leaned forward, his eyes dark and turbulent, and her breath caught in her throat. “Emily, do you want to know why I stopped calling, why I never came home?”

  She nodded.

  “My whole life, all I wanted was to get away from here. I wanted a fresh start in a place where no one knew me. Where I wasn’t the son of two worthless drunks. I would have amounted to nothing here. Then that night on the beach happened and suddenly I had these feelings for you.”

  “Y-you had feelings for me?”

  He stood, shoving his chair back. “Yeah, I had feelings for you, and they scared the hell out of me. I started thinking crazy things, like maybe I didn’t want to leave. But I knew if I didn’t, I’d be throwing my future away. I knew I wasn’t good enough for you.”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “I had nothing. I was nothing. You deserved better than that. Better than me.”

  She opened her mouth to speak, but no sound came out. Tears welled in her eyes and her throat squeezed shut. That’s when she knew, when it became so completely clear to her. She was in love with Matt. The revelation filled her with equal parts joy and sadness because they had no future.

  Even if she could never tell him, never say the words, she could at least show him.

  Emily threw her arms around Matt’s neck, nearly knocking him off his feet. She
pulled his head down, locked her mouth on his and kissed the daylights out of him. He didn’t think he’d ever been kissed with more enthusiasm than he had by Emily. She put her heart and soul and, in this case, her whole body into it.

  He wrapped his arms around her and hugged her close to him. She felt too good, too perfect there. So good, he could imagine never letting go—even if that meant making sacrifices he’d never thought he would be willing to make.

  When she finally broke the kiss, her lips and chin were pink and abraded from three days’ growth of beard stubble.

  “Is that the bedroom over there?” Emily asked, gesturing toward the bedroom door. When he nodded, she grabbed the front of his shirt and pulled him toward it. “Let’s go.”

  “Emily, I’m a mess. I need a shower, and I need to shave.”

  “The shower.” She made a purring noise deep in her throat. “Even better.”

  How they’d gone from her wanting to kill him, to her wanting to jump him was a mystery. Not that he was complaining. He wanted to spend the rest of the afternoon losing himself in that wonderful body of hers. Then tonight, after he took her out for a nice dinner, he wanted to do it all over again. He had eleven years of wanting her to make up for. Eleven years of dreaming about touching her. Eleven years of looking at the women in his arms and wishing they were someone else.

  Wishing they were Emily.

  Emily backed them into the bathroom and switched on the light. She smiled when she saw her choices: an enormous Jacuzzi tub or a two-headed shower stall wide enough to fit four people. “This just keeps getting better.”

  “Your choice.” He peeled his T-shirt over his head.

  “Both.” She unfastened his pants, shoved them and his boxers down his legs. “Shower first, bath second.”

  He pulled her shirt up over her head and, after some minor fumbling, unhooked the clasp on her bra. Her breasts were perfectly rounded and deeply tanned, her nipples small and dusty rose. And there it was, that enticing nipple ring. Memories of it, of taking it into his mouth, had tortured him for days. They had invaded his dreams, filling them with erotic images. For two nights running he’d awoken aroused and restless and missing her more than he should have. Plagued by a hunger, a thirst, that only Emily could quench.