Manhattan's Most Scandalous Reunion by Dani Collins, Caitlin Crews

CHAPTER TWO

“I DIDN’T! I was across the street and they surrounded me. I panicked and ran to what was familiar.” She hugged the pillow she was still holding. “I didn’t expect Amir to call you.” Her chin trembled. “I just wanted to catch my breath.”

Reve had been born skeptical. The life he’d led had honed his cynicism to a razor-sharp edge. The first time Nina had spoken to him, he’d seen her angle. She’d been cutting in line ahead of her own employer, a shark of a woman named Kelly Bex, to get to him.

That put Nina on his own level of ruthless buccaneering—not devoid of a conscience, but willing to leap on an opportunity when it presented itself in a bespoke suit with a Patek Philippe wristwatch and a gold credit card made from actual gold.

He respected that. Plus, she was pretty as hell. Mesmerizing with her silky, shiny hair and her expressive brows and her delicate oval face. She was curious and interesting and made him laugh, so he’d let her run her game. Why not? He liked to play as hard as worked.

He’d thought he was embarking on an affair with a like-minded partner, but their relationship hadn’t gone the way he’d expected. Nina possessed an artistic temperament. She was naturally passionate and sensitive and effusive. She challenged his assumptions, and pushed up against him and excited him. Sparks had constantly been flying, especially in the bedroom. They were an A-hazard combustible combination, and his body refused to forget it.

The lust she provoked in him had been her ticket into this penthouse. He’d known he was being a fool. Emotions were a tool for manipulating a reaction. He sat in marketing meetings all the time where they discussed how to stir up envy and turn it into a luxury car purchase, but he’d still allowed her to enthrall him.

When she had stormed out because he had declined to eat dinner with her father, he’d seen it as a tantrum intended to bring him to heel. He’d balked—hard—expecting her to come back once she cooled off, but she hadn’t.

Her social feeds had reassured him she was alive and spending time with her father, and then three days later he’d seen a “good to be home” post. The phone he’d bought her turned up at the desk downstairs, and he discovered she had blocked him from every aspect of her life.

That abrupt cutting of ties had thrust him into a fractured moment of fearing he had genuinely hurt her. Dread had leaned a sharp elbow into his integrity. He wasn’t the most moral of men, but he didn’t harm people. He didn’t use them up and throw them away.

He didn’t need them, either, but he felt her absence more keenly than he’d expected. It still put a sick knot in his gut recalling how discarded he’d felt for those few dark minutes.

Then he’d remembered that she’d left her precious sewing machine. This whole charade was a taunt. She had wanted him to chase her, but he refused. He’d sat back and waited, knowing she would turn up when she was ready, and here she was.

The part where she was claiming to have been chased here by paparazzi was an odd way to save face. Definitely not the quickest way into his good graces, but he knew how nightmarish those scrums could be and she seemed genuinely distressed. There was a haunted look around her eyes. Tension pulled at the corners of her mouth. Her cheekbones stood out as though she’d lost a few pounds. She was naturally slender and tall, but she had never struck him as fragile.

His heart sat crooked in his chest as he realized she hadn’t smiled once yet. In fact, she looked like a rabbit run to ground.

“Are you sure they didn’t hurt you?” he asked with gruff concern.

He was still twitching with adrenaline from noticing the blood on her hand. For a few seconds, he’d gone to a very violent place. He’d always been a scrapper, but today, imagining someone had hurt her so badly she was terrified of him, he had known he could kill.

It was sobering. And a stark reminder that she brought more tumult into his life than was comfortable. In fact, he was sitting here filtering through a thousand reactions when he ought to have already dismissed her from his life and left for his engagement.

“I’m fine.” She was rubbing her thumb into the heel of her palm. “I might have a bruise later, but I’m just...” She heaved a sigh that contained a metric ton of despair. “Tired.”

That he believed. The way she stared sightlessly at the fireplace, her mouth pouty with desolation, bothered him. He didn’t like seeing her like this, trampled and sad. It slipped past the armor he was donning and sank like an ice pick in his gut.

He fought softening toward her while she blinked slowly once, twice, then drew a breath and shot him a tight, brave, flat-lipped stretch of her lips that was evidently supposed to be a smile. She set aside the pillow.

“You’re right. I shouldn’t have come to you.”

His lungs tightened in a very visceral reaction. Why not him?

This was her strange power over him, though. She said and did things that tugged reactions from him with a barbed hook. He didn’t want to be the sort of man who could be led by his emotions. It left him open to all sorts of strikes.

He clenched his jaw against any declarations of concern or offers to help and stood.

She rose and shouldered her bag, tugging her hair free from the strap, making him want to reacquaint himself with how satin-cool those wavy tendrils were and how warm and smooth her skin was.

He jerked his gaze away. “I’ll take you out through the underground parking and drop you wherever you’re staying.” It was the decent thing to do. That was the only reason he offered.

“A subway station is fine, thanks.”

“I’ll take you home,” he insisted. “Your things are in storage downstairs. It will only take a minute to have them load—”

“No.”She hit him with a look that accused him of hate crimes. “Why do you still have it? Sell it. Give it away. Throw it away. I don’t care, but it’s not mine.” She disappeared into the powder room and slammed the door.

And there was the flare of temper that lit his own, making him want to bang on the door and demand she explain herself.

No. He wouldn’t let her manipulate him again.

He went down the hall to finish dressing, determined to end their association once and for all. Determined to ignore the gravel that sat heavy in his stomach as he did.

“Do you need a few more minutes?” Reve asked stiffly as she joined him in the elevator. He’d put on a tie and jacket and looked fantastic, the bastard.

Nina looked and felt like the crumpled tissues in her hand. She was as tired of crying as she was of everything else, but why had he thrown her shattered dreams in her face like that? Why?

“I’m fine.” She felt his gaze on the side of her face, intense enough to leave a radiation burn.

His car was waiting by the elevator when it opened. He moved to open the back door himself and she slid in, slouching down even though the windows were tinted.

He came in beside her and gave her a disgruntled look, then flicked his gaze to their surroundings as though checking for cameramen.

“Where are you staying?” he asked.

“Lower East Side.”

“Where?”

“A friend’s studio. His lease runs out at the end of the month and he’s in Australia. He said I could use it. The price was right.” She spoke with indifference, as though she wasn’t dreading going back there. “Drop me at whichever subway station is along the way,” she told the driver, adding to Reve, “I don’t want to keep you from...whoever you’re seeing.”

She flicked her gaze to his razor-sharp lapels, trying not to contemplate who he’d dressed to see.

“It’s a lobbying fundraiser,” he said.

“Oh, well, you know I’d love nothing better than to keep you from giving crooked politicians your money. Take me home, then,” she said facetiously.

“Sorry to disappoint, but I’ve already paid for the tickets. Lower East Side,” Reve said to the driver, and closed the privacy screen.

“I was being sarcastic. The subway is fine.”

He put up a finger as he dialed his phone and brought it to his ear.

She looked out the window. The word tickets—plural—had stuck like a blade in her stomach. The knife twisted as she heard a woman’s voice answer his call.

“I’m running late,” Reve said. “I’ll meet you there.”

Nina did her best to transport herself out of body while the woman promised to “tell Daddy” and said, “See you soon.”

“Dating a politician’s daughter is not the way to stay out of the spotlight,” she remarked pithily when he ended his call.

“It’s cocktails on the lawn. I don’t make the rules, you know. I simply play them to my advantage.”

“Sounds like you’re playing her.” She used the voice of experience.

“She called me to say that if I bought the very overpriced tickets, she would join me to make introductions.” He dropped his phone into the inside pocket of his jacket. “That’s how the system works, and that’s how I have a chance to swing things into better practices than the ones you hate. I recently succeeded in getting emissions regulations tightened, so you’re welcome. Breathe easier.”

“Don’t act like that was about the planet. You’re only trying to make the field more even for your hydrogen fuel cells.”

“Air quality still wins.”

True. And she wasn’t swiping at him for chasing political influence. She was jealous. That was the ugly bottom line.

They drove several blocks in silence, the commuter traffic heavy but not awful.

“Why are you in the spotlight?” he asked in a tone shaded with skepticism. “You never said.”

“It’s a long and b—” She’d started to say boring, but it was tragic and painful and confusing and life changing. Potentially more so, if she pursued it, but she didn’t think she had a choice. Not if she was being chased through the streets demanding answers she didn’t have.

She dug into her bag, found her phone and then pulled up the photo of Oriel from Cannes.

Reve gave her screen the quickest, most cursory glance. His mouth twisted with faint disgust. “So you are seeing him.”

“Read the caption.”

He took her phone and stared longer. Frowned. “Oriel Cuvier?” He flicked his gaze to her face and back to the photo. “That’s you.”

“Nope.” She reached for the phone. “She’s a French model. Runway work, but also underwear and swimsuit ads. She recently landed one of the top brands for sunglasses. When I first came to New York, someone pointed out a photo of her and said we looked alike. I didn’t think much of it. We all look like someone, right?”

“Your dad was in the air force, wasn’t he?”

“Funny you should mention that, but don’t malign the fidelity of a man you refused to meet. Especially because if you had, you would know he’s white. What are the chances he would have two daughters with such dark coloring? If you say he must have a type, I will poke you in the eye.”

He held up a placating hand. “What’s your theory then?”

She looked at the phone, loathe to go to that other image because it made her seriously question her sanity. Her stomach had been nothing but acid since she’d seen it. She gathered herself and flicked, then handed her phone across, not glancing at the two photos that had been juxtaposed by the press in India. They showed a mother and daughter, both in their midtwenties.

“That’s why Oriel Cuvier is making headlines right now,” Nina said to the window. “She was adopted by a French couple and raised in France, but she recently learned her birth mother was Lakshmi Dalal, a Bollywood star who died about twenty years ago.”

Reve scrolled to read the article beneath.

Nina dug into her bag for the keys to the building so she wouldn’t have to look at him. Was he thinking she was pitiful? Reaching for a connection that was laughably beyond her? Soft in the head?

He didn’t swear or give any indication of his reaction.

When she dared glance in his direction, he was watching her.

“Are you adopted?”

“No.” Her throat closed, making the word more of a squeak. The pressure in her chest became nearly unbearable. Her eyes grew so hot she had to clench them to prevent the tears from leaking out.

“So this is a coincidence?” he scoffed. “A quirk of genetics?”

“Must be.” She snatched back her phone, so abruptly it bordered on rude, and threw it into her bag. “Now all these stupid reporters think I’m her. I’ll have to go back to Albuquerque so they’ll leave me alone except I can’t.” She leaned to rap on the glass and then pushed the button to lower the screen. “Make a right at the light, please. I’m eight blocks up, but let me off wherever you can.”

“I’m not letting you off here.” Reve glowered as they rolled into a street full of stained awnings over pawnshops and moneylenders. There were homeless people sprawled with their belongings on the sidewalk. A woman in a short skirt paced alongside their slowing car and leaned suggestively, trying to catch Reve’s attention.

“It’s daylight. I’ll be fine. I’m in the middle of the next block,” she told the driver, pointing at a very dodgy building that had half its windows boarded up.

Reve swore and curtly ordered the driver, “Let us out here and drive around the block.” He turned back to her and added, “I’ll walk you in.”

“Why?”

He ignored her and stepped out of the car after her, taking hold of her elbow as they crossed the street and walked the remaining block. He sent alert glances in both directions and subtly placed himself between her and the man blocking the entrance to the building.

“Spare change?” the man asked.

Reve handed him a few dollars, and his grip tightened on Nina’s elbow as they moved into the darkened entranceway at the top of the steps.

“Why the hell are you staying in a place like this?” The simmering rage was back in his tone.

“I told you. It was free.” She tried the key, but the building’s front door had been broken in since she’d left this morning. It swung inward as she touched it.

“You’re smarter than this, Nina.”

“It’s not that bad,” she lied, secretly relieved that he was following her up the two flights of stairs. She unlocked the door to the studio and they entered what was admittedly a dim, squalid room of peeling paint and hard-used furniture. “See? Perfectly fine.”

“Why is the window nailed shut?”

“My friend was robbed a few weeks ago, but it’s safe now, right? No one can get in.”

“It’s a firetrap,” he said grimly. “Get your things. You’re not staying here.”

“It’s for a couple of nights. It’s fine.”

“There’s a full bag of garbage right here.” He pointed. “You know that attracts rats, right?”

“That’s actually my suitcase. I bagged it to keep the cockroaches out.”

He gave her the most condescending look in the history of condescending looks.

“So you’re already packed,” he said with muted fury. “Good.”

“I’m not staying with you,” she insisted.

“Well, you’re not staying here, so tell me which hotel you want to go to.”

“It’s been so nice seeing you again, Reve. I can’t imagine why I told you to go to hell and walked out on you.”

“Yeah, I’m awash in warm fuzzies myself. Do you have more than this?”

“I don’t have money for a hotel! And don’t you dare tell me you’ll pay for it. I already owe you thousands, and I feel sick about it every single day. So no, Reve. No.”

“What are you talking about?” he muttered crisply. “I have never expected—” His phone pinged. “That’s probably my driver telling me he’s losing the hubcaps.” He glanced at his phone and his expression turned to concrete. Accusation flashed into his eyes.

She fell back a step. “What?”

“My publicist is texting,” he said through his teeth. “Asking if I want to make a statement about my relationship with Oriel Cuvier, since she was seen coming into my building. There’s speculation we’re involved. So, yes, Nina. You will come home with me. You are going to tell me exactly what is going on, and we’re going to find a way to keep my name out of it.”