When the contracts were signed.
And when Daisy was extraneous to his life.
* * *
Stepping out of the limousine onto the smooth paved driveway in front of Swan Creek, Daisy stopped dead. Rollo’s apartment had been a shocking and awe-inspiring revelation of how the other half lived. The Dunmores’ Hamptons home took that shock and awe and magnified it tenfold. It was so immense, so impressive, so imposing, that for a moment she wondered if she was actually dreaming.
But then Rollo’s hand slid over hers and she knew she was awake.
‘I know it doesn’t look like it,’ he said softly, glancing up to where James Dunmore and his wife, Emily, stood smiling on the steps. ‘But to them it’s home. Like the penthouse is our home.’
The warmth of his hand matched the warmth in his voice—and the warmth in her heart when he’d said ‘our home.’
Since Rollo had confided in her about his past she had found it almost impossible to stop thinking about his mother’s behaviour and its devastating impact on her son.
She had thought he wanted the building for profit, or simply to satisfy some baffling masculine need to conquer a business rival. Instead it was all about keeping a promise to his father.
Her throat swelled. Finally she was beginning to understand what had made him the way he was, and everything looked different now. His reticence was no longer a flaw but a teenage boy’s perfectly understandable response to being abandoned by his mother. And beneath his ruthless exterior there was a man who was capable of loyalty and love. A man she wanted to get to know so much better.
But she still hadn’t told him that her feelings had changed.
So many times over the last few days she’d been on the verge of saying something—words had jostled inside her head, eloquent and clumsy, euphoric and tentative, all jumbling together so that it had been an effort to speak normally at all.
And an impossibility to declare her love.
But maybe that was for the best.
She knew how hard it had been for Rollo to reveal his past. Right now, faced with the chance to make a deal with Dunmore and make good on his promise, what he needed to do was focus on the present.
So, smiling up at him, she gripped his hand more tightly and together they walked up the steps towards their hosts.
Emily Dunmore was as delightful as her husband, and Daisy quickly forgot the grandeur of her surroundings.
‘James tells me that you met Rollo at his office?’
They were having coffee in the sun-soaked garden behind the main house.
‘I did.’ Daisy smiled at the older woman. ‘I was waitressing at one of his parties.’
‘I was working as a hotel receptionist when I met James. He was a guest, and I thought he was the most handsome man I’d ever seen.’ Emily glanced across at her husband, her eyes gleaming. ‘And the most objectionable!’
Everyone burst out laughing.
‘He kept extending his stay. Every day, another night. Only he wouldn’t look me in the eye when he talked to me. And he was so officious. I was spitting mad.’
Shaking his head, James leaned over and took his wife’s hand. ‘I was only supposed to stay one night, but I couldn’t take m
y eyes off her. I knew she was the one. Only I’d hardly even spoken to a woman outside of my family, and this goddess at the front desk clearly thought I was repulsive. So I thought I’d try and impress her with my natural authority.’
He groaned.
Daisy laughed. ‘What happened?’
‘I made a complete fool of myself for ten days and then I left.’
‘What?’ Daisy frowned. ‘Why didn’t you ask her out?’
James shook his head. ‘I was too scared. I walked out of that hotel and got on a bus and went two thousand miles across the country to San Francisco.’