My Fair Billionaire(16)
Author: Elizabeth Bevarly

“Anymore,” he amended. “I won’t bite your head off anymore.”

The eyebrow went back down, and she smiled. It wasn’t a big smile, but it was a start. If nothing else, it told him she was willing to keep reminding him, as long as he was willing to remember he’d reminded her to do it.

The tailor returned with a trio of suits and a single tuxedo, and Peyton blew out a silent breath of relief that none of them could be called anything but dark. The man then helped Peyton out of his leather jacket and gestured for him to shed the dark blue sweater beneath it. When he stood in his white V-neck T-shirt and jeans, the tailor helped him on with the first suit jacket, made some murmuring sounds, whipped the tape measure from around his neck, and began to measure Peyton’s arms, shoulders and back.

“Now the trousers,” the man said.

Peyton looked at Ava in the mirror.

“I think it’s okay if you go in the fitting room for that,” she said diplomatically.

Right. Fitting room. He knew that. At least, he knew that now.

When he returned some minutes later wearing what he had to admit was a faultless charcoal pinstripe over a crisp white dress shirt the tailor had also found for him, Ava had her back to him, inspecting two neckties she had picked up in his absence.

“So…what do you think?” he asked.

As he approached her, he tried to look more comfortable than he felt. Though his discomfort wasn’t due to the fact that he was wearing a garment with a price tag higher than that of any of the cars he’d owned in his youth. It was because he was worried Ava still wouldn’t approve of him, even dressed in the exorbitant plumage of her tribe.

His fear was compounded when she spun around smiling, only to have her smile immediately fall. Dammit. She still didn’t like him. No, he corrected himself—she didn’t like what he was wearing. Big difference. He didn’t care if she didn’t like him. He didn’t. He only needed for her to approve of his appearance. Which she obviously didn’t.

“Wow,” she said.

Oh. Okay. So maybe she did approve.

“You look…” She drew in a soft breath and expelled it. “Wow.”

Something hot and fizzy zipped through his midsection at her reaction. It was a familiar sensation, but one he hadn’t felt for a long time. More than fifteen years, in fact. It was the same sensation he’d felt one time when Ava looked at him from across their shared classroom at Emerson. For a split second, she hadn’t registered that it was Peyton she was looking at, and her smile had been dreamy and wistful. In that minuscule stretch of time, she had looked at him as if he were something worth looking at, and it had made him feel as if nothing in his life would ever go wrong again.

Somehow, right now, he had that feeling again.

“So you like it?” he asked.

“Very much,” she said. Dreamily. Wistfully. And heat whipped through his belly again. She finally seemed to remember where she was and what she was supposed to be doing, because she looked down at the lengths of silk in her hand. He couldn’t help thinking she sounded a little flustered when she said, “But you, ah, you need a tie.”

She took a few steps toward him, stopped for some reason, then completed a few more that brought her within touching distance. Instead of closing the gap, though, she held up the two neckties, one in each hand.

“I hope you don’t mind,” she said, “but I’m of the opinion that the necktie is where a man truly shows his personality. The suit can be as conservative as they come, but the tie can be a little more playful and interesting.” She hesitated. “Provided that fits the character of the man.”

He wanted to ask if she actually thought he was playful, never mind interesting, but said nothing. Mostly because he had noted two spots of pink coloring her cheeks and had become fascinated by them. Was she blushing, or was the heat in the store just set too high? Then he realized it was actually kind of cool in there. Which meant she must be—

“If you don’t like these, I can look for something different,” she told him, taking another step that still didn’t bring her as close as he would have liked. “But these two made me think of you.”

Peyton forced himself to look at the ties. One was splashed with amorphous shapes in a half dozen colors, and the other looked like a watercolor rendition of a tropical rain forest. He was surprised to discover he liked them. The colors were bold without being obnoxious, and the patterns were masculine without being aggressive. The fact that Ava said they reminded her of him made him feel strangely flattered.

“I’ll just look for something different then,” she said when he didn’t reply, once again misinterpreting his silence as disapproval. “There were some nice striped ones you might like better.” She started to turn away.

“No, Ava, wait.”

In one stride, he covered the distance between them and curled his fingers around her arm, spinning her gently around to face him. Her eyes were wide with surprise, her mouth slightly open. And God help him, all he wanted was to keep tugging her forward until he could cover her mouth with his and wreak havoc on them both.

“I, uh, I like them,” he said, shoving aside his errant thoughts.

Once again, he forced himself to look at the ties. But all he saw was the elegant fingers holding them, her nails perfect ovals of red. That night at her parents’ house, her nails had been perfect ovals of pink. He’d thought the color then was so much more innocent-looking than Ava was. Until the two of them finally came together, and he realized she wasn’t as experienced as he thought, that he was the first guy to—

“Let’s try that one,” he said, not sure which tie he was talking about.

“Which one?”

“The one on the right,” he managed.

“My right or your right?”

He stifled the frustrated obscenity hovering at the back of his throat. “Yours.”

She held up the tie with the unstructured forms and smiled. “That was my favorite, too.”

Great.

Before he realized what she was planning, she stepped forward and looped the tie around his neck, turning up the collar of his shirt to thread it underneath. He was assailed by a soft, floral scent that did nothing to dispel the sixteen-year-old memories still dancing in his head, and the flutter of her fingers as she wrapped the length of silk around itself jacked his pulse rate higher. In an effort to keep his sanity, he closed his eyes and began to list in alphabetical order all the microbreweries he had visited on his travels. Thankfully, by the time he came to Zywiec in Poland, she was pulling the knot snug at his throat.