His Princess - Stacy Gail Page 0,2
I have a lover is none of your business.”
“It is now.” A slow smile curled his mouth, and to her surprise she found she couldn’t look away from the two perfect dimples that appeared in his lean, clean-shaven cheeks. Had there ever been a more perfectly symmetrical face, with sculpted cheekbones, squared-off jaw and, heaven above, dimples? The more she saw of him, the more she realized that perfection could exist. “The moment I saw you, everything about you became my business.”
“Oh, really?” Wildly her heart bounced around in her chest like one of those bouncy balls she’d loved as a child. “How do you figure that?”
“It’s pretty simple.” He shifted a shoulder, like freaking Atlas shrugging. “I saw you standing there, and something inside me clicked into place. I’m not fighting that, and neither should you. It won’t do you any good.”
“My goodness.” It took all her strength not to pearl-clutch, but damn, it was hard. This man came on like a freight train, and for a wayward moment she could only wonder what he was like in bed… “I think there’s a song like that.”
“I guess this could be called an enchanted evening, now that I think about it. It’s not every day you meet the one that stops you in your tracks and makes you think of things like forever.”
Okay, pearl-clutching was a necessity when a man said things like that. “Anyone ever tell you that you have a tendency to overwhelm?”
“Not my fault. I’ve lost one helluva lot of time with you, so I need to catch up.”
“Catch up? We just met.”
“Yeah, but I’ve been looking for you my whole damn life. Got a shit-ton of catching up to do,” he went on while she grappled with the enormity of that statement. “You and I are spending the evening together. And then maybe the night.”
For heaven’s sake, this man. “Who in the world do you think you are?”
“I told you, I’m Gus Bloch. Also known as the new man in your life.” At that moment, the man with the camera called his name, startling Joelle. He was known well enough by the paparazzi to be called out to? Before she could put voice to the question, a flashbulb went off, and all she could see were spots. “Shit. I’m getting you inside before I get myself splashed all over the front page again for busting up another one of those assholes.”
“Again?” She was still trying to blink the spots out of her eyes as he hustled her into the ballroom, and she found herself taking his arm to use him as her guide. “Apparently I missed an edition or two of the paper. How did you wind up on the front page the first time around?”
“A couple weeks ago I caught one of those little weasels trespassing on the grounds of the place I just bought near Berger Park. I know the place is as big as a fucking city park and it’s right on the lake, but it is still private property. The dude was trespassing, so he got what was coming to him. And it wasn’t front page news. Just the front pages of the business and society sections.”
She shook her head, not sure if she believed him or not. “Why would such a thing show up on the front page of the business section?”
“The place I bought is Gilded Swan, one of Al Capone’s old haunts. It’s kind of a pile right now, but it should be fully restored within the next couple of months.”
“Kind of a pile?” she repeated faintly, rocking just a little, and it wasn’t because she could barely see. Everyone who grew up in Chicago knew the Gilded Swan. A massive property on the shores of Lake Michigan right in the middle of Chicago’s Edgewater neighborhood, it was one of the largest privately owned structures in the city. It had once been a stop in the Underground Railroad, and purportedly was riddled with secret passageways and hidey-holes. It had somehow survived the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, and for a time sheltered hundreds of Chicagoans who’d lost everything in that fire. And like he’d mentioned, it had been one of Al Capone’s favorite hideouts, thanks to all the many escape routes that had been built into it. When it had gone on the market, the city’s historical society had tried to buy it, but the owner hadn’t budged on the solid eight-figure price, and many feared a developer who