Natalie Patrick - The Millionaire's Proposition

“Yes?” He tipped his head to mimic the angle of hers. “What is it, Ms. Taylor?”

“What is what?” she whispered as if hypnotized.

“What is it you want?” He lowered his voice to match hers.

“Want? Want? I don’t want anything. You’re the one who came here to my apartment to see me, not the other way around.” She rolled her eyes and shook her head. Twice she made a quick, gasping sound, one of exasperation that he would even ask such a thing, he believed.

“But you said my name,” he reminded her.

“I did? Oh, yes, I said...” She winced, overplaying it with great zeal and apparent self-deprecating humor. “I was correcting myself—for calling you by your first name. I really shouldn’t have, not without your asking me to for real, that is, not just in my...” She bit her lip, smiled and then waved one hand in the air. “Anyway, it was rude and I’m sorry.”

“Think nothing of it.” Clark could not think of any woman, either known to him in business or in his private life, who would have reacted so openly, so honestly, so overtly. In fact, she could not have been less subtle in her flustered chagrin, Clark decided, feeling his smile grow from practiced gesture to genuine enjoyment, if she were choking on a chicken bone. And that endeared her all the more to him. He extended his right hand. “Please, do call me Clark.”

“Clark,” she repeated. Her gaze sank into his, shining with blatant admiration, he assumed, and hoped he wasn’t too big-headed for making that assumption. Her small hand became a perfect fit inside his larger one. Her fingers curled around his and she lowered her chin just enough that her lashes created an enticing veil over her pupils as she murmured, “And you can call me—”

“Rebecca,” he concluded, wanting to let her know he had not forgotten how she had first introduced herself. Clark was a detail man and he had no compunction in letting everyone involved with him know that up front. Not that Miss Rebecca Taylor was in any way now—nor was she ever likely to be—involved with him. He released her hand. “Or is it Becky?”

“Becky is fine, thank you.” She tucked her hands behind her back, then folded them in front, then let them fall to her sides. “I’m sorry again about calling you by your first name like that. It was so presumptuous of me, but after our little run-in, I just sort of thought of you as...well, I just sort of thought of you as a Clark and not a—” she made a dour face “—Mr. Winstead.”

“Well, I am pleased to see I did leave a...lasting impression on you.” He let his gaze linger in hers until she looked away. “And happy to report the impression my heel left on your silver charm was not quite so everlasting.”

He dipped into his pocket and pulled out the box, offering it to her the way one might tempt a high-strung pony with a sugar cube—the box resting in the center of his outstretched hand.

“Why, thank you. You really didn’t have to do this, you know. Just sending it back to me would have been enough.”

Enough for her, perhaps, but Clark needed to see this thing safely and satisfactorily through to the end. Or so he told himself. That’s why he had gone to such great lengths to return the trinket.

“Or I could have come down to your office and picked it up myself.”

“No. I don’t mind doing it, really.” Besides, the idea of this woman loose in his office with her lethal umbrella, her pointedly honest opinions and...those great big angel eyes... Clark blinked at the turn of his thoughts, then shook his head, half-expecting to hear his suddenly short-circuited brain rattling. Even after doing it, he realized he could think of worse things than having Becky in his office, much worse—like perhaps never seeing her again.

She took the box, and just as her fingers brushed his palm, he closed his hand.

She raised her questioning gaze to his but said nothing.

He pressed the pads of his fingertips to her skin, the box still between them. Once he let go, he would have no reason to see her again—unless he made a reason. The picture of Becky dressed, as he could provide for her, in extravagant jewels and designer clothes, or perhaps in just the jewels without the clothes—sprang to mind.

Why not? Why not ask her out, set her up in a nice apartment, give her charge accounts, take her to the finest restaurants, show her the world? It might be a fun diversion for both of them for a while, until it played itself out as those things always did—always. Clark placed his other hand beneath hers and narrowed his eyes, fully prepared to make the spontaneous and quite magnanimous, to his way of thinking, proposal.

Proposition, he corrected mentally. He was not making a proposal; he was making a proposition. Plain and simple. The distinction might be subtle, but it was very real, especially with someone like Becky.

He studied the open expectation on her face, the way she looked up at him and in so doing looked up to him. He drew in the smell of the comfortable old building and the apple aroma of the young woman’s shampoo, which seemed to so suit her. This was not the kind of girl a man propositioned—not unless he wanted a sharp, well-deserved slap in the face. He relinquished her hand.

“Um, thanks. Thank you.” She curled the box close to her chest and smiled up at him without even inspecting the charm.

She trusted him. It showed in her action and in her eyes and it clawed at Clark’s conscience.

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