“You don’t even know me,” he rumbled, and she forced herself not to feel na?ve. Of course she didn’t know him. But the little girl in her still believed in the inherent goodness of people. Men, even. Not everyone was like Jason, and his horrible behavior shouldn’t cause her to lose her trust in humankind. Even though she might have lost sight of that for a few minutes just now, Komarov’s concession had given her a pretty good reminder.
She gave him a small wave and laughed. “Hi. I’m Lily Stanton.”
The hint of a smile quirked the corners of his lips. “Bruno Komarov.”
Bruno. Hot. Not that it mattered. This was just a basic courtesy, introducing themselves before sharing a living space for the next ten hours or so.
She flashed him a wide smile—the one that had gotten her moved to the front row at the Maroon 5 concert, had gotten her free drinks all night when she went down to New Orleans last year for Mardi Gras, and the one that Jason had called her the-only-reason-you-want-to-live-in-this-town-is-because-I-own-it smile.
She hadn’t used it since she and Jason had broken up. Or, more precisely, since she had discovered he’d been cheating on her for a year with her supposed best friend, Isabelle. That had killed any desire to smile at all.
She expected this Bruno Komarov guy to melt accordingly, and say yes so that she wouldn’t feel like such a jerk for taking his hotel room.
Hey! Since when had it become his?
But there was no time to wonder about that, because it dawned on her after a few awkward seconds of silence that the smile wasn’t working on him. Komarov—for some reason, she kept thinking of him that way—was just eyeing her curiously and probably waiting for her to say something instead of grinning at him like an idiot.
Well, damn.
She dropped the smile. “Look, I don’t know you that well, but I do know some things about you,” she argued, and then stopped. “Wait. Why am I trying to convince you that you’re safe and it’s okay for you to accept a place to sleep in my hotel room?”
Back to yours, then. You’re so wishy-washy.
Except she wasn’t. That was Jason talking, during the three years they had been together and he had been so sly about it, she hadn’t even realized just how far he had brought her confidence down. She’d been a young, hotshot consultant with her own thriving business when they’d met, and although work was still going well, she had been putting in way too many hours just to prove Jason wrong, to prove that she was worthy of him.
And, apparently, to help fund his affair with Isabelle. They’d carried on in her apartment, in the room she had given to Jason to use as his painting studio after he’d quit his job to focus on his art to become the next Basquiat.
Her hands clenched into fists.
He shrugged. “Because I have three younger sisters and I can only pray they would never do something as foolish as invite a total stranger to share a hotel room with them.”
Of all the—
“I was trying to be nice, not foolish.” She punched her finger in his direction. She should never have made the offer. He was a jerk. She stepped a fraction closer as she laid into him. “You’re not the only person who’s allowed to do something decent for another human being? I was making a genuine offer—and in return, you insulted me?” Lily poked her finger forward again and was surprised when it met a warm, solid chest this time.
She hadn’t realized she’d advanced on him like this. What was it about him that had her swinging from angry to benevolent, to grateful and back again to angry within a span of five minutes? She never acted this way. That’s how she had grown her firm to the level of success it had today. By always being calm, cool, collected.
Everything that, at the moment, she was decidedly not.
And it was because of him. This man who made her feel too much.
He looked down at her finger touching his lavender shirt. And smirked.
Lily let out a strangled scream of frustration, turned on her heel, and stalked back to the counter.
“If you’ll sign here, madam,” Edgardo said smoothly, pretending not to have noticed the exchange that had gone on not five feet away from his nose, “I will make the room keys. Er— how many would you like?”
Edgardo’s perfectly pitched tone—somewhere between polite interest and polite disinterest—wavered slightly, making her feel marginally better. She wasn’t the only one who had been knocked out of joint by Komarov. She opened her mouth to tell Edgardo that one would be enough, but a low voice just behind her left shoulder beat her to it.
“She’ll take two,” Komarov told Edgardo.
He leaned in closer, until she could feel the heat of his body and smell the musky scent of his aftershave, and said, “I accept your offer.”
…
Lily Stanton was trouble.
He’d noticed her the second his cab had pulled up in front of the Ritz. She was struggling to get herself and her suitcase through the heavy front doors without causing harm to herself or the doors and had barely succeeded.
But that’s not why he’d noticed her.