My Fair Billionaire

Seven


Peyton gazed at Ava from across the smallest table he’d ever been forced to sit at and did his best to ignore the ruffled lavender tablecloth and flowered china tea set atop it. He tried even harder to ignore the cascade of lace curtains to his right and the elaborately scrolled ironwork tea caddy to his left. And it would be best not to get him started on the little triangular sandwiches with the crusts cut off or the mountain of frothy pastries.

Tea. She was actually making him take tea with her. In a tea shop. Full of women in hats and gloves. Hell, even Ava was wearing a hat and gloves. A little white hat with one of those netted veil things that fell over her eyes, and white gloves that went halfway up her arm with a bazillion buttons. Her white dress had even more buttons than her gloves did.

She hadn’t been wearing the hat or gloves when she’d walked into the record store earlier, so he hadn’t realized what was in store for him. She’d pulled them out of her oversize purse as the two of them rode to the damned tea shop—except she hadn’t said they were going to a tea shop. She’d said they were going to a late lunch.

Still, the appearance of a hat and gloves should have been his first clue that “lunch” was going to be even worse than something he’d put on a damned suit for. Something that would, in Ava’s words, aid in his edification. He just wished he could believe this was for his edification instead of being some kind of punishment for his behavior at the museum yesterday.

He also wished he could think Ava looked ridiculous in her dainty alabaster frock and habiliments. Which was the kind of language to use for a getup like that, even if those were words he had always—before this week, anyway—manfully avoided. Hell, she looked as if she was an escapee from an overbudgeted period film set during the First World War. Unfortunately, there was something about the getup that was also... Well... Dammit. Unbelievably hot.

Which was just what he needed. To be turned on by Ava, the last woman on the planet who should be turning him on. He’d been so sure he could remain unaffected by her while they were undertaking this self-improvement thing. After all, they hadn’t gotten along at all that first morning at her apartment. Instead, with every passing day, he’d just become more bewitched by her.

Just as he had in high school.

It was only physical, he told himself. The same way it had only been physical in high school. There was just some kind of weird chemistry between them. Her pheromones talking to his pheromones or something. Talking, hell. More like screaming at the top of their lungs. People didn’t have to like each other to be sexually attracted to each other. They just had to have loud, obnoxious pheromones.

Tea, he reminded himself distastefully. Focus on the fact that she’s making you sit in a tearoom drinking—gak—tea and eating the kind of stuff that no self-respecting possessor of a Y chromosome should ingest. God knew what this was going to do to his testosterone levels.

“Now then,” she said in a voice that was every bit as prissy as her outfit. “Taking tea. This will probably be your biggest challenge yet.”

Oh, Peyton didn’t doubt that for a minute. What he did doubt was that many people actually took tea—he just couldn’t think that phrase in anything but a snotty tone of voice...tone of mind...whatever—in this country. Not any people with a Y chromosome, anyway.

“A lot of people think the art of tea has fallen by the wayside over the years,” she continued, obviously reading his mind. Or maybe his distasteful expression. “But it’s actually been rising in popularity. Hence your need to be familiar with it.”

“Ava,” he said, mustering as much patience as he could, “I think I can safely say that no matter how high in society I go, I will never, ever, ask anyone to—” he could barely get the words out of his mouth “—take tea with me.”

She smiled a benign smile. “I bet the sisters Montgomery would be charmed by a man who asked them to tea. And I bet not one of your competitors would think to do it.”

She was right. Dammit. Two sweet old Southern ladies would find this place enchanting. Crap. Enchanting. There was another word he normally avoided manfully. Where the hell had his testosterone gotten off to?

He blew out an exasperated breath. “Fine. Just don’t expect me to wear white gloves.”

“I suppose we could allow that small concession,” she agreed. “Now then. As Henry James wrote in The Portrait of a Lady, ‘There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.’”

Oh, good. At least this wouldn’t last more than an hour.

“And I, for one,” she continued, “couldn’t agree more.”

Peyton did his best to look as if he gave a crap. “Yeah, well, ol’ Henry obviously never spent an afternoon sharing a case of Anchor Steam with his friends while the Blackhawks trounced the Canucks.”

Ava smiled thinly. “No doubt.”

She launched into a monologue about the history of afternoon tea—all three centuries of it—then moved on to the etiquette of afternoon tea, then on to the menu selection of afternoon tea. She talked about the differences between cream tea, light tea and full tea—thankfully, they were having full tea, since Peyton was getting hungrier with every word she spoke—then she pointed to the selections on the caddy beside them, categorizing them as savories, scones and pastries, even though they looked to him like sandwiches, biscuits and dessert. By the time she wrapped up her dissertation, his stomach was grumbling so forcefully even his Y chromosome was thinking the little flowery cakes looked good.

Unfortunately, as he reached for one, Ava smacked his hand as if he were a toddler.

“Don’t reach,” she said. “Ask for them to be passed.”

“But they’re sitting right there.”

“They’re closer to me than they are to you.”

“Oh, sure, by an inch and a half.”

“Nonetheless, whoever is closer should pass to the person who is farther away.”

Okay, she was definitely going out of her way to be ornery, deliberately to get a rise out of him. Well, he’d show her. He’d kill her with kindness. He’d be as courteous as he knew how to be. And thanks to her lessons, he’d learned how to be pretty damned courteous.

Sitting up straighter in his tiny chair, he channeled the inner Victorian he didn’t even know he possessed and said, “If you please, Miss Brenner, and if it wouldn’t trouble you overly, would you pass the...” What had she called them? “The savories?”

She eyed him suspiciously, clearly doubting his sincerity. But what was she going to do? He’d been a perfect effing gentleman. He’d even thought the word effing, instead of what he really wanted to think, which was...uh, never mind.

Still looking at him as if she expected him to start a food fight, she asked, “May I suggest the cucumber sandwiches or the crab puffs?”

He unclenched his jaw long enough to reply, “You may.”

“Which would you prefer?”

“The cucumber sandwiches,” he said. Mostly because he didn’t think he could say crab puffs with a straight face. Not that cucumber sandwiches was exactly easy. “If you please.”

Before retrieving the plate, she began to unbutton her gloves. Evidently good manners precluded wearing such garments whilst one was taking tea.


Dammit, he thought when he played that back in his head. There was no way he was going to last an hour in this place.

When she finally had her gloves off—a good fortnight after initiating their unbuttoning—she reached for the plate of sandwiches and passed it the three inches necessary to place it on the table between them. Then she poured them each a cup of tea from the pot, adding three sugar cubes—jeez, they had flowers on them, too—to her own. Peyton eschewed them—since no one taking tea would ever blow off something; they would always eschew it—and lifted the cup to his mouth. At Ava’s discreetly cleared throat, he looked up, and she tilted her head toward the cup he was holding. Holding by its bowl having grabbed the entire thing in his big paw, because he’d been afraid he’d break off the handle if he tried to pick it up that way. Gah. After a moment of juggling, he managed the proper manipulation of the cup, holding it by its handle, if just barely. Only then did Ava nod her head to let him know he was allowed to continue.

Man, had she actually had to grow up this way? Had her mother sat her down, day after day, and made her memorize all the stuff she was making him memorize? Had she been forced to dress a certain way and unfold her napkin just so, and talk about only approved subjects with other people, the way she was teaching him to do? Or did that just come naturally to people who were born with the bluest blood in the highest income bracket? Was good taste and polite behavior encoded on her DNA the way green eyes and red hair were? Did refinement run in her veins? And if so, did that mean Peyton’s DNA was encoded with garbage-strewn streets and fighting dirty and that transmission fluid flowed through his veins?

It hit him again, even harder, how far apart the two of them were. How far apart they’d been since birth. How far apart they’d be until they died. Even with his income rivaling hers now, even mastering all these lessons that would grant him access to her world, he’d never, ever be her social equal. Because he’d never, ever be as comfortable with this stuff as she was. It would never be second nature to him the way it was to her. He would hate it in her world. All the rules and customs would suffocate him. It would kill everything that made him who he was, the same way taking Ava out of her world would doubtless suffocate her and kill everything that made her her.

And why did it bug him so much to realize that? He wasn’t a kid anymore. He didn’t care what world she lived in or that he’d never be granted citizenship there. Truth be told, now that he was a monster success, he kind of reveled in his mean-streets background. Even as a teenager, he’d taken a perverse sort of pride in where he came from, because where he came from hadn’t destroyed his spirit the way it had so many others in the neighborhood. So why had it been such a sticking point with him in high school, the vast socioeconomic chasm between him and Ava? Why was it still a sticking point now, when that chasm had shrunk to a crack? Why did it bother him so much that his and Ava’s worlds would never meet? What difference did her presence in the scheme of things—or lack thereof—make anyway?

His cup was nearly to his mouth when an answer to that question exploded in his head. It bothered him, he suddenly knew, because the thing that had sparked his success, the thing that had made him escape his neighborhood and muscle his way into a top-tier college, the thing that had kept him from giving up the hundreds of times he wanted to give up, the thing that had made him seize the business world with both fists and driven him to make money, and then more money, and then more money still...the thing that had done all that was...

Hell. It wasn’t a thing at all. It was a person. It was Ava.

Down went the teacup, landing on the table with a thump that sent some of its contents spilling onto his hand. Peyton scarcely felt the burn. He looked at Ava, who was studying a plate of cakes and cookies, trying to decide which one she wanted. She was oblivious to both his spilled tea and tumultuous thoughts, but she had flipped back the veil from her face, leaving her features in clear profile.

She really hadn’t changed since high school. Not just her looks, but the rest of her, too. She was as beautiful now as she’d been then, as elegant, as refined. And, he couldn’t help thinking further, as off-limits. When all was said and done, the Ava of adulthood was no different from the Ava of adolescence. And neither was he. He was still—and would always be—the basest kind of interloper in her world.

As if to hammer home their differences, she finally decided on a frilly little pastry cup filled with berries and whipped cream and transferred it to her plate with a pair of dainty little silver tongs. Then she went for one of the prissy little flowered cakes. Then a couple of the lacy little cookies. All the fragile little things Peyton would have been afraid of touching because he would probably crush them. He was way better suited to a big, bloody hunk of beef beside a mountain of stiff mashed potatoes, with a sweaty longneck bottle of beer to wash it all down. The nectar of the working-class male.

When Ava finally looked up to see how he was faring, her brows knitted downward in confusion. He glanced at the plate of sandwiches sitting between them. Although they were heartier than the pastries, those, too, looked just as off-limits as everything else, so small and delicate and pretty were they. He tried to focus on them anyway, pretending to be indecisive about which one he wanted. But his thoughts were still wrapped up in his epiphany. God. Ava. It had been Ava all along.

He wasn’t trying to master the art of fine living because he wanted to take over another company and add another zero to his bottom line. Not really. Sure, taking over Montgomery and Sons was the impetus, but he wouldn’t be trying to do that if it weren’t for Ava. He wouldn’t have done anything over the past sixteen years if it weren’t for Ava. He’d still be in the old neighborhood, working in the garage with his old man. He’d be spending his days under the chassis of a car, then going home at night to an apartment a few blocks away to watch the Hawks, Bulls or Cubs while consuming a carryout value meal and popping open a cold one.

And, hell, he might have even been happy doing that. Provided he’d never met Ava.

But from the moment he’d laid eyes on her in high school, something had pushed him to rise above his lot in life. Not even pushed him. Driven him. Yeah, that was a better word. Because after Ava had walked into his life, nothing else had mattered. Nothing except bringing himself up to standards she might approve of. So that maybe, someday, she would approve of him. And so that maybe, someday, the two of them...

He didn’t allow himself to finish the thought. He was afraid of what else he might discover about himself. Bad enough he understood what had brought him this far. But he did understand now. Too well. What he didn’t understand was why. Why had Ava had that effect on him when nothing else had? Why would he have been satisfied with the blue-collar life for which he had always assumed he was destined until he met her? What was it about her that had taken up residence deep inside him? Why had she been the catalyst for him to escape the mean streets when the mean streets themselves hadn’t been enough to do that?

“Is something wrong?” she asked, pulling him out of his musings.

“No,” he answered quickly. “Just trying to decide what I want.”

Which was true, he realized. He just didn’t want anything that was on the plate of sandwiches.


“The petit fours here are delicious,” she told him.

He’d just bet they were. If he knew what the hell a petit four was.

“Though you’d probably prefer something a little more substantial.”

Oh, no doubt.

“Maybe one of the curried-egg sandwiches? They’re not the kind of thing you get every day.”

And naturally Peyton didn’t want the kind of thing he could get every day. Hell, that was the whole problem.

“Or if you want something sweeter...”

He definitely wanted something sweeter.

“...you might try one of the ginger cakes.”

Except not that.

Oh, man, this thing with Ava wasn’t turning out the way he’d planned at all. She was supposed to be schooling him in the basics of social climbing, not advanced soul-searching. And what man wanted to discover the workings of his inner psyche for the first time in a frickin’ tearoom?

“Aaahhh...” he began, stringing the word over several time zones in an effort to stall. Finally, he finished, “Yeah. Gimme one of those curried-egg sandwiches. They sound absolutely...” The word was out of his mouth before he could stop it, so overcome by his surroundings, and so weakened by his musings, had he become. “Scrumptious.”

Okay, that did it. With that terrible word, he could feel what little was left of his testosterone oozing out of every pore. A man could only take so much tea and remain, well, manly. And a man could only take so much self-discovery and remain sane. If Peyton didn’t get out of this place soon...if he didn’t get away from Ava soon...if he didn’t get someplace, anyplace, far away from here—far away from her—ASAP, someplace where he could look inside himself and figure out what the hell was going on in his brain...

Bottom line, he just had to get outta here. Now.

“Look, Ava, do you mind if we cut this short?” he asked. “I just remembered a conference call I’m supposed to be in on in—” He looked at his watch and pretended to be shocked at the time. “Wow. Thirty minutes. I really need to get back to my hotel.”

She looked genuinely crushed. “But the tea...”

“Can we get a doggie bag?”

Judging by the way her expression changed, he might as well have just asked her if he could jump up onto the table, whip off his pants and introduce everyone to Mr. Happy.

“No,” she said through gritted teeth. “One does not ask for a doggie bag for one’s afternoon tea. Especially not in a place like this.”

“Well, I don’t know why the hell not,” he snapped.

Oh, yeah. There it was. With even that mild profanity, he sucked some of his retreating testosterone back in. Now if he could just figure out how to reclaim the rest of it...

He glanced around until he saw a waiter—or whatever passed for a waiter in this place, since they were all dressed like ma?tre d’s—and waved the guy down in the most obnoxious way he knew how.

“Hey, you! Garson!” he shouted, deliberately mispronouncing the French word for waiter. “Could we get a doggie bag over here?”

Everyone in the room turned to stare at him—and Ava—in frank horror. That, Peyton had to admit, helped a lot with his masculine recovery. Okay, so he was acting like a jerk, and doing it at Ava’s expense. Sometimes, in case of emergency, a man had to break the glass on his incivility. No, on his crudeness, he corrected himself. His grossness. His bad effin’ manners. Those were way better words for what he was tapping into. And wow, did it feel good.

He braved a glance at Ava and saw that she had propped her elbows on the table and dropped her head into her hands.

“Yo, Ava,” he said. “Take your elbows off the table. That is so impolite. Everyone is staring at us. Jeez, I can’t take you anywhere.” He looked back at the waiter, who hadn’t budged from the spot where he had been about to serve a couple of elderly matrons from a pile of flowered cakes. “What, am I not speakin’ English here?” he yelled. Funny, but he seemed to have suddenly developed a Bronx accent. “Yeah, you in the penguin suit. Could we get a doggie bag for our—” he gestured toward the tea caddy and the plates on the table “—for all this stuff? I mean, at these prices, I don’t want it to go to waste. Know what I’m sayin’?”

“Peyton, what are you doing?” Ava asked from behind her hands. “Are you trying to get us thrown out of here?”

Wasn’t that obvious? Was he really not speakin’ English here?

“Garson!” he shouted again. “Hey, we don’t got all day.”

Ava groaned softly from behind her hands, then said something about how she would never be able to take tea here again. It was all Peyton could do not to reply, You’re welcome.

Instead, he continued to channel his inner bad-mannered adolescent—who he wasn’t all that surprised to discover lurked just beneath his surface. “The service in this place sucks, Ava. Next time, we should hit Five Guys instead. At least they give you your food in a bag. I don’t think this guy’s going to bring us one.”

He figured he’d said enough now to make her snap up her head and blast him for being such a jerk—as politely as she could, naturally, since they were in a public place. Instead, when she dropped her hands, she just looked tired. Really, really tired. And she didn’t say a word. She only stood, gathered her purse and gloves, turned her back, and walked away with all the elegance of a czarina.

Peyton was stunned. She wasn’t going to say something combative in response? She wasn’t going to call him uncouth? She wasn’t going to tell him how it was men like him who gave his entire gender a bad name? She wasn’t going to glare daggers or spit fire? She was just going to walk away without even trying?

When he realized that yep, that was exactly what she was going to do, he bolted after her. He was nearly to the exit when he realized they hadn’t paid their bill, so ran back to the table long enough to drop a handful of twenties on top of it. He didn’t wait for change. Hell, their server deserved a 100-percent tip for the way he had just behaved.

When he vaulted out of the tearoom onto the street, he found himself drowning in a river of people making the Friday-afternoon jump start from work to weekend. He looked left, then right, but had no idea which way Ava had gone. Remembering her outfit, he searched for a splash of white amid the sullen colors of business suits, driving his gaze in every direction. Finally, he spotted her, in the middle of a crosswalk at the end of the block, buttoning up those damned white gloves, as if she were Queen Elizabeth on her way to address the royal guard.

He hurtled after her, but by the time he made it to the curb, she was on the other side of the street and the light was changing. Not that that deterred him. As he sprinted into the crosswalk against the light, half a dozen drivers honked their displeasure, and he was nearly clipped by more than one bumper. Even when he made it safely to the other side of the street, he kept running, trying to catch up to the wisp of white that was Ava.

Every time he thought he was within arm’s reach, someone or something blocked him from touching her, and for every step he took forward, she seemed to take two. Panic welled in him that he would never reach her, until she turned a corner onto a side street that was much less crowded. Still, he had to lengthen his stride to catch up with her, and still, for a moment, it seemed he never would. Finally, he drew near enough to grasp her upper arm and spin her around to face him. She immediately jerked out of his hold, swinging her handbag as she came. Peyton let her go, dodging her bag easily, then lifted both hands in surrender.


“Ava, I’m sorry,” he said breathlessly. “But... Stop. Just stop a minute. Please.”

For a moment, they stood there on the sidewalk looking at each other, each out of breath, each poised for...something. Peyton had no idea what. Ava should have looked ridiculous in her turn-of-the-century garb, brandishing her handbag in her little white gloves, her netted hat dipping to one side. Instead, she seemed ferocious enough to snap him in two. A passerby jostled him from behind, sending him forward a step, until he was nearly toe to toe with her. She took a step in retreat, never altering her pose.

“Leave me alone,” she said without preamble.

“No,” he replied just as succinctly.

“Leave me alone, Peyton,” she repeated adamantly. “I’m going home.”

“No.”

He wasn’t sure whether he uttered the word in response to her first sentence or the second, but really, it didn’t matter. He wasn’t going to leave her alone, and he didn’t want her to go home. Despite his conviction only moments ago that he needed to be by himself to sort out his thoughts, isolation was suddenly the last thing he wanted. Not that he was sure what the first thing was that he wanted, but... Well, okay, maybe he did kind of know what the first thing was that he wanted. He just wasn’t sure he knew what to do with it if he got it. Well, okay, maybe he did kind of know that, too, but...

“You said we still have a lot of work to do before I can go out with Francesca,” he reminded her, shoving his thoughts to the back of his brain and hoping they stayed there. “That’s only a week away.”

She relaxed her stance, dropping her purse to her side. It struck him again that she looked tired. He couldn’t remember ever seeing her looking like that before. Not since reacquainting himself with her in Chicago. Not when they were kids. It was...unsettling.

Then he remembered that yes, he had seen her that tired once. That night at her parents’ house when they’d been up so late studying. It had unsettled him then, too. Enough that he’d wanted to do something to make her less weary. Enough that he’d placed his hands on her shoulders to rub away the knots in her tense muscles. But the moment he’d touched her—

He pushed that thought to the back of his brain, too. He really didn’t need to be thinking about that right now.

“You should have thought about your date with Francesca before you humiliated us the tearoom,” she said.

“Yeah, about that,” he began. Not that he had any idea what to say about that, but about that seemed like a good start.

Ava spared him, however. “Peyton, we could work for a year, and it wouldn’t make any difference. You’ll just keep sabotaging us.”

He couldn’t help noting her use of the word us. She hadn’t said he was sabotaging himself. She hadn’t said he was sabotaging her efforts. She’d said he was sabotaging the two of them. He wondered if she noticed, too, how she’d lumped the two of them together, or if she even realized she’d said it. Even if she did, what did it mean, if anything?

“I only sabotaged us today,” he told her. “And only because you were going out of your way to make things harder than they had to be.”

Even though that was true, it wasn’t why he’d behaved the way he had. He’d done that because he’d needed to get out of that place as fast as he could. The problem now was convincing Ava that he still wanted to move forward after deliberately taking so many giant steps backward.

And the problem was that, suddenly, his wanting to continue with this ridiculous makeover had less to do with winning over the Montgomery sisters in Mississippi...and more to do with winning over Ava right here in Chicago.