“Still want that drink?” she asked, not sure she wanted him to stay.
He shook his head. “I think I should be going.”
She did, too. She ducked out from under his arms. She opened her front door, leaning back against it. The chill of the night air swept into her warm little house.
She shivered as she waited for Steven to leave. He turned and crossed the threshold. His car was parked at the curb, in front of her very old and very temperamental MG. But she loved that car despite its problems.
“Will you have dinner with me again?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “But I’m flying to New York tomorrow for a meeting with the team for our American magazine.”
“How long will you be gone?”
“Four days,” she said. “But I won’t be able to function until six days. Jet lag slows me down.”
“Then we’ll have dinner six days from now…that’s next Monday. I’ll pick you up here at home.”
Ainsley realized that Steven was used to giving orders. “Do people always do what you say?”
“Most times,” he admitted.
“You can pick me up at my office. I’m not going to be home in time for a dinner date.”
“Very well. My assistant will call your office tomorrow to get all your contact information—e-mail address and so on. That way I can be in touch with you when you’re in the States.”
“What would you need to talk to me about?”
“The story, of course,” he said.
“I have assigned a writer to the story and my boss wants the U.S. magazine to run the article as well. So we might actually have two writers working on this.”
“Sounds good to me,” he said.
She stood there until he got in his car and drove away. She stepped inside and closed the door, fastened the lock and leaned back against the door.
Steven Devonshire had kissed her.
She shouldn’t put too much emphasis on it. It was nothing more than a kiss from a man. A man she found interesting…oh, heck, who was she kidding? Steven had been the man that she’d been obsessed with for five long years.
After his comment and the massively embarrassing debacle at the Business Journal, she’d had no choice but to start over—and she had. Now she was focused on work and on herself. And her little habit of following Steven—almost cyber stalking him—had to stop. She’d kept tabs on him, hoping that someday their paths would cross again and she’d come out the victor. But tonight had shown her that she still had weaknesses as far as he was concerned.
No matter how much she’d read about him, she was just starting to realize that she didn’t know everything about the man. The stuff she’d read barely scratched the surface of him. Words like intense conjured an image of a certain kind of man and Steven was so much more in real life.
And he’d kissed her.
“Stop building dreams,” she warned herself. She walked through her house, kicking off her heels as she went along. Her mother hated that habit, but Ainsley always left a trail of shoes near her front door.
In her tiny kitchen, she opened her liquor cabinet, poured herself a splash of cognac and drank it. This was nothing.
She had her career and it was on track. She wasn’t about to let Steven derail her. It would be so easy to just give in to her own desires and start thinking in terms of a real relationship with him, but she couldn’t forget that behind that charming facade he was a pit bull.
Later on as she lay in her own bed staring at the ceiling, sleep eluded her. Instead, all she could think about was that she should have taken his hand and led him back to her bed. She should never have let him walk out her front door. Because she knew tomorrow she was going to start doubting that a man as handsome and sexy as Steven Devonshire could really want a girl like her.
Two days later Steven found himself in an odd predicament. He was in the middle of a meeting with the Everest Mega Store team at the Leicester Square location when he caught a glimpse of a woman on the retail floor who looked like Ainsley. He knew Ainsley was in New York and it couldn’t be her, but he watched the woman for a minute just to make sure it wasn’t her.
She was an obsession for him. He should have bedded her the first night they were together. Instead, he had waited because he wanted to unravel her secrets. Now he was thinking, secrets be damned. He wanted her out of his mind so he could get back to normal.
He wasn’t the type of man to spend too much time thinking about a woman—any woman. But with Ainsley on his mind all the time he was starting to believe that something dangerous was happening to him.
“Mr. Devonshire?”
His secretary stood in the doorway. The woman was proving to be a good fit here.