Provided he didn’t screw up.
“If you’ll all excuse me,” Ava said to the group, “I’ll be going. I’ve been asked to leave.”
She had turned and completed two steps when Peyton’s voice stopped her.
“The hell you will,” he said. Loudly. “You’re my—” the profanity he chose for emphasis here really wasn’t fit for print “—guest. You’re not going anywhere, dammit.”
She turned back around and automatically started to call him on his language, then stopped when she saw him smile. Because it was the kind of smile she’d seen from him only twice before. That night at her parents’ house sixteen years ago, and last night, in her apartment. A disarming smile that not only rendered Ava defenseless, but stripped him of his armaments, too. A smile that said he didn’t give a damn about anything or anybody, as long as he had one moment with her. Only this time, maybe it would last more than a moment.
He started to wrestle his black tie free of its collar, then stopped a passing waiter and asked him what the hell a guy had to do to get a—again with the profane adjective—bottle of beer at this—profane adjective—party. When the waiter assured him he’d be right back with one, Peyton turned not to Ava, but to Catherine.
“You’re full of crap, Catherine.” Except he chose a different word than
crap.
“I know no one at Emerson, including you, ever thought I would amount to anything. But, hell, I never thought any of you—” now he looked at Ava “—well, except for one of you—would amount to anything, either. It’s not my fault I’m the one who turned out to be right. And furthermore...”
At that point, Peyton told them they could all go do something to themselves that no gentleman would ever tell anyone to do. Ava’s heart swelled with love.
Catherine sputtered again, but this time managed not to spit on anyone. However, neither Peyton nor Ava stayed around long enough to hear what she had to say. Catherine was a big nobody, after all. Who cared what she had to say?
As they headed for the exit, they passed the server returning with Peyton’s longneck bottle of beer, and in one fluid gesture, he snagged both it and a slender flute of champagne for Ava. But when they reached the hotel lobby, they slowed, neither seeming to know what to do next. Ava’s heart was racing, both with exhilaration from having stood up to Catherine’s bullying and exuberance at having told Peyton how she felt about him. Until she remembered that he hadn’t said anything about his feelings for her. Then her heart raced with something else entirely.
Ava looked at Peyton. Peyton looked at Ava.
Then he smiled that disarming—and disarmed—smile again. “What do you say we blow this joint and find someplace where the people aren’t so low-class?”
She released a breath she hadn’t been aware of holding. But she still couldn’t quite feel relieved. There was still so much she wanted to tell him. So many things she wanted—needed—him to know.
“You were only half-right in there, you know,” she said.
He looked puzzled. “What do you mean?”
“What you said about everyone at Emerson. As wrong as Catherine was about you, everything she said about me is true. Every dime my family ever had is gone. My father is a convicted felon and a louse. My mother was a patient in a psychiatric hospital when she died. My car is an eight-year-old compact and my business is struggling. The most stylish clothing I own, I bought at an outlet store. That apartment above the shop? That’s been my home for almost eight years, and I’m not going to be able to afford anything nicer anytime soon. I’m not the kind of woman your board of directors wants within fifty feet of you, Peyton.”
She knew she was presuming a lot. Peyton hadn’t said he wanted her within fifty feet of himself anyway. But he’d just completely sabotaged his entrée into polite society in there. Even if his home base of operation was in San Francisco, word got around fast when notable people behaved badly at high-profile events. He wouldn’t have done that if his social standing was more important to him than she was.
He said nothing for a moment, only studied her face as if he were thinking very hard about something. Finally, he lifted his hand to the back of her head and, with one gentle tug, freed her hair from its elegant twist.
“Looks better down,” he said. “It makes you look vain, shallow and snotty when you wear it up. And you’re not any of those things. You never were.”
“Yeah, I was,” she said, smiling. “Well, maybe not shallow. I mean, I did fall in love with you.”
There. She’d said it twice. If he didn’t take advantage this time, then he wasn’t ever going to.
He smiled back. “Okay, maybe you were vain and snotty, but so was I. Maybe that was why we...” He hesitated. “Maybe that was what attracted us to each other. We were so much alike.”
She smiled at that, but the giddiness she’d been feeling began to wane. He wasn’t going to say it. Because he didn’t feel it. Maybe he didn’t care about his place in society anymore. Maybe he didn’t even care about his image. But he didn’t seem to care for her anymore, either. Not the way he once had. Not the way she still did for him.
“Yes, well, we’re not alike anymore, are we?” she asked. “You’re the prince, and I’m the pauper. You deserve a princess, Peyton. Not someone who’ll sully your professional image.”
He smiled again, shaking his head. “You’ve taught me so much over the past couple of weeks. But you haven’t learned anything, have you, Ava?”
Something in the way he looked at her made her heart hum happily again. But she ignored it, afraid to hope. She’d forgotten what life was like when everything worked the way it was supposed to. She’d begun to think she would never have a life like that again.
“You tell me,” she said. “You went to all the top-tier schools. I could only afford community college.”
“See, that’s just my point. It doesn’t matter where you go to school.” He gestured toward the ballroom they’d just left. “Look at all those people whose parents spent a fortune to send them to a tony school like Emerson and what losers they all turned out to be.”
“We went to Emerson, too.”
“Yeah, but we got an education that had nothing to do with classrooms or the library or homework. The only thing I learned at Emerson that was worth anything...the only thing I learned there that helped me achieve my many admirable accomplishments...” Now he grinned with genuine happiness. “I learned a girl like you could love a guy like me, no matter what—no matter who—I was. You taught me that, Ava. Maybe it took me almost two decades to learn it, but...” He shrugged. “You’re the reason for my many admirable accomplishments. You’re the reason I went after the gold ring. Hell, you are the gold ring. It doesn’t matter what anyone thinks of you or me. Not our old classmates. Not my board of directors. Not anyone I have to do business with. Why would I want a princess when I can have the queen?”
Ava grinned back, feeling her own genuine happiness. “Actually, it does matter what someone thinks of me,” she said. “It matters what
you
think.”
“No, it doesn’t. It only matters what I feel.”
“It matters what you think and feel.”
He lifted a hand to her hair again, threading it through his fingers. “Okay. Then I think I love you. I think I’ve always loved you. And I know I always will love you.”
Now Ava remembered what life was like when everything worked the way it was supposed to. It was euphoric. It was brilliant. It was sublime. And all it took to make it that way was Peyton.
“We have a lot to talk about,” he told her.
She nodded. “Yes. We do.”
He tilted his head toward the hotel exit. “No time like the present.”
Yeah, the present was pretty profane-adjective good, Ava had to admit. But then, really, their past hadn’t been too shabby. And their future? Well, now. That was looking better all the time.
Epilogue
P
eyton sat at a table only marginally less tiny than the one in the Chicago tearoom Ava had dragged him to three months ago, watching as she curled her fingers around the little flower-bedecked china teapot. No way was he going to touch that thing, even if it might win him points with the Montgomery sisters, who had joined him and Ava in the favorite tearoom of Oxford, Mississippi. It was one thing to be a gentleman. It was another to spill scalding tea on the little white gloves of his newest business partners.
“Peyton,” Miss Helen Montgomery said, “you must have found the only woman worth having north of the Mason-Dixon Line. You’d better keep a close eye on her.”
Miss Dorothy Montgomery agreed. “Why, with her manners and fashion sense, she could run the entire Mississippi Junior League.”
“Now, Miss Dorothy, Miss Helen,” Ava said as she set the teapot back down. “You’re going to make me blush.”
Wouldn’t be the first time,
Peyton thought, remembering how radiant Ava’s face had been that evening in her apartment when he’d asked her to keep her gloves on while they made love. There had been plenty of evenings—and mornings and afternoons—like that one since then. In fact, now that he thought about it, he couldn’t wait to get back to their hotel. She was wearing a pair of those white gloves now, along with a pale gray Jackie Kennedy suit and hat that were driving him nuts.
It was their last day in Mississippi. They’d met that afternoon with the Montgomerys and all the requisite corporate and legal types to fine-tune the deal Peyton had been fine-tuning himself for months. Now all that was left was to draw up the contracts and sign them. Montgomery and Sons would stay Montgomery and Sons, with Helen and Dorothy Montgomery as figureheads, and Peyton planned to keep the company intact. In fact, he was going to invest in it whatever was necessary to make the textile company profitable again, and it would become the flagship for his and Ava’s new enterprise. Brenner Moss Incorporated would produce garments for women and men that were American made, from the farm-grown natural fibers to the mills that wove them into fabric to the couturiers who designed the fashions to the workers who pieced them together. Eventually, there would even be Brenner Moss retail outlets. And CEO Ava was chomping at the bit to get it all underway.
Miss Helen moved two sugar cubes to her cup and stirred gently. “Now, remember. You all promised to come back in October for homecoming.”
Miss Dorothy nodded. “Helen and I are staunch Ole Miss alumnae. It’s a very big deal around here.”
“Oh, you bet,” Peyton promised. “And you’ll both be coming to Chicago for the wedding in September, right?”
“We wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
For now, Peyton and Ava would be dividing their time between Chicago and San Francisco, but eventually they would merge everything together on the West Coast. She wanted to include Talk of the Town under the Brenner Moss umbrella and open a chain of stores nationwide, but for now had turned the management of the Chicago shop over to her former sales associate, Lucy Mulligan. However, she was grooming Lucy to become her assistant at Brenner Moss once things took off there.
Funny, how Peyton had returned to Chicago for the single-minded purpose of enlarging his business and making money and had ended up enlarging his business and making money...and gaining so much that was way more important—and way more valuable—than any of that.
Who needed high society when everything he’d ever wanted was wherever Ava happened to be?
“By the way,” Ava said, darting her attention from one Montgomery to the other, “thank you both so much for the homemade preserves.”
“And the socks,” Peyton added.
“Well, we know how cold those northern nights can be,” Miss Helen said. “We went to Kentucky once. In the fall. It must have gotten down to fifty degrees!”
“In Chicago, it gets down in the teens during the winter,” Peyton said. “But I promise it will be nice when you’re there in September.”
Miss Dorothy shivered, even though here in Mississippi, in July, it was a soggy ninety-five degrees in the shade. “Honestly, how do you people survive up there?”
Peyton and Ava exchanged glances, his dropping momentarily to her white gloves before reconnecting with hers—only to see her eyes spark. “Oh, we find ways to keep the fires going.”
Hell, their fires never went out. He could barely remember what his life had been like before reconnecting with Ava. Just days of endless work and nights of endless networking. And yeah, there would still be plenty of that in the future, but he wouldn’t be doing it alone, and it wouldn’t be endless. It would only be until he and Ava had time to themselves again.
“You two are the perfect power couple, I must say,” Miss Dorothy declared. “Intelligent and hardworking and obviously of very good breeding.” With a smile, she added, “Why, you remind me of Helen and myself. You were obviously brought up right.”
True enough, Peyton thought. They’d just had to wait until they were adults so they could bring each other up right. Still, in a lot of ways, Ava made him feel like a kid again. But the good parts about being a kid. Not the rest of it. The parts with the stolen glances, the secret smiles, the breathless wanting and the nights when everything came together exactly the way it was meant to be. He’d never be too old for any of that.
“When your new business gets going,” Miss Helen said, “you two will be the talk of the town.”
“That’s our plan, Miss Helen,” Ava agreed with a grin. But she was looking at Peyton when she said it. “Well, that and living happily ever after, of course.”
Peyton grinned, too. Maybe some people thought living well was the best revenge. But he was more of the opinion that living well was the best reward. And it didn’t matter where or how he and Ava lived that made it worthwhile. It only mattered that they were together. Talk of the town? Ha. He was happy just being the apple of Ava’s eye.
* * * * *
If you loved Peyton’s story, check out these other billionaire novels from
New York Times
bestselling author Elizabeth Bevarly!
THE BILLIONAIRE GETS HIS WAY
CAUGHT IN THE BILLIONAIRE’S EMBRACE
All available now from Harlequin Desire!
Keep reading for an excerpt from EXPECTING THE CEO’S CHILD by Yvonne Lindsay.