One Night with Prince Charming (Aristocratic Grooms #2)(10)
Author: Anna DePalo

“What’s your address?” he called as she hurried toward him. “I’ll tell the driver.”

She called it out to him, realizing that he had an excuse to find out where she lived. He made everything appear smooth, charming and effortless.

“Are you leaving? Do you want to share a cab?” she asked as she reached him. “You’re getting drenched! I should have offered you the umbrella in my bag but you stepped out so suddenly.”

She couldn’t stop the flow of words, though she knew she was nearly babbling. She had no idea what direction was home for him, but it seemed churlish not to offer to share the cab that he’d hailed for her. Yet again, he’d handily managed to accomplish something she herself often found difficult, being petite and certainly less imposing.

James looked at her and his lips quirked. Even with his hair getting matted by the rain and his face wet, he looked unbelievably handsome.

“Thanks for the offer,” he said.

She wasn’t sure if he meant to accept her offer, but once she entered the confines of the cab, she slid across the seat so he would have room to join her.

A moment later, he slid in beside her, folding his tall frame onto the bench seat and answering her unvoiced question.

She felt relief and a happy flutter, even as she also experienced a sense of nervous awareness. She had never left a bar with a man before—she was cautious. But then again, no man had attempted to pick her up in a bar before.

“I live on First Avenue in the high Eighties,” she cautioned James belatedly as he closed the car door. “I don’t want to put you out. I don’t know in what direction you need to head.”

“It’s no problem,” he said easily. “I’ll see you home first.”

She noticed that he didn’t divulge whether she was taking him out of his way or not.

He leaned forward to the partition separating the front from the backseat and told the cab driver her address. And in no time at all, they were speeding through Manhattan’s wet and half-empty streets.

They were content to make some more desultory chitchat as the car ate up the distance to her apartment. She discovered that he was thirty-three to her twenty-four—not ancient by any means, but older and more worldly than the boys she’d dated back in high school and college in Pennsylvania.

Perhaps in order to make the gulf between them seem less so, she shared her dream of opening her own wedding planning business. Surely, he wouldn’t think of her as so young and inexperienced if he knew she had plans to be a business owner.

He showed enthusiasm for her plans and encouraged her to proceed with them.

All the while, as thoughts raced through her mind, she wondered if he felt the sexual tension, too. Would she ever see him again?

In no time at all, however, they arrived outside her building.

James turned toward her, searching her eyes in the silence drawing out between them. “Here we are.”

“W-would you like to come up?” she asked, surprising herself.

It was a daring move. But she felt as if their evening had been cut short when he’d had to meet with the CEO of MetaSky.

He paused and looked at her meaningfully for a moment. “Sure…I’d love to.”

He settled the cab fare, and then they raced up the front stoop of her building, sharing her small umbrella.

She managed to fish out her keys in record time and let them inside. They stumbled into the vestibule and out of the cold and wet.

She lived in a studio on the top floor of a four-story brownstone. At least, however, the rental was hers alone. On a night like tonight, she didn’t have to worry about the awkwardly timed arrival of a roommate or two. She’d made the best of her situation by putting up a partition wall to create a separate bedroom, though she couldn’t do anything to alter the fact that her windows were the small ones beneath the roof.

As she heard and felt the tread of James’s feet behind her on the stairs, she couldn’t help feeling nervous about having him step into her little world.

Fortunately, she didn’t have much time to dwell on the matter. Within a few minutes, they reached the uppermost floor, and she inserted her key in her door and let them inside.

She dropped her handbag on a chair and turned around in time to see him scanning her apartment.

He dominated the small space even more than she’d anticipated. Here there were no fellow bar patrons to defuse the full force of the magnetism that he exuded. There was no crowd to mitigate the sexual attraction between them.

James’s eyes came back to hers. “It’s cute.”

She’d tried to make the apartment cheerful, as much to lift her own mood as anything else. A tiny table flanked by two chairs and sporting a vase of pink peonies and tulips sat near the door. The kitchen lined one wall, and a love seat guarded the space on the opposite side. Facing the entry, a small entertainment center stood in front of the partition that separated her bedroom from the rest of the space.

Pia knew what lay beyond the partition that shielded what remained of her apartment from James’s gaze. A white croquet coverlet covered the full-size bed that occupied most of her sleeping area.

Nervously, she wet her lips. She couldn’t keep her eyes from straying to the rain-soaked spots of his shirt. Some of those wet areas clung to the muscles of his arms and shoulders.

She’d never done this before.

“Pia.”

Pia found herself jerked from her memories as Tamara closed the space on the lawn between them. Over Tamara’s shoulder, she noticed the member of the household staff with whom Tamara had been speaking was heading back toward the stone terrace and French doors at the back of the house.

Hawk was nowhere to be seen. He, too, must have gone indoors.

“I’m sorry to have left you stranded here.”

Pia pasted a bright smile on her face. “Not at all. It’s all part of the prerogatives of the bride.”

And one of her prerogatives, Pia thought, was to stay away from Hawk for the rest of this wedding…

Four

Pia walked along East 79th Street on Manhattan’s Upper East Side looking for the correct house number. She’d received a call from Lucy Montgomery yesterday about being hired as a bridal consultant. She hadn’t paid much attention to the particulars, but had jumped at the chance for new business because it had been a slow summer.

She hadn’t liked to dwell on how much her silent phone was due to the Wentworth-Dillingham wedding being, well, both more and less than expected. She hadn’t been directly to blame for the first part of the debacle. But the hard truth was that if the wedding had been a resounding success, her phone might have been ringing with more interested brides.