But if there was a way he could keep seeing her, he wanted to find it.
“What do you want from a man, Natalie?”
“Why do you think I need anything from a man?” she challenged lightly.
“You don’t need anything?” he asked with a skeptical cock of his brow. He swept her blushing cheeks with a masculine gaze of interest that hovered on lips she nervously dampened with her tongue.
“You seduced me in France because I allowed it,” she asserted, adding blithely, “I can seduce myself if I want to.”
“Flirt,” he accused, delighted when she was cheeky and suggestive. “You know I’d like to see that.” She never, ever bored him. He adored that about her.
“I’m not flirting,” she lied, mouth twitching with rueful amusement.
“It was a challenge, then?”
“No,” she said firmly. “And don’t think for a minute I don’t know how to say that word when I need to.”
“Cute of you to think so, but you’re the biggest soft touch going, Natalie.”
“I have a daughter to think of,” she countered with a shift in her mood to grave sincerity. “As weak as I might be as a woman, as a mother I would lift cars and tear grown men apart to protect her. That’s what I’m trying to say, Demitri. That’s who I am here. Mom first. Woman second.”
He pondered that, asking cautiously, “Do you want a father for her?”
“She has one,” she said with a pragmatic shrug. “He’s not perfect, but she gets more from him than I got from mine.”
“Love, you mean.” The word hurt to say because it was an emotion so foreign and incomprehensible to him, he doubted he could ever offer such a thing.
Natalie didn’t laugh or mock. She didn’t light up and say yes. She pursed her mouth as though trying to school her lips from trembling. He watched her throat work as she swallowed, and he sensed pain. It made his throat hurt.
“Love is nice,” she said with a flicker of a smile. “But it doesn’t mean anything. Heath tells me he loves me all the time. I still can’t live with him.”
“Does he?” Demitri began to fall, pushed so abruptly into a chasm of darkness he couldn’t see or feel or breathe.
“He says it after he feeds Zoey junk food all day, or gets her from school but forgets her backpack. As if he’s this great guy capable of loving me even though I’m angry with him. I thought my father loved me and he left because life got hard. Love isn’t enough. I want someone I can count on.”
She looked up at him, but he couldn’t reply. What could he say? They both knew Demitri Makricosta could only be counted on to do what he shouldn’t.
“Natalie...” He found himself laughing bitterly at what a mess this had become. He’d flown up here thinking he could fall into bed with her and stop feeling this angst and dismay with his life. Instead, he was baring his soul in a fight for a place in her life. “The way I’ve always behaved... I don’t want to be that man anymore.”
The persona he’d cultivated had worn thin even with him. No one ever gave him credit for the level of control he exerted, and he was tired of being underestimated.
“I can appreciate that, Demitri. I can,” she said, so earnestly she moved him, giving him hope yet gently rejecting him. “But I can’t afford to be your guinea pig. I can’t invest my time and heart, my daughter’s heart, while you figure out if you really want to stick around.”
Was she asking for a deeper level of commitment? Marriage?
The thought should have put him firmly on the run, ending dinner before they’d eaten the appetizer that arrived with a waft of buttery garlic and salty tang.
He wasn’t repelled by the idea of marriage to her, though. He liked sharing space with her, waking next to her, eating across from her. In France, he’d wanted to make her his mistress, but he could easily see something more permanent. Given how hard she’d had it, he would feel really good if she’d let him provide for her.
The stumbling block was her daughter. Maybe Natalie didn’t expect a father for Zoey, but he would never convince her to let him infiltrate her small family if he remained estranged from his own.
* * *
Natalie picked at food so exquisitely prepared she ought to be moaning aloud, but her heart was weighted by Demitri’s silence and everything tasted like cardboard in her mouth.
When their waiter came to remove the plates and ask after the next course, she was surprised that Demitri ordered entrées. He’d gone so quiet she had assumed the date was over.
“Really?” she asked when the waiter had left. “I thought you might want to call it a night.”
“Natalie,” he chided. “When I said I want to change, it doesn’t mean I’ve lost my taste for getting what I want. I won’t slink away and die because you expressed a few doubts about my reliability. Count on me to be persistent, at least.”
She shouldn’t laugh at that, but a mixture of relief and alarm twitched her lips.
He intended to pursue her. The scent of danger sharpened in her nose and her heart rate kicked up. She shook her head, fearful she wouldn’t be strong enough to resist him if he had his mind set on possessing her.
She wanted to be possessed. Therein lay the problem.
“Don’t make this hard for me, Demitri.” It was a plea.
He picked up her hand, smiling ruefully as he drew it across the table and leaned forward to kiss her knuckles. “I could say the same to you.”
He was asking her to allow him to break her heart. She must be the biggest soft touch going, because she sat there and let him continue to hold her hand, incapable of arguing.
“How’s work?” he asked, taking her by surprise. “Catch me up on the gossip.”
“Seriously?” she asked with a disconcerted laugh. “Why?”
“We’ve had enough of the hard conversations for now, haven’t we? Let’s remind ourselves why we enjoyed each other so much in Paris. Tell me if that idiot Laurier is still rewriting all of my carefully worded campaigns when he translates them into French. That always annoyed the hell out of me.”
Oh, he was a magnetic man. Far too capable of disarming and engaging. She found herself admitting, “Laurier’s losing his mind at all the shake-ups in that department since you left, thinking he ought to have been promoted over Sanjit.”
They wound their way through a million topics over dinner, taking their time, lingering over specialty coffee and crème brulée while the restaurant emptied. When he said, “Tell me about Zoey,” she hesitated.
“What do you want to know?”
“Anything you would have told me in France if you hadn’t been afraid to.”
She shrugged, thinking of all the moments she’d almost said, “One time Zoey...” Wrinkling her nose, she admitted, “Last week she asked me where babies come from.”
“Wow,” he said, chuckling at the wry panic she recreated for him. “What did you say? Stork or cabbage patch?”
“I was close to my mom because she was always honest with me,” she said with a helpless lift of her hand. “I had to tell her. It was a very basic version, of course. I skimmed over a lot.”
He grinned at her, so much admiration in his look she had to glance away from the intensity of its glow.
“You’re a good mom, Natalie. Contrary to what I made you think our last night in Switzerland, it’s actually one of your most appealing qualities.”
Tears sprang to her eyes and she swallowed, deeply moved. She tried really hard to be a good mom, wished daily that she had her own mother to ask for advice and second-guessed herself all the time. Demitri was hardly an expert, but it still meant a lot to her that he’d said that. No one ever did.
“Thank you,” she murmured shyly.
“I would never try to get between you. I hope you believe that,” he said solemnly. “What you have with her is precious. I’d do everything I could to preserve it.”
Perhaps he wasn’t an expert on good parenting, but he was very well versed in terrible. The flimsy defenses she had against him wavered and fluttered like the walls on a house of cards.
“I should pay before they turn the lights out on us,” he said, reaching into his pocket.
A few minutes later, he held her chair and kept his hand at her back as he steered her toward the door. His touch sizzled through her dress and she knew there was only one way she wanted this evening to end.
Weak, weak Natalie. Was he playing her in his expert way, seducing her to his will? Or was this real?
When he’d helped her with her coat earlier, she’d caught a look so tender on his face, she’d been completely beguiled. Still, it surprised her when he turned her in the elevator and made no effort to disguise the warmth and desire in his gaze. He curled his fists into her lapels, then paused as though waiting for permission.