Sweet Heart (The Hearts of Sawyers Bend #2) - Ivy Layne Page 0,23

is!

Fine, then he's a boy-friend. Royal is a man. You don't need a boy-friend, you need a man-friend.

“You're staring into space. I can’t tell if that's a yes or a no,” Royal said, the side of his mouth quirked up in a bemused grin.

I wanted to kiss him again.

No, I'm not dating Royal Sawyer.

I thought you just decided you needed a man-friend, mocked the little voice in my head. She could shove it. I opened my mouth to turn him down and nothing came out.

Royal took a step closer and raised his hand as if to touch my face. It hovered in the air in front of me for a moment, magnetic, drawing me closer.

I almost leaned in to close the distance myself. Royal’s hand dropped to his side.

“Daisy,” he said slowly, his voice low and private. “I'm in an odd position here. Every instinct I have is telling me to pursue you. To ignore you every time you tell me no. To chase you down until you're mine. But I don't want to scare you or make you feel cornered. If I'm making you uncomfortable and you want me to leave you alone, I need you to tell me. I’m persistent, but I'm not a stalker.”

“Are you always this persistent?” I had to ask. Some guys get off on the chase. Maybe Royal was one of them. Maybe if I went to dinner with him he'd lose interest.

“Not usually. In business, yes. Not with women.”

“Just with me?” I asked, my voice thin and high-pitched in my ears.

“So far, just with you.” When he lifted his hand and stroked his fingertips over one of my unruly curls it felt like he'd given in to a need he’d been denying. “Am I scaring you, Daisy?”

“No. I think I might be scaring myself. And I need to think about dinner.”

Royal studied me for a long moment before he nodded. “Understood. I'll just take this and go.” He dipped his head and ran his lips across mine, the brief taste drawing me closer. So sweet. I could've reached up and—before I finished the thought he was gone, stepping back and turning for the door.

I stared after him, my lips cold, missing him already. I looked down and spotted the pack of cookies I’d put aside for Hope when I made up the tray. “Royal! Wait a sec.”

“Change your mind?”

“For Hope.”

I shoved the cookies into his hand and leaned up to press a quick kiss to the hard line of his jaw. “I'll see you later,” I said before practically pushing him out the door and closing it behind him.

Chapter Ten

royal

Griffen and Hope were waiting for me in Griffen's office, a lunch tray taking up half of the desk. It was hard for me to think of it as Griffen's office. For most of my life, this had been my father's place, the massive leather chair a throne from which he lorded his power over the rest of us.

I hated this room. I hated the trophies hanging on the walls, animals he'd hunted himself—though I had my doubts about the bear. Prentice wasn’t above a little cheating when it suited him, along with taking credit for somebody else's achievements. I'd always had a feeling the hunting guide had taken down the bear.

The look on the majestic bear’s face had always struck me as sad. Trapped. Forced to spend eternity nailed to a wall when he should have been free to roam the mountains. Prentice's children hadn't been much different from those animals. We were trophies to him. Evidence that unlike our Sawyer ancestors, Prentice was capable of producing more than a paltry few offspring.

Prentice had packed the family tree, though he’d gone through three wives and a mistress to do it. By the time someone broke into the Manor and shot him dead, most of us had moved out to get away from him.

These days, I was coming to regret our hasty departure. Our father had been largely alone in Heartstone Manor over the last few years, and everything had gone to hell. He'd been so proud of the house, one of the finest examples of Jacobean architecture in the United States and one of the very few Gilded Age mansions still used as a private home.

Once, Heartstone Manor had been a showpiece. It would be again when Griffen finished with it. I’d never been able to uncover the truth of what had gone wrong. I only knew that one day Prentice had