He was holding court unlike anyone I’d ever seen before, surrounded by a flock of avid admirers who stared at him, readying to hang onto his every word even though he gave them none. Instead, he stood quietly, proud, and perfectly groomed as a lord of the realm warranted. He was the most beautiful, powerful man anyone in the room had ever seen, and he knew it. People spoke at him, trying to lure him into conversation with pretty, flashing praise and the scintillating scent of gossip, but he remained unmoved.
Until something in the pressure of the air around him must have shifted, penetrated by the hot knife of my regard.
Instantly, his spine stiffened, and his eyes snapped to mine like powerful magnets clipping together. It didn’t matter how many people stood between us like sheaves of paper stacked between our magnetized bodies. At that moment, it seemed the only two people in the room, in the universe, were us.
Instinctively, my body gathered itself to run. Not away from him, but toward. I wanted to throw myself across the room into his arms and then slide to the ground on my knees and beg him to take me home.
Home to Pearl Hall.
Home to wet and dreary England where I knew no one, but him and his.
Home was where he was, no matter how hard I’d tried to convince myself for the past twelve months it wasn’t.
After all my hard work, the hours of therapy and meditation, the countless self-help books, and I was right back to where I’d been before.
My heart and body were slave to Alexander Davenport.
I opened my mouth to say something, lowered my foot to take the first step in his direction when his eyes went from smoke to stone, and his gaze cut away from mine.
I felt that knife’s edge of his disregard cut me off at the knees, and I sank gracelessly from the last step to the ballroom floor, clinging to the rail to keep from falling.
Unhooked from his eyes, I noticed what he had turned to look at. Not what, but whom.
A gorgeous woman with hair like spun sunlight stood at his side wearing a smile as bright as the diamonds wrapped around her throat and a dress that was nearly as expensive.
She was the golden queen to his golden king.
They looked so perfectly suited, his arm wrapped tight around her hips, her hand pressed lightly to his chest, that for a moment, I wondered if they were real.
Alexander ducked his head to listen to something she spoke quietly in his ear and then broke into a smile like sunbeams cutting through clouds to bathe her in unfiltered warmth.
God, but he’d never smiled at me like that.
Not once, not ever.
I’d had private moments with him, small intimacies I collected like charms on a chain around my wrist but seeing him with her like that made them feel cheap and fake.
Nothing like the diamonds she wore around her arms that I knew instinctively that he had gifted her.
“You look thunderstruck, Cosi,” Jensen Brask murmured as he took my elbow and gently pulled me into his side for stability. “What has happened?”
I placed my shaking hand over his forearm where it linked with mine and took a deep breath to settle my rabid heartbeat.
“Someone I once knew,” I explained to the man who had taken me so thoroughly under his wing since I’d re-entered the modelling world heralded by the great Willa Percy. “I thought I saw a man I once knew, but it was just a trick of the light.”
Or of the mind.
I wondered with a sinking gut whether my time apart from Alexander and the horrors we’d live through together had only distanced me from the pain of the memories and gilded them with a love and magnitude that had never really existed.
Jensen’s platinum blond brow puckered, but he knew me well enough not to push me for answers. “Why don’t you come meet some of your admirers then, my beautiful girl? There is nothing like the flattery of shallow people to make one feel better about themselves.”
I laughed, as was his intention. Jensen might have been one of the most famed fashion house directors in the business, but he was not idle or vainglorious. He believed in hard work, dedication to the craft, and a rigorous level of self-discipline. He was a study in control, and I longed to model myself after him.
He held me close as we made the rounds, our laughter pretty and perfectly formed, canned like the giggles after a sitcom joke. He knew how to play the game, and he’d taught me well how to do it too. If he sensed my discomfiture as I moved around the room, aware of every shifting angle between myself and Alexander like a star orbiting the sun, he didn’t say.