“Dinner was nice,” Stella said from the passenger seat. “Henry’s so charming.” I was so on edge, so amped up over what I was going to say that I’d almost forgotten she was next to me.
“Yes. Nice.”
“Are you okay?” she asked.
I wasn’t sure I was. My palms were sweaty. I couldn’t sit still. I thought I’d wanted Henry’s signature on the contract for the Dawnay building badly, but it didn’t compare to the need that coursed through me knowing Stella wasn’t mine. “Fine,” I replied. I’d feel better when we got to my office and I showed her what I’d done.
“You’re heading east,” she said. “I can get the tube home if—”
“I’ll take you. Just need to pick up something from the office.” Wooing women, as Dexter put it, wasn’t something I was practiced in. I’d never had to convince a woman to give me a chance. Never had to explain how I felt. And now, without any experience, I had my one shot.
I’d make it work. I had to.
I drew up outside my building.
“The City’s always so quiet at the weekend,” she said, glancing around. The streetlights highlighted her cheekbones and her full, soft lips. It had been too long since I’d been able to properly touch her.
“Will you come up?” I asked.
“To your office?” She raised her eyebrows as if she didn’t understand, but without further questions, she unclicked her seatbelt and opened the door. That was the thing with Stella—yes, her ex had left her mistrustful, but underneath that, when the people unworthy of her were cleaned away, there was an open, beautiful woman who would do anything to please someone she cared about. She just needed the right man to care about.
I took her hand as I joined her on the pavement, and she tipped her head back and smiled.
“We are due a conversation,” she said. “I have things I need to say and you said
you did, too.”
I led her through the sliding doors and inside toward the lifts.
“You’re right,” I replied. “I’d like to go first if you don’t mind.”
She nodded, and I squeezed her hand, silently thanking her for her patience.
“It seems like an age since I was last here,” she said as the lift doors opened onto my office floor.
It felt like a different lifetime to me. I led her toward the glass wall with the view of St. Paul’s.
“It looks great lit up at night,” she said, gazing up at the cathedral that had stood there for nearly four hundred years. “Did you know that in order to get such an audacious design built, Sir Christopher Wren pretended he was building a more modest church and then he whipped off the scaffolds and surprised everyone?”
I grinned. Perhaps subconsciously I’d taken inspiration from the architect of St. Paul’s. I’d gotten Stella up to my office under false pretenses. “Is that right? There must be something in the air around here,” I replied.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
Without answering her, I headed away from my office to the other side of the floor and came to a standstill outside the second glass office on the floor that I’d just had created.
“What?” Stella asked.
I nodded toward the pink neon sign behind the desk. “I think your new business needs an office.”
She stepped closer and peered inside, her nose almost pressed up against the glass.
“We can go in—I kinda own the building.” I pulled open the door and led her inside.
“I don’t get it. The sign says London Designs.” She let my hand drop and made her way toward the desk.
Jesus, I knew I’d be bad at this. “Yeah. I didn’t know how else to—I wanted to show you how—I need you to know . . .”
Bollocks. Dexter said I had charm, but it had all escaped me now.