The Billionaire's Bridal Bid (5 page)

Matt popped a micro-slice of cheese-topped asparagus into his mouth. “I didn’t lie.”

“Well, you clearly didn’t tell her the truth or she wouldn’t have been winking at me about how charming and romantic our reunion is.”

He gave a c’est la vie shrug. “I may have left out a few details.”

“Like what? Our mutual hatred and belligerence?”

He gave an exaggerated wince. “Now that’s a little strong, don’t you think?”

“No, I don’t think—”

“Now that’s the spirit. Don’t think.” He held an amuse-bouche toward her. “Here try this.”

She wanted to protest, but when she opened her mouth he popped the bite in. The tiny dollop of goat cheese melted in her mouth, contrasting perfectly with the crisp fresh asparagus. Her eyes drifted closed as she savored the experience.

“See?” he said. “I knew you’d love it. Suzy’s—”

His cell phone rang and he broke off with a frown. He pulled his iPhone out of his breast pocket and glanced at it. He frowned—for an instant his expression of intense concern flickered across his face, giving her a glimpse
of the driven young man she’d known so many years ago. Then it vanished and he continued talking. “Suzy’s one of the most talented chefs on this coast.”

As he extolled the merits of Market—of which Claire was all too aware—he fiddled with his phone, turning it to vibrate. He slipped it back into his pocket. He was still talking a moment later when it gave a faint beep.

She raised her eyebrows. “Shouldn’t you get that?” she asked as a waiter set a plate of appetizers in front of them.

“I don’t take business calls on dates.”

She was too hungry and too tempted by the food to ignore it, so she dug right in. In all likelihood, she’d never eat like this again; she might as well enjoy it.

“But this isn’t really a date,” she said. “And unless I’m mistaken, they called and sent you a text message in the past two minutes. It must be important.”

“It’s work,” he said stiffly. “It’ll wait.”

When they’d dated in college, he’d been so passionate about the work FMJ did, work had never waited. He’d been on fire with the determination to solve new engineering problems. To invent. To create. To fix all the things wrong with the world, which he believed FMJ could do with the right funding and resources.

“What is it?” she surprised herself by asking. Not curiosity, she told herself. She was merely being polite. “This project you’re working on? It’s important enough that someone on your team is working on it on a Saturday night. So what is it?”

He sat back, his appetizer untouched, his arms crossed over his chest. “No woman wants to hear about some geeky science project over dinner.”

The bite of Dungeness crab turned to sponge in her mouth. She set down her fork and sat back. Bringing her
napkin to her face, she wiped at her lips. “I said that to you.”

He lifted his glass of wine as if to toast her and then took several long swallows. When he set down his glass, he smiled with only a tinge of bitterness. “I should thank you. It’s some of the best advice I ever got about women.”

“Matt, I—” Christ, what had she done? He used to love talking about his work. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It was great advice.” He shoved a bite of the appetizer into his mouth without even a glimmer of satisfaction.

“It wasn’t advice. It was—” She broke off, dropping her hands into her lap.

When she’d left him, she’d been so worried he’d want to follow. She’d been so sure he wouldn’t really let her go that she’d said things she knew would hurt him. That had seemed like the only way to make a clean break.

Now, hearing her words thrown back at her, she realized what she’d done. That womanizing playboy he’d become after she left—that guy she hated so much—she’d helped create him. She’d made Matt believe that she didn’t want to be with the geeky brilliant scientist. And she’d been so convincing, he’d transformed himself into this suave playboy as a result.

“You were never boring,” she tried to tell him.

“Tone down the geekiness and take out the wallet. Isn’t that what you said? Well, you wouldn’t believe how well that works with most women.”

She couldn’t stomach the bitterness in his voice or knowing that it had colored the way he saw women. The way he saw himself.

“Matt, when I left—” But she stumbled on the explanation. How could she make him understand the
truth about the past? “Has it ever occurred to you that when I left, it wasn’t about you at all?” His expression was impassive as he stared at some spot over her shoulder. She willed him to meet her gaze. To see the truth of her words. She searched her memory, dredging up all the awful lies she’d told him. “It had nothing to do with you being geeky or too smart or boring. It was none of that stuff.”

“Then what was it about?” He spit the words out between them.

“It was about me and my family and—”

“Right. You’re a family of runners. That’s what you always said, right? So that’s your excuse? You were just running away?”

She sucked in a deep breath, feeling like she’d been slapped in the face. Had she been?

She’d left Matt to return home and help her younger sister. Surely he knew that by now. Everyone in town knew why she’d come home and everything that happened since then, so surely he knew, as well. When she’d left Matt, she’d said so many things to make sure he wouldn’t follow her, she barely remembered them all. Matt bored her. He was too geeky for her. She’d met someone else. She was going to New York with Mitch, a real man who rode a motorcycle and never talked about work at dinner.

They had all been lies. He hadn’t bored her. She’d loved his passion for engineering. Most of all, there had been no Mitch. There’d been no one else. Ever. Mitch was a name she’d pulled from her mother’s unsavory past.

But since he’d been back, it hadn’t once come up in conversation. No “Hey, how’s your sister?” or “So how’d
that teenage pregnancy turn out?” He knew about it and clearly didn’t want to talk about it.

But for the first time, she considered the possibility that she hadn’t left only to help Courtney. Had she also been running?

The possibility made her skin prickle. Like she’d brushed against a live wire. Slowly, she shook her head. “I don’t know. Maybe. I was so young. And scared. I loved you, but you—” She squeezed her eyes shut. “You loved me
so
much. Your future seemed so bright and I was terrified of ruining all of that.”

She opened her eyes to see him staring at her, his expression dark and unreadable in the flickering candlelight.

And then his phone buzzed again, just the silent vibration of the phone moving in his pocket. He took it out and set it facedown on the table by his arm, but before he could say anything else, a waiter appeared, all solicitous concern.

“May I take this, sir?”

“Yes,” Matt said. “We’re done here.”

The waiter left with their plates and still Matt said nothing about her confession. Obviously, he was going to ignore it. She didn’t blame him and she hadn’t really expected him to forgive her. Besides, he was good at ignoring things.

Finally, she leaned forward. “Look, this isn’t working. This has been amazing, but it’s enough, okay? The plane, the restaurant…by now, you’ve made your point.”

“My point?” he asked slowly.

“Yes. Your point. I get it. You’re very rich. You’re also very smooth and very capable of wooing any woman on a date. But now, I’m just ready for it to be over because the stress—”

“No.” He gave her an assessing look. “Why not just relax and try to enjoy the evening. Pretend it’s just a normal Saturday.”

“If this was a normal Saturday, I’d be at home watching
Dancing with the Stars
on my DVR.”

His lips twisted in a wry smile. “Okay, pretend it’s just a normal first date.”

“I don’t—”

“Right. You don’t date. Well, pretend you do.”

“Okay.” She sucked in a bracing breath. “Normal first date.”

With the man she both loved and hated. Easy as pie.

T
he rest of the date passed in blur of food she barely tasted and wine she drank more of than she probably should have. At one point Suzy came out to the table to check on them and Matt invited her to sit with them for a while. Suzy seemed blissfully unaware of the tension between them. Matt seemed…thoughtful. As if he were assessing Claire like a specimen under the microscope and hadn’t yet decided if she was going to become penicillin and save countless lives or merely make all the fruit on the counter go bad.

Claire felt her nerves drawing tighter and tighter.

His phone buzzed again and again. Each time he looked concerned, but he ignored it. However, it only ratcheted up her tension. By the time Suzy returned to the kitchen and the main course was whisked away, she’d had it.

“Stop acting like we’re on a real date when we both know this is just a farce.”

“A farce?”

“Yes. This is just part of the Twelfth Annual Ballard Festival of Putting Claire in Her Place.”

“The Twelfth Annual…” He rocked back in his chair, turning his hands up in a what-the-hell gesture. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Hey, you’re the genius. You figure it out.”

He dropped the legs of his chair forward and reached across the table to grab her hand. “Has my family been giving you a hard a time about this date?”

“No more than usual.”

“No more than
usual?
” he repeated, his tone darkly steady. “What’s that supposed to mean? Do they normally give you a hard time?”

The gleam in his eyes was almost…protective. Of her. Startled, she jerked her hand away. “Look, your family is…” She shrugged at the difficulty she had putting it into words. “They’re your family. You know what they’re like. Being a Ballard is everything. And they really get off on reminding people that they’re the richest, most important people in town. Any chance they have to remind me that I’m just grasping white trash, they’re going to take it.”

His face slowly darkened as she spoke. “And you think that’s what this date is about? That I’m putting you in your place?”

She couldn’t read his expression and it unnerved her. She dropped her hand to the table and toyed with her fork. “Look, I…I don’t know what to think this is about. You waltz back into my life after all of these years…” Her emotions choked her and she broke off, struggling for the words. “You take me on this amazing date. And
I’m so obviously out of my league here. I make grilled cheese sandwiches for a living and you introduce me to a woman who’s won the James Beard award like we’re supposed to be colleagues. And there’s this elephant in the room between us that you seem determined to ignore. To ignore him and…”

Beside him his phone started buzzing again. It shattered her nerves. She slapped her hand down on the table, rattling the fork.

“Would you please just answer that!”

He stared at her, scrutinizing the lines of her face like she was a mystery he was trying to figure out. “No.”

“Yes. Answer it.” She looked away, unable to have this conversation with him now. Maybe ever. “It’s obviously important. Your phone has rung six times in the past thirty minutes.”

“I don’t take calls from work when I’m on a date.”

She threw up her hands in exasperation and then pressed both of her pointer fingers to her temples. “This isn’t a date!” She blew out a long, exhausted sigh. Trying to let go of her anger. Trying to see him, not as the enemy, but as just a man, a guy on a first date with a woman. Like he asked. When she spoke again, she managed to make her tone civil. Logical. “Look, it’s work. It’s obviously important and you must know it or you could have just turned your phone off. I am a business owner, too. I understand. If someone from the diner were calling and needing to talk to me, I’d have to take the call. So, please, just answer it.”

By now, the phone had stopped buzzing and lay silent by his hand. After a long assessing look, he nodded. Then he picked up the phone, bumped his chair back and stood. After punching a button or two on the phone,
he turned his back on her, wandering to the far side of the empty restaurant.

“Ballard here.”

Over the faint piped-in music, she could hear his end of the conversation.

“What?” His voice rose sharply. “How the hell did you do that? When I left you had two hours of work left. All you had to do was put the finishing touches on it, lock the door on your way out and leave it the hell alone until the shipping company came along to pick it up on Monday.”

There was a faint babble as whoever was on the other end of the line rushed to explain whatever snafu had happened. Matt raised his other hand to pinch the bridge of his nose.

Then he cut off the other speaker. “You’re fired. You’re all—” He broke off, sending her a quick look. Like he didn’t want to cuss in front of her. “You’re all freakin’ fired.”

She heard another flurry of chatter from the other speaker.

Claire felt laughter bubbling up inside of her. His exasperation was palpable. She got up, crossed to where Matt stood and gently pried the phone from his fingers. She put her own ear to the phone and interrupted the speaker.

“Excuse me—”

“But the converter was working fine when—” a male voice continued.

“Excuse me,” she repeated.

“Matt?”

“No. This is his date. Claire.”

“Claire? Oh, damn! That’s where he was? I am
so
fired. I—”

“You’re not going to be fired. I promise.” Matt tried to take the phone from her, but she swatted him away. “No, no. I promise.”

“He’s gonna kill me.”

“He’s not going to kill you.” The voice on the phone was silent, but she could hear other voices in the background, a chorus predicting doom to them all. “Can I assume that whatever’s wrong, you need Matt there to help you fix it?”

“I… Look, he’s not going to leave his date. If I’d known he was out with you, I never would have—”

“Tell me your name.”

“Dylan. Jeez, he is going to—”

“Just let me handle Matt. Don’t worry. We’ll be there soon.”

She pulled the phone away from her ear. Matt tried to grab it back from her, but she dodged his grasp, and after finally spotting the end call button, hung up on Dylan’s protests.

Matt stood watching her with a scowl on his face. She extended the phone back to him. “You should have let me fire him,” he muttered as he took the phone.

She smiled sweetly. “Are you kidding? Dylan got me out of the most awkward date ever. He’s my knight in shining armor.”

“I’m definitely firing him.”

She just laughed. “Come on, let’s go. The limo can drop you at FMJ and then take me to the hotel.”

Matt put a hand on her arm to stall her. “Wait here, I’ll have Suzy box up dessert.”

“But—”

“You can eat it at FMJ while I sort this out. I’m not carting you off to the hotel yet. As soon as I fix this
mess, we’ll finish the date. We still have a lot to talk about.”

She suppressed a shiver as she watched him head for the kitchen. But the truth was, she’d love to visit FMJ, get a glimpse of the kind of projects they worked on. But underneath her excitement, she felt a tremor of dread. For the first time since Matt had waltzed back into her life two weeks ago, he seemed like the intense, passionate guy she remembered. And that made him very dangerous indeed.

Dylan turned out to be a scrawny twenty-two-year-old intern working at FMJ for the semester. He’d been given the job of getting a hold of Matt while the rest of the team worked on the problem. After the forty-five-minute drive from San Francisco to Palo Alto where FMJ’s development lab was located, Claire was deposited into Dylan’s care while Matt went to find out what was wrong.

“Take care of her,” Matt had ordered. “Get her anything she wants.” Then to her, he added, “Don’t touch anything.”

Claire had just laughed, but Dylan had nodded solemnly.

Matt left them standing near the elevator. The workspace was massive and open, with a scattering of scribbles on whiteboards set up amid the worktables and clusters of overworked lounge chairs. Bits of gadgetry were everywhere. It looked like the robotics lab of some deranged mad scientist.

The second Matt was out of earshot, Dylan started babbling again. “I’m so sorry I interrupted your date, if I’d—”

“It’s no big deal,” she tried to reassure him.

“Of course it’s a big deal. You’re Claire Caldiera. This was
the
big date, right? And—”

She shot Dylan a surprised look. “You know who I am?”

“Of course I do. You’re—”

“I know. Claire Caldiera.” She just wasn’t used to people she didn’t know talking about her without using the prefix
that trashy.
As in “That trashy Caldiera girl is up to something again.” To Dylan she said, “I just assumed Matt never talked about me.”

“Oh,
he
never talks about you.” Dylan shook his head. “But the other guys do. The guys who’ve been around since the early days. Your name has…um, come up.”

“I see.”

Off in the far corner of the room, where Matt now stood, there was a team of six or seven guys and couple of women. A few of the faces were familiar. They were standing around an aluminum something. It was shaped like a giant dollop of whipped cream. The thing stood maybe five feet tall and was comprised of closely spaced arching blades that gleamed under the fluorescent lights.

“Is that a…?” she fished.

Dylan nodded like she’d guessed correctly. “Yeah. A magnetically-levitated, vertical-axis wind turbine. Cool, huh?”

“That’s just what I was going to say.”

One or two of the engineers standing around were people she recognized.

“Steve and Dean had just started at FMJ when Matt and I dated,” she observed. They’d all been friends, back in the day. Now, when Steve glanced at her, his expression was suspicious. Dean gave a weak smile,
but it didn’t reach his eyes. “I can imagine the kinds of things they say about me.”

Dylan’s face flushed red and she knew she was right.

On the other side of the room, Matt looked up at her just then. He’d shucked his jacket and literally rolled up his shirtsleeves to get to work. His forearms were tan and muscled. Less than five minutes here and his hair, short as it was, was already mussed, like he’d been running his hands through it.

The sight of him, standing there with his hands on his hips, made her heart nearly stop. This was the guy she’d loved. The intense concentration. The sheer passion for his work. The brilliance.

In the times she’d seen him since he’d returned, he’d been all easy charm and smooth charisma. But now the Matt she’d loved so fiercely was standing right in front of her.

Oh, she was in so much trouble.

“Can I, um…get you a drink?” Dylan asked from beside her.

She smiled warmly at the poor guy. “Coffee would be great.” She linked her arm through his and started guiding him toward an open door through which she could see a vending machine. “And you can tell me what it’s like to work for Matt.”

“It’s great.” Dylan sounded out of breath. Practically panting with enthusiasm. “I mean, he’s Matt Ballard. He’s practically a god.”

“Um…sure.” Here she was, ready to join the Matt Ballard fan club. Her and a twenty-two-year-old geek.

Four hours later, Matt found Claire, asleep, curled up in a chair. Someone had dimmed the lights in this half of
the room, so she sat in the shadows, her legs tucked up onto the seat of the chair, her arms folded on the chair arm, her head resting on the bend in her elbow. Her hair had tumbled down around her shoulders; her makeup had lost its luster. Asleep, she looked so beautiful and relaxed, he didn’t want to wake her.

In the time he’d worked with the rest of the team, he’d never once forgotten she was there. She’d spent the first couple of hours with Dylan. He’d gotten her coffee and they shared the dessert Matt should have eaten with her. She hadn’t complained. Never distracted him or whined or demanded attention. Finally, she’d grabbed a book off the community bookshelf by the break room, curled up in the chair and read until she’d fallen asleep.

How many of the women he’d dated in the past decade would have handled this as well? He couldn’t think of a single one.

He wanted to hate her. Wanted to resent the hell out of her, but, damn, she made it hard.

Maybe it would be easier if she wasn’t so pretty. So vulnerable. Maybe if she didn’t seem so convinced that he wasn’t the only victim here. There were times when she seemed to think he was just as much to blame for their breakup as she was. Times when she seemed to be expecting him to apologize to her.

Who knew, maybe she was right. They’d been young and he’d been so devoted to FMJ. He’d probably been a crappy boyfriend. Tonight, she’d said it hadn’t been about the person he was, but about her. Yes, she’d run, but the truth was, he hadn’t gone after her.

Maybe all she’d wanted was for him to put her first. To make the sacrifice and chase her down. Things might have been very different.

After tonight, he knew one thing.

This thing between them wasn’t over.

They’d only dated for six weeks. That was barely enough time to get to know each other then. The few times they’d seen each other since the charity auction wasn’t enough time to get past her barriers, let alone to get reacquainted. And he was now willing to admit that that was what he wanted. He was ready to set aside all the things he thought he knew about her and to learn who she really was.

As gently as he could, he reached down, scooped her up into his arms and carried her out to the limo. She slept peacefully in his arms.

Claire woke up in the limo, with her head resting on Matt’s shoulder and her shawl draped over her torso. His chest was beneath her cheek, the buttery fabric of his jacket soft beneath her skin, his heartbeat steady and strong beneath her palm. The woodsy smell of his cologne was faint and familiar and stirred something deep within her. The feel of his breath, warm against her hair, was the final proof that this was not just a dream.

She jerked upright, and felt his hand slip off her shoulder.