My Fair Billionaire(41)
Author: Elizabeth Bevarly

Ava looked at Peyton. Peyton looked at Ava.

Then he smiled that disarming—and disarmed—smile again. “What do you say we blow this joint and find someplace where the people aren’t so low-class?”

She released a breath she hadn’t been aware of holding. But she still couldn’t quite feel relieved. There was still so much she wanted to tell him. So many things she wanted—needed—him to know.

“You were only half-right in there, you know,” she said.

He looked puzzled. “What do you mean?”

“What you said about everyone at Emerson. As wrong as Catherine was about you, everything she said about me is true. Every dime my family ever had is gone. My father is a convicted felon and a louse. My mother was a patient in a psychiatric hospital when she died. My car is an eight-year-old compact and my business is struggling. The most stylish clothing I own, I bought at an outlet store. That apartment above the shop? That’s been my home for almost eight years, and I’m not going to be able to afford anything nicer anytime soon. I’m not the kind of woman your board of directors wants within fifty feet of you, Peyton.”

She knew she was presuming a lot. Peyton hadn’t said he wanted her within fifty feet of himself anyway. But he’d just completely sabotaged his entrée into polite society in there. Even if his home base of operation was in San Francisco, word got around fast when notable people behaved badly at high-profile events. He wouldn’t have done that if his social standing was more important to him than she was.

He said nothing for a moment, only studied her face as if he were thinking very hard about something. Finally, he lifted his hand to the back of her head and, with one gentle tug, freed her hair from its elegant twist.

“Looks better down,” he said. “It makes you look vain, shallow and snotty when you wear it up. And you’re not any of those things. You never were.”

“Yeah, I was,” she said, smiling. “Well, maybe not shallow. I mean, I did fall in love with you.”

There. She’d said it twice. If he didn’t take advantage this time, then he wasn’t ever going to.

He smiled back. “Okay, maybe you were vain and snotty, but so was I. Maybe that was why we…” He hesitated. “Maybe that was what attracted us to each other. We were so much alike.”

She smiled at that, but the giddiness she’d been feeling began to wane. He wasn’t going to say it. Because he didn’t feel it. Maybe he didn’t care about his place in society anymore. Maybe he didn’t even care about his image. But he didn’t seem to care for her anymore, either. Not the way he once had. Not the way she still did for him.

“Yes, well, we’re not alike anymore, are we?” she asked. “You’re the prince, and I’m the pauper. You deserve a princess, Peyton. Not someone who’ll sully your professional image.”

He smiled again, shaking his head. “You’ve taught me so much over the past couple of weeks. But you haven’t learned anything, have you, Ava?”

Something in the way he looked at her made her heart hum happily again. But she ignored it, afraid to hope. She’d forgotten what life was like when everything worked the way it was supposed to. She’d begun to think she would never have a life like that again.

“You tell me,” she said. “You went to all the top-tier schools. I could only afford community college.”

“See, that’s just my point. It doesn’t matter where you go to school.” He gestured toward the ballroom they’d just left. “Look at all those people whose parents spent a fortune to send them to a tony school like Emerson and what losers they all turned out to be.”

“We went to Emerson, too.”

“Yeah, but we got an education that had nothing to do with classrooms or the library or homework. The only thing I learned at Emerson that was worth anything…the only thing I learned there that helped me achieve my many admirable accomplishments…” Now he grinned with genuine happiness. “I learned a girl like you could love a guy like me, no matter what—no matter who—I was. You taught me that, Ava. Maybe it took me almost two decades to learn it, but…” He shrugged. “You’re the reason for my many admirable accomplishments. You’re the reason I went after the gold ring. Hell, you are the gold ring. It doesn’t matter what anyone thinks of you or me. Not our old classmates. Not my board of directors. Not anyone I have to do business with. Why would I want a princess when I can have the queen?”

Ava grinned back, feeling her own genuine happiness. “Actually, it does matter what someone thinks of me,” she said. “It matters what you think.”

“No, it doesn’t. It only matters what I feel.”

“It matters what you think and feel.”

He lifted a hand to her hair again, threading it through his fingers. “Okay. Then I think I love you. I think I’ve always loved you. And I know I always will love you.”

Now Ava remembered what life was like when everything worked the way it was supposed to. It was euphoric. It was brilliant. It was sublime. And all it took to make it that way was Peyton.

“We have a lot to talk about,” he told her.

She nodded. “Yes. We do.”

He tilted his head toward the hotel exit. “No time like the present.”

Yeah, the present was pretty profane-adjective good, Ava had to admit. But then, really, their past hadn’t been too shabby. And their future? Well, now. That was looking better all the time.

Epilogue

Peyton sat at a table only marginally less tiny than the one in the Chicago tearoom Ava had dragged him to three months ago, watching as she curled her fingers around the little flower-bedecked china teapot. No way was he going to touch that thing, even if it might win him points with the Montgomery sisters, who had joined him and Ava in the favorite tearoom of Oxford, Mississippi. It was one thing to be a gentleman. It was another to spill scalding tea on the little white gloves of his newest business partners.

“Peyton,” Miss Helen Montgomery said, “you must have found the only woman worth having north of the Mason-Dixon Line. You’d better keep a close eye on her.”

Miss Dorothy Montgomery agreed. “Why, with her manners and fashion sense, she could run the entire Mississippi Junior League.”

“Now, Miss Dorothy, Miss Helen,” Ava said as she set the teapot back down. “You’re going to make me blush.”