“Hmm.” His eyes slowly skimmed the length of my hair from the roots to the curled ends. It felt like he’d stroked it.
“I didn’t expect you to bring me here,” I said.
“Why not?”
“I’m usually the one booking dinner reservations for you and your lady friends. This isn’t where you take them.”
“Which is why I brought you here. If this was truly a serious date, I’d take you somewhere different than I took the others, so you’d know I don’t see you as a simple companion for the evening.”
I nodded. “Gotcha.”
The waiter appeared with our wine, took our food orders, and then left.
Dane picked up his glass. “Tell me about your family,” he said.
My stomach twisted. “My family?”
His brow hitched up. “Couples tend to tell each other about their families, yes?”
Ugh. I smoothed a wrinkle out of the white tablecloth. “There’s my dad, Simon—we’re pretty close. I also have my foster parents, Wyatt and Melinda. I see them often.”
“And your biological mother?”
I clenched my fists beneath the table. “I haven’t seen her since I was taken away by social services as a kid. As for siblings, I’m an only child. Plenty came and went over the years I was in foster care, but none stuck around long enough for me to form a real bond with them.”
“Your foster parents don’t have any biological children?”
“They have one. A daughter. Heather’s a few years older than me.”
“But you don’t think of her as a sister?”
After the things she’d done to me, fuck, no. “We’ve never really gotten along. But her son is a sweet kid.” Heather had purposely gotten pregnant by a rich guy and now lived off her child support payments—she actually considered that sneaky move an achievement, like getting a college degree.
Dane raised his glass to me. “Impressive, Vienna.”
“Excuse me?”
“You answered each of my questions without really giving me much information.”
I shrugged one shoulder. “Just practicing being vague and evasive—I thought you’d appreciate it.” I sipped my wine. “I know you have two siblings but no nieces or nephews, and I know you lived with your uncle for a short while, but that’s pretty much it.”
Dane was silent for a long moment. “My mother died of cancer when I was young. My father died when I was fifteen. My uncle then took in me and my siblings, but he died of heart failure some years ago.”
I waited for him to expand, silently noting that he hadn’t specified how his father died. But he didn’t say another word. “Now who’s being vague and evasive?”
“There’s not much else to say.”
Not much else he wanted to say, I thought. But I let it go, because there was plenty of information that I’d kept to myself about my own family.
It wasn’t long before our food arrived. We talked as we ate. He didn’t touch me, but he really didn’t need to. Not when he was so wholly focused on me, like every sentence that came out of my mouth was a nugget of pure wisdom.
His gaze occasionally dropped to my lips as I talked, but then it would lock with mine again, alive with an electric intensity that almost took my breath away.
Sometimes his eyes would drift to my hair, as if fascinated by it. I could genuinely believe he wanted nothing more than to reach out and stroke it.
Honestly, I was getting a little hot under the collar. I knew none of this was real. I knew his attraction to me was faked. But my body didn’t care about that. It was tipsy just from the intoxicating, sexual buzz in the air.
I found myself wondering … would a girl get a lazy, controlled seduction from Dane? Or would he allow himself to lose that control he clung to and then boldly take what he wanted? Both were questions for the ages.
Having finished my meal, I took a calming sip of my wine. I could feel the weight of many curious eyes. “I didn’t think people would pay us much notice. We’ve eaten together before.”
“At business lunches or dinners. Never alone.”
“You don’t date, so people might not automatically assume that that’s what this is.”
He gave me a look that questioned my intelligence. “They’re looking at you in that fuck-me dress and they know for sure it’s a date.”
I felt my brow crease. “This is not a fuck-me dress.”
He leaned forward. “No man who sees you in that is going to think about anything other than having you beneath