Caught Between Two Billionaires - Skye Warren Page 0,118

liquid, a form of seduction I didn’t know I was capable of until I see Christopher’s eyes darken. “Does a powerful woman turn you on?”

He studies me with those inky black eyes. “Yes,” he says, but though that word reveals so much, it still feels like he’s holding even more inside. Like I’d have to pry him open to find out all his secrets. I’m a little afraid of what I’d find if I did.

“Do you think it would have been different?” I ask, a little wistful. “That kiss in the art gallery. Do you think we would have really dated if my father hadn’t written you into the will?”

He stares at me, his eyes stormy, no sense of stillness now. “Dated? You think I would have dated you and then… what? We would have had an argument about working long hours or being jealous or whatever the fuck normal people fight about?”

“I don’t know,” I whisper, a strange sense of longing tightening my throat.

It would have been nice to find out.

“We wouldn’t have dated,” he informs me, his voice rim. “I would have claimed you. And what’s more you would have claimed me. There wouldn’t have been an end. You want to know if it would be different? Day and night, that’s how different it would be.”

This way is night, dark and a little scary. He doesn’t have to spell that part out for me to recognize that truth. “Why did we let Daddy mess it up?”

“We were young. And I was stupid.”

“You aren’t young anymore.” And he’s a long way from stupid.

He gives me a private smile, as if he knows a secret. “No, not anymore.”

It sounds like a promise, those words. As if he’s going to fix what’s been broken for so long, but some things are damaged right down to their core. Some things can’t ever be put back together. The library looks up at us, its windows shattered and boarded, its walls caving in.

I burn my hand pulling a tray out of the oven. Metal heated to four hundred degrees burned right through the cute dish towel I found at a boutique that says, My safeword is takeout.

“Shit!” I suck on my thumb with a plaintive sound.

Avery gives me a completely unsympathetic snort. “I’ll do it.”

She uses an oven mitt—a plain, utilitarian blue oven mitt that seems to protect her just fine, because she manages to put the tray on the stove without almost dropping it.

“I bow to your greatness, Martha Stewart,” I say, handing her a serving spoon.

We spent the afternoon carving pumpkins. Avery made a traditional jack-o-lantern face. I applied my Smith College art school education to sculpting a penis out of a large orange fruit. And then we cleaned off the seeds, added plenty of butter and salt, and roasted them to perfection. My mouth is watering just looking at them, all browned and glistening.

When we’ve got the pumpkin seeds in a bowl, we join my mother on the sofa, where she’s got the TV queued up to the title screen of An Affair to Remember. “Ready, girls?”

“I’ve never seen this one,” Avery says.

“That’s blasphemy,” my mother says. “This is the most romantic movie.”

I go for a cluster of pumpkin seeds and pop it into my mouth. It burns my tongue. Then the salt and flavor hit me all at once. Orgasmic. “I’ve seen this a million times. And sometimes she’ll replay the scene at the end, the one where he sees her in the theater.”

Mom’s eyes get all dreamy. “And then he goes to her apartment.”

“‘I was looking up,’” I say in my best Deborah Kerr impression. Avery gives me a bemused smile. “You’ll understand in about two hours. And you’ll never look at the Empire State Building the same way. In fact it’s almost like the movie is a statement on the dangers of corporate excess.”

“Oh hush,” Mom says, pressing play. “It’s pure romance.”

The three of us gorge ourselves on butter-coated pumpkin seeds, licking our fingers to get all the salt. Cary Grant and Deborah fall in love on their cruise, even though they’re engaged to other people. Pure romance, my mother said. And it’s true. This is one of the most romantic movies ever made, except for the woman Cary Grant’s character didn’t marry. The man Deborah’s character didn’t marry. Strange, how love makes everything understandable. Even if it breaks someone else’s heart.

We reach the middle of the movie when I realize my mother’s fallen asleep, her head tilted