‘Da, we go,’ he muttered, as if making up his mind about something, pushing back his chair and pulling out a billfold. He peeled off a few notes and tossed them down on the table. Five times the cost of her meal.
She wanted to yell at him and tell him she wasn’t a woman he could toy with. She wasn’t some game for him to play because he was bored and rich and…
She didn’t really want to go home.
She wanted to give this a try…
And then it occurred to her. Plato might be a whole heap more important than Bill Hilliger and his influential family, but she hadn’t really felt it until now. All the time she had spent with Bill she’d been made to feel like an unsophisticated hick, but Plato hadn’t made her feel like that once.
Last time she had been in a restaurant with him she’d stormed out, she hadn’t given him the benefit of the doubt, and she had been proved wrong.
Was she wrong now too?
Troubled, confused, she looked up at him, trying to sort out the old feelings left over from her years in Houston from the new ones he had stirred in her over the last few days and line them up with what was happening now. Was she ready to risk her tender heart? Would he prove worthy?
‘How about we do this?’ Plato said, far more calmly than he was feeling. He was used to dealing with women, their idiosyncrasies.
Rose had just shifted from her singular spot as the only girl he’d ever spent time with who hadn’t bored him stupid, into the row of spoilt divas he’d handled on a regular basis for the last several years. She was just another girl who liked to get her own way and he’d mistaken that for character. He ignored the man in him who wanted to shake some sense into her and then wrap her up tight in his arms.
‘I am opening a new club in Monaco mid-week. We’ll fly down. I’ll get you back to Toronto from there.’
He sounded bored. He was bored. He’d done this all before. With far too many women to number.
‘Monaco?’ she said a little faintly. ‘That sounds—ritzy.’
All of a sudden she just wanted to cry.
She’d really hoped…what? That this would be different? With a man like this? Was he really going to put in the time to fly in and out…date her?
‘Da, you can do a little shopping, we can go to the casino—you’ll have fun.’
Patronising her, thought Rose, and everything she had been building up in her head about this man disintegrated into nothing. She’d been mollycoddled all her life by a father and brothers who adored her; she’d wasted four years of her life with a man who’d both controlled her and underestimated her. She wasn’t wasting five more minutes on a man she had known three days who clearly had no interest in getting to know her at all!
Plato took her elbow almost impersonally, steered her across the restaurant. People were looking at them. Looking at him.
He was right, she thought. He wasn’t an invisible man in this city, and now he had been transformed into that silent stranger she’d imagined back on the tarmac in Toronto who would walk away.
Well, she could do it too. With a lot more class.
She wasn’t going to Monaco with this man. She was going as far as his apartment and she was packing her suitcase.
Except as he helped her into her wool coat she was invaded by a sense of longing for what she had so briefly had with him, only sharpened by the knowledge that she needed to go home. He turned her in his arms, began to button her up although she could have done it herself. She let him. His expression was closed, his eyes impassive on hers.
He knew as well as she did that it was over. Before it had even started.
The physical longing for him welled up inside of her.
Wild, uncontrollable Rose.
Frustrated, and frightened by the intensity of those feelings and what they told her about herself, she suddenly needed to put some physical distance between them and she pulled away, heading straight for the doorman, who opened the plate glass doors at the entrance.
Plato swore and followed her out, his temper barely restrained. He grabbed her arm as she stepped out onto the wide snow-swept pavement, saw the cold hit her like a gravity pull. His instinct was to protect her from it. She wasn’t used to it. He shoved that soft thought aside. She wasn’t going to get used to it.
This had been a mistake—a girl like this and a man like him.
Something pulled tight and hot in his chest. He took a sharp breath past it.
She needed to go home. Whatever this was, it ended here and now.