Until I'm Yours (2 page)

“What a pleasant image, Daddy. I’ll hold it close.”

“Do.” He brings us to a complete stop, offering my elbow back to Rip with an absent smile. “It was good meeting you, Rip. Keep up the good work this season.”

“Sure thing, Mr. Baston.” Rip offers the white-toothed smile he’s taking all the way to the bank. “Nice to meet you, too.”

Daddy nods before returning his eyes to me.

“Remember what I said, Sofie. I need to go check on a surprise guest.”

“Surprise?” My interest piques. Daddy does great surprises. “No hints?”

“You’ll find out with everyone else, sweetheart.”

Of course. Why would I be special?

“You ready?” I ask Rip as my father walks off to tend to his surprise guest.

“Definitely.”

Rip kisses my hair, and I can’t help but remember the kiss Walsh gave Kerris a few minutes ago. I’m not sure anyone will ever kiss me that way. Not the kiss itself, the practice of lips touching hair, but what lay behind it. I can’t put my finger on it, but I’m sure no one has ever touched me that way. No one has ever felt for me what Walsh feels for that woman. I can see it in the simplest contact they share. Whatever they have, I don’t think I ever believed in it, and I certainly don’t expect it for myself.

We reach the table, and I see my place card to the left of Trevor Bishop’s, with Walsh on his right, like Daddy said it would be. At least he seated my date on my other side. Kerris is, of course, on Walsh’s other side. There has never been any love lost between that girl and me. She stole what was always supposed to be mine. Walsh and I made sense. She and Walsh defy the laws of social logic, her being a nobody and all, but somehow here they are, obviously besotted with each other and…working.

“Sof, Aunt Billi told me you just got back from Dubai.” Walsh walks around the table and kisses my cheek.

“Yep.” I lean in to the friendly greeting, knowing friendly is as far as we’ll ever go now. “It was a quick shoot.”

Somehow we’ve remained friends despite the disastrous affair a few years back, a desperate attempt on my part when Kerris married Walsh’s best friend, Cam. I’ve been conductor for enough train wrecks to recognize one, and that was some fucked-up shit. Now Cam is married to Walsh’s cousin Jo, and Walsh is married to Kerris. A game of musical beds I wish I could have gotten in on.

Come to think of it, with my turn at Walsh, I guess I kind of did.

Walsh has stayed true through everyone telling him what a bitch I am, and let’s face it, they’re right. He even forgave my insulting treatment of his wife. I mean, we don’t talk every day or anything, but he could have used his influence with the Walsh Foundation to take something from me that means a lot. I have served as the foundation’s celebrity ambassador for years. If I haven’t done anything else right, I have that. Walsh knows how much it means to me, and didn’t take it away as retaliation for the bad blood between Kerris and me. For that, and for a hundred other kindnesses he has shown me since we were in preschool, I’ll strain to be civil to his sweet wife.

“Sweet” is not a compliment, by the way. Kerris’s smile alone gives me a cavity.

“Good to see you, Walsh. Hi, Kerris.” I slide my glance to Kerris. She returns my nod, wearing a guarded look on her face. Smart girl. I’ll try for my best behavior, but I’m a bitch on a leash that slips from time to time. Best be prepared for anything.

“Sofie, let me introduce you to our guests.” Walsh gestures to Mr. Oatmeal. “This is Harold Smith, co-founder of Deutimus Corp.”

Mr. Oatmeal, given name Harold, stands and shakes my hand. He sports the look most men have when they first meet me “in real life.” Slightly stunned. I’m so used to my face, to this body, that I almost forget the effect they have on people. Also, the fashion world is an alternate dimension, populated by a species of gorgeous, lissome perfectly maintained superwomen where I am the norm. I rather enjoy not being the most striking person in the room from time to time.

“And this is his business partner, Trevor Bishop.”

Walsh steps back, and I have my first close-up of the fish I’m here to catch. Only I’m the one hooked, immediately. I’m careful not to show it, but that stunned look I’m used to seeing on other people’s faces? All over my inside face.

This force of flesh and bone and muscle wrapped in heat
looms
over me. Trevor Bishop’s presence burns holes in my composure. I could tell from across the room that he was attractive and built like a mountain lion, lean and strong and broad. But it’s only now, with proximity, that his absolute confidence meets mine head-on. He tilts his head to the left, his chocolate-colored eyes steadily considering me, and I swear he knows. Even though I’m sure my face doesn’t give it away, I swear he knows that as I stand in front of him, inhaling his clean scent and waiting for his first smile, windmills turn in my belly.

“A pleasure to meet you, Miss Baston.” His lips, wide and full, give me a smile punctuated by dimples. And he has a Southern drawl.

Fuck me now.

That’s not a figure of speech. I quite literally want him to toss me over that hulking shoulder, find a dark corner somewhere, and screw me so deeply into a wall we leave a dent. Or in a bathroom stall. Hell, he could drag me over to the elaborate buffet table and take me from behind right there by the ice sculpture.

One brow, a few shades darker than his hair, rises. Holy crap, I haven’t responded yet.

“Um, nice to meet you, too, Mr. Bishop.” I take my time so my tongue doesn’t betray the muddled mess of haywire hormones I am right now.

His eyes drift over my shoulder, forcing my mind and manners back to Rip.

“Oh, yes. I’m sorry. How rude.” I turn to Rip, who immediately claims my elbow and draws me into his side. All of a sudden he’s territorial. I can’t blame him. If my girlfriend was within five feet of this man, I’d handcuff her to me for the night. “This is Michael Ripley.”

“Great game Sunday.” Trevor shakes the hand Rip isn’t manacling me with. “I’m a Falcons fan myself, but I can appreciate a good toss no matter the team. That’s some arm you got there.”

Rip’s hold on me relaxes a bit. Clever Trevor, disarming him that way. Well played. Will I be able to strip this fish of his defenses as easily?

Once seated, Rip, Trevor, Harold, and Walsh fall into a discussion about football I don’t even try to follow. Apparently neither does Kerris. She’s texting someone with a small frown on her face, and mumbles something to Walsh about a sitter. I settle into my seat beside Trevor, taking a few moments to compose myself and strategize how I can get that hook in his mouth.

“So you were in Dubai?”

The question startles me a little, I was so lost in my musings. I turn slightly in Trevor’s direction, creasing my lips politely.

“For a shoot, yes.” I toy with the clamp on my clutch, which rests on the table. “And my friend Ardis married a prince over there. I like to visit her every once in a while.”

“A real live prince, huh?” He teases me with a quirk of those full lips.

“Don’t be too impressed.” I lean a few inches closer to him and lower my voice. “He’s a prince in name only.”

“If he’s a prince in name only, what does that make him in deed?”

I can’t hold on to the humor when I recall the bruises shackling Ardis’s throat and wrists, or the black-and-blue mark on her cheek like a brand. I refocus my eyes and sober my mouth.

“A frog.”

“I thought you ladies kissed all the frogs to find the prince.”

“It happens that way in fairy tales, not in Manhattan.” I sip my champagne. “Or in Dubai, apparently.”

“So that accounts for your tan.” His dark eyes make a slow, thorough inspection of my features.

“Hmm. What accounts for yours?” I toss a skein of silvery-blond hair back so he gets an eyeful of the bare line of my neck and shoulder. His eyes move down my neck, warming the skin like a touch, before he looks back into my eyes.

“Haiti.” He laughs a little, lounges back in his chair, and links long fingers across a flat stomach I imagine is corded with muscle. “Well, and my father is Lumbee, so some of my tan’s natural.”

“Lum what?”

He laughs again, his teeth white against his skin. I really like that it’s because of something I said.

“Lumbee Indian, a tribe found mostly in Lumberton, North Carolina.”

“So your mother’s responsible for the red hair?”

“She is.” He brushes a hand over his neat hair, disrupting it into a coppery spill on his forehead. “I was spared the freckles, though.”

“I’m sure there’s one or two.”

His eyes are suddenly hot chocolate, heating up a little as they hold mine.

“You’re welcome to try to find them.”

I’m supposed to be flirting with
him
, baiting
him
, but he’s casting the line. I don’t like it. I need the pole in my hand. I break that steamy contact, lowering my eyes to the cocktail ring I’m twisting around my finger.

“What took you to Haiti?” I ask. “It’s miserably hot this time of year.”

He pauses a moment before answering, the press of his lips against a smile acknowledging my conversational feint.

“You’ve been?”

“Sofie’s been to our orphanage in Haiti several times for the foundation,” Walsh interjects from Trevor’s other side.

I wonder how in on this little plan of Daddy’s he actually is. Walsh is a great guy, but when it comes down to it, he’s as much Martin Bennett’s son as I am Ernest Baston’s daughter. Both of us descend from ruthless corporate raiders.

“She’s our celebrity ambassador,” Walsh continues.

“Really?” A new light enters Trevor’s dark eyes. It could be respect. I’m not sure.

“Kristeene, Walsh’s mother, recruited me years ago to do it, and they haven’t gotten rid of me yet.”

Though there were a few times I wondered if the Walsh Foundation board of directors might have ousted me had I not been Baby Girl Baston. And right on cue, Daddy takes a seat beside Harold. Maybe Oatmeal is his assignment.

“Sorry, I was detained making plans for a surprise guest.” He takes a sip of the white wine at his elbow. “Now, Harold and Trevor, you’re both Princeton men, right?”

“In a manner of speaking.” Trevor offers a self-deprecating laugh, sharing a grin across the table with Harold. “We dropped out our junior year to start Deutimus Corp.”

“It all worked out, though.” Harold pushes the glasses back up his nose with an index finger. “They conferred an honorary degree on us last year.”

“Well, that was nice.” Daddy points a fork in my direction. “You wouldn’t know it, but Sofie here was accepted to Princeton.”

My lips purse against the groan that wants out so badly. Not this again.

“And Sarah Lawrence,” Daddy continues. “And UCLA.”

“Yes, but somewhere along the way I got confused and thought it was my life.” I dash saccharine on the smile I offer my father. “And that I could do what I wanted with it.”

“You mean running all over the world having your picture taken?” Daddy lowers his fork to his plate and his eyebrows into the frown I’m used to seeing when we discuss my misspent youth.

“It’s actually worked out quite well for me, Daddy.”

I’m one of the highest-paid, most sought-after models in the world. That means something to me, if not to him. I won’t let him piss on it.

“We saw your billboard today.” Harold passes the words and a kind smile to me across the table.

“I hope it was the one where she’s wearing clothes.” Daddy slices into his tender steak and any pride I might feel for my accomplishments, as they were.

An awkward silence pools around his words. I feel Trevor’s eyes on me, assessing if Daddy’s words have found their mark. Good luck cracking this safe, Bishop. I offer a laugh that tinkles like a champagne toast.

“Daddy, that’s the BARE campaign.” I’m sure he’s not bringing up the
Playboy
spread I recently did for my birthday. Not in front of his fish. “It’s very tastefully shot.”

Harold forks an asparagus spear. “Was that the one we saw, Trev?”

“Not sure.” Trevor moves his broad shoulders in a careless shrug.

“If it was Times Square, it’s BARE, a skin-care product I endorse.” I push a chunk of hair behind one ear. “In the other one I’m actually wearing clothes.”

“Where’s the other billboard?” Trevor raises his glass of water to his lips while he waits for my answer.

“In the Meatpacking District.” I’m taking the pole back and baiting the hook. “But you don’t have to try to find it. You have the real thing right here.”

He doesn’t bite, but smiles and gives me one last look before turning to answer a question Walsh just posed.

“Where’s your mom?” Rip asks from his seat beside me.

“Probably scolding a server.” I pierce a scallop and pop it into my mouth. “After years of practice, she’s very good at that.”

“Your mother is actually making some seating chart adjustments so our special guest can sit here with us,” Daddy says.

That special guest again. As long as it’s not another sheikh. The last time I entertained one of Daddy’s sheikhs, he followed me to the bathroom and got handsy. He didn’t speak a word of English, but I translated knee to groin perfectly.

“Here they come now.” Daddy wears a pleased expression on his usually hard-to-satisfy face.

I see my mother first, and I can only hope, with all my creams, exfoliations, and serums, to look as beautiful as Willimena Baston—Billi to her friends—does in twenty years. Like my father and me, she’s blond. Where my hair is naturally almost Nordic bright, hers is a buttery gold. Her hair color and nature are much softer than mine and Daddy’s. And where our eyes are emerald green, with not a speck of hazel, hers are pewter gray.

By all rights, living with my father—his callousness, infidelity, and neglect—should have lined Mother’s face with pain, but her skin radiates age-defying youth. By necessity, I have toughened my heart’s tender places, but I’ve always wanted to be like her in some ways. Always wanted us to be closer. Maybe I remind her too much of my father for her to really love me. I glance at Daddy, who barely registers her approach because he’s fixated on the “special guest” accompanying her.