She shook her head. He’d made her face a few demons in the past few weeks, but the fear that Damion was gradually taking over her life and her emotions had become a reality she couldn’t ignore. If she didn’t take care, he would devour her whole.
‘Your guests are arriving. I need to make sure they’re comfortable. The models are also assembling for the show. That’s what you hired me for, after all, isn’t it?’
He dismissed her words with a typical Gallic hand gesture. ‘The guests can entertain themselves. This is important.’
‘You have lousy timing, Damion. All this time you’ve been determined to set me on the straight and narrow. Now just as I think I could get into this whole organizing-slash-party-planning thing, you want to tear me away.’ She shook her head satirically.
His face closed, but not before she caught a look of uncertainty.
‘I’ve messed up. I realise that now. Let me try to fix this.’
‘That’s just it. Don’t you get it? You’ve been trying to fix me ever since we met. And you know what? I think I prefer myself broken. I’m much more fun that way.’
‘Reiko, arrête.’
She lifted her chin. ‘It’s also not fair that you can speak Japanese and I can’t speak French. That annoys the hell out of me, actually—’
Her snarky response was choked off in her throat as she looked over Damion’s shoulder and caught sight of who’d just walked in.
Isadora Baptiste. Blonde, blue-eyed, statuesque and extremely beautiful, she was everything Reiko knew she would never be. And, as if to drive the point home, two young girls, dressed in similar white gowns to the world-renowned designer’s, flanked her. Isadora’s children.
In that moment the fact that she would never be given the opportunity to experience motherhood for herself ripped a path of pain through Reiko.
‘You invited her?’ She wasn’t sure which emotion reigned supreme—shock or devastation.
He glanced at his old flame. ‘Isadora is still a friend.’
She tried to pull herself together, to find the poise and composure that had been sorely missing since she’d walked downstairs and been thrown into chaos.
‘Well, let’s go and greet your friend, then, shall we?’
For the next five minutes, Reiko staged the performance of her life. She sailed ahead of Damion and introduced herself. Although Isadora smiled at her, her attention strayed to Damion, her eyes devouring him in a way that made Reiko alternately want to claw her eyes out and hurry away so they could have privacy. Worse still, all four broke into French, leaving her biting her lip as fresh waves of despair crashed over her.
She withstood it for as long as humanly possible. ‘Excuse me.’ She pasted on a smile as she excused herself and moved to the next set of guests.
For the next hour, she kept a safe distance. Every time Damion stalked closer, she moved away. Once she caught his eyes across the room. His displeasure hit her like a sledgehammer and a shiver washed over her at the dark promise of retribution. Defiantly, she glared back at him.
What right had he to feel annoyed when he was the one who’d upset her? As Reiko glared, Isadora sidled up beside him and slid her arm through his. Pain scoured through her. He must have caught it because his expression changed. The hint of gentle speculation made her feel even more exposed.
Her heart hammered. Damion learning of her deeper feelings for him was the last thing she wanted. She was already vulnerable enough as it was. Isadora leaned up to whisper in his ear. He smiled but his gaze never wavered from Reiko.
He finally looked away when one of Isadora’s daughters, Alaine, tugged on his sleeve. But it wasn’t before Reiko knew with every fibre of her being that Damion had seen into her heart
, had guessed at her devastation. And had every intention of exploiting it.
She started as a deep voice murmured beside her. ‘Here we are again. The déjà vu is overwhelming, non?’ Sylvain Fortier demanded, a shrewd gleam in his eyes.
‘Yes. I mean, no.’ She cleared her throat. ‘Sylvain, it’s good to see you again—’
He waved her away. ‘Let us do away with the platitudes, ma petite. It is time to stop running away.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
He nodded to where Damion stood, surrounded by Isadora and her children, his stunning dark looks a perfect foil for their blonde beauty. The perfect picture they made tore a path of pain through her chest.
‘You need to stop running and grasp your future before it slips away from you.’
A bitter laugh scoured her throat. ‘Nothing in my future includes him. I’m here to do this job, followed by another—preferably somewhere far, far away. Speaking of jobs …’ She waved to Sabine LeBoeuf, who was trying to catch her attention.