My Fair Billionaire(15)
Author: Elizabeth Bevarly

She steeled herself for another round of combat, but he only said softly, sincerely, “I’m sorry.”

She relaxed. Some. “I forgive you.”

“Will you come back to the table? Please?”

She knew the apology hadn’t come easily for him. His use of the word please had probably been even harder. He was trying. Maybe the two of them would always be like fire and ice, but he was making an effort. It would be small of her not to give it—not to give him—another chance.

“Okay,” she said. “But, Peyton…” She deliberately left the statement unfinished. She’d made clear her terms already.

“I know,” he said. “I understand. And I promise I’ll do what you tell me to do. I promise to be what you want me to be.”

Well, Ava doubted that. Certainly Peyton would be able to do and say the things she told him to do and say. But be what she wanted him to be? That was never going to happen. He would never be forgiving of the way she had treated him in high school. He would never be able to see her as anything other than the queen bee she’d been then. He would never be her friend. Not that she blamed him for any of those things. The best she could hope for was that he would, after this, have better memories of her to replace the ugly ones. If nothing else, maybe, in the future, when—if—he thought of her, it would be with a little less acrimony.

And, hey, that wasn’t terrible, right?

“Let’s start over,” she said.

He nodded. “Okay.”

She was talking about the afternoon, of course. But she couldn’t help thinking how nice it would be if they could turn back the clock a couple of decades and start over there, too.

* * *

The last time Peyton was in a tailor’s shop—in fact, the only time Peyton was in a tailor’s shop—it had been a cut-rate establishment in his old neighborhood that had catered to low-budget weddings and proms. Which was why he’d been there in the first place, to rent a tux for Emerson’s prom. The place had been nothing like the mahogany-paneled, Persian-carpeted wonder in which he now stood. He always bought his clothes off the rack and wore whatever he yanked out of the closet. If the occasion was formal, there was the tux he’d bought at a warehouse sale not long after he graduated from college. His girlfriend at the time had dragged him there, and she’d deemed it a vintage De la Renta—whatever the hell that was—that would remain timeless forever. It had cost him forty bucks, which he’d figured was a pretty good deal for timelessness.

Ava, evidently, had other ideas. All it had taken was one look at the dozen articles of clothing he’d brought with him, and she’d concluded his entire wardrobe needed revamping. Sure, she’d been tactful enough to use phrases like a little out-of-date and not the best fitting and lower tier. The end result was the same. She’d hated everything he brought with him. And when he’d told her about the vintage De la Renta back in San Francisco and how he’d worn it as recently as a month ago, she’d looked as though she wanted to lose her breakfast.

Now she stood beside him in front of the tailor’s mirror, and Peyton studied her reflection instead of his own—all three panels of it. He still couldn’t get over how beautiful she was. The clingy leopard-print dress she’d worn the day before had been replaced by more casual attire today, a pair of baggy tan trousers and a creamy sweater made of some soft fuzzy stuff that didn’t cling at all. She’d left her hair down but still had it pulled back in a clip at her nape. He wondered what it took—besides going to bed—to make her wear it loose, the way it had been Saturday morning. Then again, as reasons went for a woman wearing her hair loose, going to bed was a pretty good one.

“Show him something formal in Givenchy,” she said, speaking to the tailor. “And bring him some suits from Hugo Boss. Darks. Maybe something with a small pinstripe. Nothing too reckless.”

The tailor was old enough to be Peyton’s grandfather, but at least his suit wasn’t purple. On the contrary, it was a sedate dark gray that was, even to Peyton’s untrained eye, impeccably cut. He had a tape measure around his neck, little black glasses perched on his nose and a tuft of white hair encircling his head from one ear to the other. His name was the very no-nonsense Mr. Endicott.

“Excellent choices, Miss Brenner,” Mr. Endicott said before scurrying off to find whatever it was she had asked him to bring.

Ava turned her attention to Peyton, studying his reflection as he was hers. She smiled reassuringly. “Hugo Boss is a favorite of men in your position,” she said. “He’s like the perfect designer for high-powered executives. At least, the ones who don’t want to wear eggplant, loden or espresso.”

Peyton started to correct her about the high-powered-executive thing, then remembered that he was, in fact, a high-powered executive. Funny, but he hadn’t felt like one since coming back to Chicago.

“I promise he won’t bring you anything in purple or puke-green,” she clarified when he didn’t reply. “He’s one of the most conservative tailors in Chicago.”

Peyton nodded, but still said nothing. A weird development, since he’d never been at a loss for words around Ava before. He’d said a lot of things to her when they were in high school that he shouldn’t have. Even if she’d been vain, snotty and shallow, she hadn’t deserved some of the treatment she’d received from him. There were a couple of times in particular that he maybe, possibly, perhaps should apologize for…

“It’s not that your other clothes are bad,” she added, evidently mistaking his silence as irritation. “Like I said, they just need a little, um, updating.”

She was trying hard not to say anything that might create tension between them. And the two of them had gotten along surprisingly well all morning. They’d been stilted and formal and in no way comfortable with each other, but they’d gotten along.

“Look, Ava, I’m not going to jump down your throat for telling me I’m not fashionable,” he said. “I know I’m not. I’m doing this because I’m about to enter a sphere of the business world I’ve never moved in before, one that has expectations I’ll have to abide by.” He shrugged. “But I have to learn what they are. That’s why you’re here. I won’t bite your head off if you tell me what I’m doing wrong.”

She arched that eyebrow at him again, the way she had the day before at the restaurant, when he’d bitten her head off for telling him what he was doing wrong.