My Fair Billionaire

No calls ever came, of course. Not that Ava wanted them to. And their comments didn’t bother her, because she didn’t care about those people anymore. But coming from Peyton... For some reason, she suspected such comments would bother her a lot.

So she stalled. “We’re supposed to be receiving a couple of evening gowns from Givenchy today, and I wanted to look them over before they went out on the floor.” All of which was true, she hastened to reassure herself. She just didn’t mention that she would have also been at the store if they were expecting a shipment of bubble wrap. She put in more hours at Talk of the Town than her two full-timers did combined.

“Then I guess I was lucky I came in today,” he said, looking a little anxious. Sounding a little anxious.

“What made you come in?” she asked. “I thought you were going to be all booked up with Henry Higginses and millionaire matchmakers while you were in town.”

He grinned halfheartedly and shifted his weight from one foot to the other. Both actions were probably intended to make him look comfortable, but neither really did.

“Yeah... Well... Actually...” He took a breath, released it slowly and tried again. “Actually, that’s kind of why I’m here.”

He gestured toward the only other chair in the office and asked, “Mind if I sit down?”

“Of course not,” she replied. Even though she did kind of mind, because doing that would bring him closer, and then she would be the one trying to look comfortable when she felt anything but.

He folded himself into the other chair and continued to look uneasy. She waited for him to say something, but he only looked around the office, his gaze falling first on the Year in Fashion calendar on the wall—for April, it was Pierre Cardin—then on the fat issues of Vogue, Elle and Marie Claire that lined the top shelf of her desk, then lower, on the stack of catalogs sitting next to the employee schedule she’d been working on, and then—