“You’re really going to sit there and tell me what I believe? It’s true. We’re hard wired to be selfish and fulfil our own needs.”
“Yes, I’m going to sit here and tell you that you don’t believe that. You work for a charity that raises money to help people. Other people. And you’re not the only one—you have colleagues, donors, supporters. If your theory was true, charities wouldn’t exist. People wouldn’t volunteer. I’m not saying people won’t try to fulfil their basic needs. Of course they will. But some of them try to do more than that. Some of us don’t have an agenda other than wanting to donate to a good cause and spend the evening with a beautiful woman.”
He couldn’t be right and charming. That was a step too far.
“There will always be exceptions to every rule.” It was the best response I had. I’d run out of road and his smile was getting to me. Especially when he was pointing out how wrong I was. A little voice inside my head started telling me that maybe he was an exception to the rule. I needed to find the mute button for that voice. There was a good reason I hadn’t had a date since I’d broken off my engagement. Exceptions were rare. And I wasn’t going to fall for another man who pretended to be someone he wasn’t.
A waitress I’d not seen before cleared our plates and reset the table for pudding. Tristan waited for her to leave before he answered.
“Maybe, but I think it would have been an exceptional man in that ballroom who wouldn’t want to be sitting opposite you here tonight. Lucky for me, I get that privilege.”
“So you’re saying you have no interest in impressing my father?” If that was the case, Sutton’s idea of getting Tristan to marry me fell apart—there was no motivation.
“If I was trying to impress Arthur, dating his daughter wouldn’t be the first thing I’d try.”
“So you’d have no interest in marrying me then?”
“You’re proposing? On a first date? I must have impressed you a little at least.”
He was way too cute—I could hear the danger sirens already.
I shrugged as if I’d just told him I’d been planning to split the bill. “Yeah. I mean, if you’d been wanting to impress my father, it would have been a win-win solution to all our problems. But given you don’t, I guess that’s put pay to my idea.”
He chuckled and the sound reverberated across every goosebump that peppered my skin.
“I don’t tend to say yes to marriage proposals on the first date. But like you said, there are exceptions to every rule.”
Six
Tristan
Parker was better company that I’d expected. Not that I’d been expecting tonight to be bad. I just never had expectations when it came to a date. All too often, I’d thought a date would go well and been sorely disappointed—either we didn’t have anything in common or I found myself making all the conversation. I’d kind of given up. I had my fair share of hookups, but dating had taken a back seat to most things in my life. After tonight, I might be reassessing my priorities.
Parker was more beautiful than I remembered. The sassy almost-black bob and her ruby red lips were far from my usual type, but there was something about her that I couldn’t look away from. She was sexy—not just because of how she looked, but because of how she was.
“I’m intrigued,” I said. “Tell me how marrying you would be the solution to all our problems.”
“If you were my father’s son-in-law, you’d get anything you needed from him.”
“Except I don’t need anything from him.”
“Right, but I didn’t know that until just now.”
“Okay, and why would it work for you? Don’t tell me you just want me for my body.”
She grinned and the flush in her cheeks told me she didn’t mind my body one bit. “My charity always needs money and I’d like to donate my trust fund to supporting not just the children who have heart defects, but their families too. The strain this kind of illness puts on a family is unimaginable.”
It wasn’t unimaginable to me.
“I want to provide support for the entire family—accommodation close to the hospital if they need it, counselling for parents and siblings, academic support if it’s needed. That kind of thing.”
I nodded, trying to push down the memories of my family before my sister died. Looking back, it was no wonder my parents split up. With constant relays to the hospital, they rarely both stayed under one roof. The pressure of having to make life-and-death decisions on a regular basis, the limbo we all lived in—it was an impossible situation. I’d buried myself in my computer, grieving the loss of my family way before my sister died and my parents divorced.