“How old are you?”
Willa pinned me with a glare. “I thought you were not trying to sleep with him?”
I shrugged one shoulder indolently, completely unnerved by her rudeness.
“Stop it, already. The mama bear act was old when I was seventeen,” he told her.
Willa pressed her lips together.
He shot her a fond, slightly exasperated look and then turned to face me as he pushed back his rapidly drying hair. “I am nearly as rude as my mother. My name is Daniel Sinclair, but please call me Sinclair. It’s lovely to meet you, Cosima.”
“French?” I asked, identifying his accent much more easily when he spoke English.
He inclined his head slightly. “Mais, bien sûr.”
“I don’t speak French, but I do understand that. How many languages do you speak?” I asked.
“Four fluently,” his mother said proudly. “He also has an MBA from Columbia and owns an up-and-coming real estate development company in New York City. Perhaps now you can see why I’m protective?”
“I can,” I agreed, fiddling with the handle of my cup, imagining what it would have been like to have a mother who had gone to bat for me. “And I can’t blame you for it. I wish I had a protector like that.”
I looked up at them after a beat of silence and found them watching me, twin expressions of reluctant tenderness on their faces.
“I’m not to be pitied,” I told them as I wrung out the ends of my drenched hair onto the tile floor beside me. “You don’t know my story. You aren’t to know if it’s a tragic one.”
“No nineteen-year-old girl should have so much sadness in her eyes,” Sinclair said, his beautiful blue gaze cool and serene as twin lakes. “I don’t need to know your story to know that.”
“Ah, and we hit on the real reason you offered to buy me coffee,” I said with a self-deprecating quirk of my lips.
“No,” he said slowly, locking eyes with his mother who shook her head slightly and sighed. “I bought you a coffee because you are a beautiful woman who looked like she could use a kind word. I’m offering to be your friend and maybe, to protect you the way my mother protects me because of those sad golden eyes.”
“Why in the world would you do that?” I asked, instantly suspicious of his altruism.
If my time at Pearl Hall had taught me anything, it was that no one did anything without getting something in return.
The world was a hellhole masquerading as a field of dreams, and I wasn’t a naïve girl frolicking through the flowers anymore. I was a warrior with a blade, and I’d cut down anyone who tried to drag me farther into that hell again.
“We’re a family who takes in strays,” Willa surprised me by responding, throwing down a few bills to pay for our drained coffees.
“Especially beautiful ones,” Sinclair said with such an audacious wink that it made me laugh.
“You better come with us,” Willa said with a dramatic sigh. “I’ll have to do something about your hair if we want to get you back to work.”
“I’m not cutting it,” I snapped, my hands flying to the thick, inky wet mass of it.
My hair was my security blanket, my crown when I would otherwise be without one. Even Alexander hadn’t tried to take it from me, and I didn’t know what I would have done if he’d tried.
Willa rolled her eyes as she ushered us all out into the rain straight into a waiting car, the driver holding the door open for us.
“Darling girl, I would never. Your hair will be your signature when I catapult you to stardom.”
“It will be her eyes,” Sinclair argued as he helped me into the clean leather interior. “I have a feeling her money eyes have taken her places before, and that won’t stop now.”
Alexander
The sight of her hit me with the force of a nuclear wave.
My back slammed into the plush leather car seat as my chest decompressed, my heart swollen and beating against the confinement.
She was achingly beautiful.
It was the only way to describe the acute sensation her beauty stirred in the beholder, the breath-stealing, blood warming impact one had at the sight of her.
My muscles locked against the urge to throw the door to the Bugatti open and stalk over to her where she stood looking lost and unforgivably alone of the street corner outside the Piazza Mercanti in Milan.
I’d spent hundreds of pounds directing resources to find her. Finally, after five weeks of searching, they found Cosima in Milan because she’d sent the bulk of her savings to her mother in New York City and the transaction had pinged on our radar. From there, it was easy. She was living in a cramped apartment with a fellow model and her lecherous boyfriend. No one in Milan’s varied and thriving fashion circle would work with her thanks to the damage Landon Knox had done to her before she’d become mine. She was broke and broken, all because of me.