“Once or twice, a few pieces.”
“And you liked it?”
“I did.”
“Good.” He leans back, satisfied. “This place is the best in the city. You’ll love it.”
As soon as we walk into the restaurant, we’re swept to a private booth in the back. The restaurant is lovely, dimly lit, and cool with bamboo walls and a fountain with water trickling over the rocks and koi fish swimming happily around. The booth is dark leather, and I slide in, trying to quell my nervousness as Liam takes a seat across from me. I don’t knowwhyI’m so nervous, exactly, except that this feels like a date—our first date, if that’s really what it is.
“I’ll order for us, then, if you don’t mind,” Liam says as the server brings us menus. “Since you haven’t had it often, before.”
“Of course. That’s fine.” I watch as he orders water and a sake flight for us both, and then a sushi boat, naming off rolls that I’ve never heard of before. It’s oddly sexy, watching him order for us both, and the way he looks at me when the server walks away after taking our order makes my heart flutter in my chest.
It feels so—normal, in a way that I haven’t felt in a long time, and in some ways like I’ve never felt before. Liam is like no one I’ve ever dated, in so many ways. It’s been so long since I’ve been out on a date, and even if no one has officially said that’s what this is, deep down, I know it is. All of this is Liam trying to lay a foundation for us, trying to do what’s necessary to help me move past everything that’s happened, and the amount of effort he’s putting into it is astonishing.
No one has ever treated me like this, with so much concern and care, not out of possessiveness but simply because he wants to. I know, logically, that it’s far too early to think that he might love me. We still hardly know each other. But thisfeelslike love, more than anything else I’ve ever had close to it.
Even more than Alexandre, and although my chest tightens at the thought, I know it’s true. I’m here with Liam by my own choice, and everything he does for me is without coercion, without strings. It means something different, somethingmore, and however much I want to cling to what I had with Alexandre, I can’t pretend that isn’t true.
Liam is a different man. A better one, even though it hurts me to think it. And deep down, I can feel myself beginning to fall for him.
All I have to do is let it happen, as terrifying as it is.
This is just the first step.
15
ANA
After lunch, just as he’d said, Liam takes me to a salon downtown for an appointment. “I have services booked for you, but have them do whatever you’d like,” he tells me. “I’ll be back to pick you up when you’re finished.”
“Services” is putting it mildly. Liam has booked me an entire afternoon’s worth of spa treatments, from a facial to a manicure and pedicure, and finally a haircut and color. “Just highlights and some toner for the blonde,” I tell the stylist when she asks me what color I want and that I want something simple for my cut, not too much length off. When I’m entirely finished, I feel buffed, polished, and glowing, my hair falling around my face in subtly cut layers, my nails gleaming with shiny pale pink polish, my toes the same. I also feel more relaxed than I have in a long time, and I push back the lingering guilt as I look at myself in the mirror. Liam has done all of this for me so that I can feel good, feel as if I’m starting fresh, and I don’t want to be ungrateful or make him think that I don’t appreciate it.
When I meet him in the lobby of the salon, the look on his face sends a warm glow through me. “You look beautiful,” he says, getting up to pay and leaving a generous tip, then guiding me out to the waiting car.
“I feel like a princess,” I admit once I’m in the cool, dim interior of the town car again. “It feels like a dream.”
“Good.” Liam leans back, looking over at me. “I wanted you to feel pampered, Ana, spoiled without any ulterior motive other than your own happiness. You don’t owe me anything for today. You don’t have to repay me in any way. If you wanted to go back to Manhattan tonight, I would book a flight for you—although I don’t want you to,” he adds quickly. I know he’s telling the truth—I’d seen the flicker in his eyes the moment he’d mentioned it, the momentary fear that I might actually take him up on it.
“I only ask that you follow my rules and obey me while I’m here out of concern for you, not because I own you. That’s the difference.”
“Between you and Alexandre.” I twist my hands in my lap, feeling him stiffen when I say the name out loud. “I don’t think Alexandre understood the difference.”
“Probably not,” Liam agrees. “But what matters is thatyoudo, Ana.”
“Whatdoyou want from me?” I turn to face him, my heart suddenly speeding up in my chest. “To fuck me, but for me just to want you? To be in a relationship with me? To keep me here, living with you forever? You keep saying you want me to heal, to feel happy again, but you haven’t said what the end of all this looks like—”
“It doesn’t matter right now,” Liam says, his voice suddenly hardening slightly. “Unless you can forget him, Ana, unless you can stop feeling the things you do for him, there isn’t a future for us. Let’s focus on right now.”
I open my mouth to say something in return, but there’s a finality to the last words that makes me close it again slowly, my hands clenched together between my knees.
Liam isn’t giving me an ultimatum, not exactly. And I can understand him not wanting to sleep with me again until he knows that it’s him that I want and no one else, especially after what happened last night. I can’t think of another man in the entire world who would take a woman out on a shopping and spa trip the morning after she cried out another man’s name with him still inside of her. But it still makes my heart sink to hear him tell me, in so many words, that if I can’t put Alexandre entirely behind me that there can never be anything between us.
We go back up to the penthouse in silence, and Liam opens the door for me, carrying my shopping bags in. He takes them to my bedroom, me trailing behind him, and straightens after he sets them down, fishing his phone out of his pocket. “I’m going to call about your appointments while you put your things away,” he says. “It shouldn’t take long.”
The room feels too quiet without him after he leaves. I can’t quite bring myself to look at the bed, not wanting to think about what happened there last night—and wanting to remember it, all at the same time.
Instead, I busy myself with putting my clothes away, the scents of new fabric, fresh nail polish, and salon shampoo filling my senses as I do. It still all feels like too much, like I’m being spoiled, but I also feel more relaxed than I have in longer than I can remember. I haven’t had a haircut in months, and I’veneverhad my nails done—as a ballerina, it simply wasn’t a thing I could do. Of course, I was expected to keep them trimmed and manicured, but nail polish was out of the question.