Christmas in the City - Jill Barnett Page 0,19
as if she had suddenly grown roots. She pulled her arm from his grip and walked away from him toward the line of poor, her face showing every emotion she felt.
"Lillian."
She ignored him.
He watched, horrified, as she unscrewed an extremely expensive diamond and platinum earring and started to toss it into the nearest outstretched tin can.
"What the hell are you doing?" he shouted, grabbing her hand.
She looked up at him with surprise, then concern. She looked at the beggars, then back at him.
"Someone has to help them." She placed her hand on his arm.
He looked at her for a very long time. Had he ever been that kind and innocent?
"No matter how solitary your world is, Daniel, not everyone is strong enough to make it all alone."
He knew he'd lost.
Her voice became even smaller. "They could be fallen angels."
He dug into his pocket. His voice was more gruff than he'd have liked when he said, "Put the earring back on." He held out a handful of money.
An instant later he received a gift worth more than any fortune.
Lilli's smile.
It was the longest night she could remember.
She must have met a hundred people like Daniel. Women stared at her jewelry with covetous eyes. Men talked money and business while they looked at her—not her jewelry—with those same covetous looks. Two of those same men pinched her when Daniel had his back turned.
She'd lost count of the number of people who said "Worth? How lovely," never meaning a word they said. She wondered if Hell was in truth one big New York society party.
And Daniel. From the moment they walked inside, he had kept her close, his hand on her arm. When he looked at her it was from a dark gaze that bordered on obsession, as if she were something necessary to him, desperately necessary. It caught her off guard, because when he looked at her that way she sensed a vulnerability in him that she hadn't actually seen before. His grip would tighten, and he would turn and look at her as if he thought she might not be there. It made the night tense and difficult for her. She supposed she should have been grateful that the long night had been cut short.
The reason? There had been a harp solo.
Lilli sat in the balcony, her forehead resting on one hand, when, one by one, every harp string broke. A series of boing! Boing! Boing! There were just some things that were the same whether she was in Heaven or on Earth. Either that, or God had a strange sense of humor.
But now, over an hour later, she stood in the gold suite, dressed in Daniel's silk shirt—the one she loved to sleep in—and looked out the window at a world she didn't understand. In a moment of unexplained whimsy, she reached out and drew a heart in the frost on the window.
The moment she finished, she sensed that she was no longer alone. She turned.
Daniel stood in the room, half turned away, his hand just locking the door behind him. He turned back and leaned against the doorjamb, his arms crossed.
He studied her as if he wasn't going to stop looking for a long time. He was still in his dress shirt and black pants, but his tail coat and white tie were gone, and two of the onyx and diamond studs near the collar of his shirt were undone.
As casual as he appeared standing there, she knew that some part of him wanted to intimidate. It was his protection. It was how he hid his vulnerable side—the side that held on to her because he was afraid she would leave him. She saw the rigidness in his square jaw, the tension in his neck, the raw need in his black eyes.
She moved to the bed and sat in its center, not knowing exactly why he was there and feeling small and overwhelmed. She cocked her head and looked in his face, searching for answers before she asked her question.
He shoved off from the wall and moved toward her.
"Why do you always look at me that way?"
He stopped at the foot of the bed, looking down at her from an intimidating height. "What way is that?"
"As if you're hungry."
She had startled him.
He gave a quiet, sardonic laugh that said the joke was on him. "It's that obvious? I must be losing my poker face."
There was a force of some kind between them. There had been from the first moment