“Yes,” he said firmly. “I do expect you to trust me.”
Her gaze dropped to the button he’d only half pushed through its hole in the middle of his chest.
“If you had let me make love to you last night, you would not be feeling so insecure this morning,” he added.
Her heart skipped at that, but she only said, “I’m not insecure. I don’t know you.”
“Exactly.”
Oh, he was infuriating. And sexy. Her eyes were eating up the way his shirt was perfectly tailored across the line of his shoulders and hugged the strength in his arms. Her fingers itched to unbutton the whole shirt and expose his very promising chest again.
It’s just hormones, she tried to insist to herself, not wanting to succumb to feelings that were a lot more complex than mere lust.
“I’m jealous of her for being pretty,” she admitted in an undertone, ashamed that she was this shallow, but, “I used to be and it gave me confidence. Don’t deny that being physically attractive is powerful,” she warned with a point of her finger. “My mother still turns heads and uses it every day. And she places so much importance on looks.”
The weight of that knowledge slumped her into her chair.
“Sometimes I wonder if that’s why she chose Dad and not Paul Sr. He wasn’t ugly by any stretch, but Dad’s got that Mr. President, all-American look. Mom wanted the best-looking kids in the state and she got them. Now, when she looks at me...”
Time to shut up. Her throat was closing and it was impossible to fix.
“Your mother sounds very superficial.” His tone of quiet observation told her he’d heard and weighed every word she’d said. Being such a tight focus of his concentration made her feel oddly vulnerable and safe at the same time. It made her think he genuinely cared about what she was revealing.
“She’s the wife of a politician. Her world revolves around how things look. You’re judged on everything in that position. Looks matter.”
“I suppose,” he allowed with a negligent tilt of his head. “Did she push your father into politics?”
“No, it was something he wanted, but maybe that’s the real reason she married him.” Tiffany considered her parents’ marriage a moment. “Dad is a good father, a super husband, a really good man, but he aspires to be a Great Man and Mom aspires to be the wife of one. She set me up to...” want? demand? “expect the same thing.”
“Was your husband planning to go into politics?”
“If our parents had anything to do with it, yes.” She curled her mouth in mild distaste.
“You didn’t want him to.”
Once again she was able to speak a truth to him that she couldn’t say aloud to anyone else.
“I honestly didn’t think I had a choice. But I’ve seen how that life has affected my mother over the years. Every word she says is guarded. Half the time she’s Dad’s mistress. His work is his wife. Our family day at the fair was always a photo op with Dad glad-handing everyone except us. He couldn’t buy me the candy floss I wanted. A taffy apple was a better message.” She sighed, still more bewildered than bitter. “My life was staged to look like the life I wanted, but we weren’t allowed to actually live it that way.”
“Another reason why I will never marry. Too much sacrifice on a family’s part.”
“Another’ reason? You don’t intend to marry? Don’t you want children? That’s the one thing I looked forward to when I agreed to marry. I wanted to give my kids the childhood I hadn’t had.”
As the words left her mouth, she realized how leading they sounded. As if this was a conflict they’d have to resolve before proceeding with their relationship. She never talked this openly, except maybe to her therapist, but who else did she talk to these days? She was out of practice with hiding her real thoughts and feelings.
“You can still have a family,” he said with a calm blink of his eyes within the holes of his mask. “Why couldn’t you?”
Behind her own mask, she burned with self-consciousness, her gaze fixed to his. Her finding that kind of happiness wasn’t as easy as he made it sound, and he knew it. With her teeth bared in a nonsmile, she said, “Why don’t you want to marry?”
“I’m married to my country,” he stated. “As you said, my work is my wife. Everything I do, I do for my people.”
She tried to ignore the dull pain that lodged in her chest. That was good, wasn’t it? She admired patriotism, and that certainly kept things simple between them. No false expectations.
“How did you become, um, president?” she asked, faltering because it was an impulsive question that sounded a lot more loaded than she’d meant it to.
“I was elected,” he said coolly.
She waited while their meals were delivered, then said, “I meant, how did people come to know who you are and want to vote for you? I’m sure it was covered in the news, but as you’ve said, that’s usually slanted, and quite frankly I’ve had other things on my mind for the last few years. I missed how it all happened. I’m really asking what drew you back to your country and into representing it.”
“My mother was killed in a random attack. I went back for the funeral and my father was determined to fight. I couldn’t leave him to it. I was angry with myself for not returning sooner, for thinking someone else would sort out the trouble and I could return when there was peace.”
“You’re either part of the solution, or part of the problem,” Tiffany murmured. “I’m sorry about your mom.” Was that whom he’d been talking about yesterday, she wondered, when he’d held her in shared grief? “At least your father is safe.”
“He died, as well. Fighting.”
“Oh. I’m so sorry.”
He waved that away with a lift of two fingers. “I believe he wanted it that way. To be with my mother.”
“Still...” She swallowed, ready to cry for him because he seemed so withdrawn and contained. Tears would never dare to seep from his bleak eyes. “I’m sure he would be very proud of you for what you’ve achieved.”
“Once you’ve paid the price of a loved one, you don’t stop until the job is done. I managed to bring enough of our various factions together to throw over our corrupt government and campaigned on a promise of peace. There is still a very long road. The biggest challenge is keeping the country from falling back into fighting, but we had some corruption charges work through the courts recently that gave people confidence. Small things like that matter.”
She nodded, tipping a little further into the primordial world of deeper feelings for him. Genuine admiration. Awe. Empathy.
Careful, Tiffany.
“Shall we take the art walk?” he asked when they finished eating.
“I didn’t know they had one.” She looked around, expecting artists with pads and a jumble of still lifes and caricatures had arrived to line the stones near the pool.
“They set it up inside to avoid sun and humidity damage.”
“Really? What are we talking about? Priceless artifacts? Da Vinci?”
“If something like that is on the market, absolutely. Most of it is contemporary, but they’re all good investments.”
Moments later, they entered a gallery of comic book art competing with old-world landscapes and elegantly carved wooden giraffes. She fell in love with a stained glass umbrella, mostly because it was so ridiculously useless.
“How much is it?” she demanded, searching for a tag.
“The auction is in a few hours.”
“We’ll come back?”
“If you like.”
“I want to use it as a parasol against the sun.” It had to weigh fifty pounds. It was the most impractical object ever created and she had to own it.
“You have a beautiful laugh,” he remarked, tugging her into a space behind a giant sculpture of ladies’ shoes. “I’d like to see you smiling under this umbrella of yours, your face painted by the colored glass. I’d like to see you sunbathe naked under it,” he added in a deeper tone that seemed to stroke beneath her skin and leave a tingle.
At the same time his words put a pang in her heart. She wished...
He bent to kiss her, pulling her into his aroused body as if they were the only two people in the room. A second later, as his tongue invaded her mouth, she forgot everything except the feel of him, shoulders to thighs, branding her.
“I want you in my bed,” he told her huskily, as he found her bare earlobe and drew it between his lips.
Her body felt as if it swelled to fill his arms, breasts aching, all her skin thin and sensitized. Willpower and self-protection fell away as she confided in a whisper, “I want that, too.”
He lifted his head. His possessive hands stilled and firmed on her. “Yes?”
Her heart stalled. He wouldn’t accept any more waffling. She swallowed, still terrified by the idea of being naked in front of him, but she would hate herself forever if she refused him out of sheer cowardice. With breath held, she gave an abbreviated nod.