8. Adrian

Chapter 8

Adrian

T he ballroom at Cipriani was completely packed to the brim with men and women and everything in between, in expensive attire. Golds, blacks, and maroon seemed to be the most popular choices. I assumed it had more to do with the logo for the charity being those colors than any kind of organized collaboration with the attendees as I stood at the far end of the room overseeing my staff. I blended right in with my all-black, three-piece tuxedo.

Everything seemed to be running smoothly so far. The managers were running a tight ship and handling every instance of stock shortages or payment troubles, and my presence was almost unnecessary.

I would have gone home if I wasn't positive that Ava would be in attendance tonight.

She hadn't dared to reach out following the meeting with whomever she'd sent in her place. I'd considered calling the number her father had given me, but I knew that she couldn't avoid me forever—even if she had her assistant sending all of her correspondence to me. And she absolutely couldn't avoid me here .

"Almost done, folks. The next item for auction is a three-night stay at The Peninsula in London," the man across the room announced. He stood in the middle of the stage behind a podium and in front of the massive, curtained window, the music at the back of the room almost drowning him out. He was older, maybe nearing seventy, with almost shoulder-length hair and small glasses on his nose as he read out from the sheet below him. The crowd in front of him raised paddles in response to numbers I didn't pay attention to—my thoughts were far too focused on Ava.

I could have let a sleeping dog lie if it hadn't been for the stunt she'd pulled last week. I could have gone through with the meeting, played my part, and maybe mentioned in passing that we would never speak of what happened. But she had made a mountain out of a fucking molehill, and I was prepared to challenge her on it.

I just had to find her first.

After grabbing a glass of wine from the bar, I crossed the patterned marble floor toward the other end of the hall through the sea of people. I kept my eyes alert for a head of auburn hair, but each time I spotted her hair color, the person was either too old, too tall, or too wide to be her. But David had confirmed with me that she'd be in attendance, and I was fucking counting on it.

"Sold for two-thousand, eight-hundred, and fifty dollars."

The projected display to one side of the man presenting, showed a tally of how much money the auction had raised for charity so far, but the gauge had already met its peak. The goal had been met and exceeded by nearly two hundred thousand. I doubted there was much more that would sell for exorbitant prices, but my curiosity got the better of me.

Until a flash of perfectly waved, deep red hair snagged my attention from the side of the stage on the right.

There she is.

She was standing beside her father in a deep emerald, satin dress that clung to her upper body like a second skin before cascading down from her hips. There was a slit up to the middle of her thigh, and her hair fell pristinely around her shoulders with little sections pinned back from the front. She made me lose my fucking breath.

She'd looked beautiful when I'd seen her at the museum. But this…this was another level.

The crowd applauded for something I hadn't been paying the slightest bit of attention to, and I moved, pushing through the crowd again with my glass of wine, my eyes locked on her. But David stepped forward, one hand positioned on the top of her back, and ushered her up the steps to the stage. I stopped in my tracks.

The man behind the podium lifted one hand as a goodbye as stepped back. David left his daughter alone with the handful of men and women standing at the edge of the stage, David took up his original position where he'd been when I'd arrived.

At the microphone.

"Thank you so much for coming this evening and raising so much for researching…" He glanced down, likely checking his notes. Don't say kids without lungs. "…childhood interstitial lung disease."

Thank fuck he hadn't butchered that.

"I do have one more thing for auction if you lovely people have another minute to spare," he grinned.

My eyes wandered for the briefest of seconds toward Ava, and to my utter shock and surprise, her wildly green eyes were already trained on me, wide as fucking saucers. Ava , I mouthed.

Her cheeks flushed pink through her makeup .

"Just to pull in a few extra dollars and maybe open the floor up to a bit of networking," David laughed, glancing across at Ava. But her eyes were still trained on me, "I'd like to offer up a dance with my daughter, Avalynn Riley."

What…the fuck?

Ava's head whipped toward her father. With nothing but anger on her face, she said something to him, but the music and the murmurs from the crowd drowned it out. All David did was laugh in return.

"Three hundred dollars!"

I turned, and roughly thirty people away to my left, the green side of a paddle shot into the air. Fuck.

"Five hundred!"

"Six hundred!"

Shit, shit, shit. She looked fucking mortified up there on the stage. All I could think to do in the heat of the moment was bid so she wouldn't have to dance with a stranger, but all I had was a glass of wine, not an unused paddle in sight.

I lifted my glass instead.

"Fifteen hundred," I challenged.

David rolled his eyes at me before being distracted by another paddle. "Two thousand!"

For fucks sake. "Three," I said, lifting my glass again.

Stop , Ava mouthed. I shook my head.

"Five thousand!"

"Ten," I shouted. I raised my glass.

The crowd quieted for a moment, and just as David opened his mouth to speak into the microphone, a paddle raised again. "Twenty!"

Jesus. Twenty fucking thousand dollars for two minutes with the woman who looked like she'd rather be anywhere else. How desperate were these people?

This wouldn't stop until it hit ridiculous numbers, and the horrified look on Ava's face as I raised my glass again only confirmed that I was either saving her or damning her to hell. I wasn't sure which one.

"Fifty thousand," I said.

"Seriously, Adrian?" David asked, but I was hardly paying attention to him. I didn't bother responding, and instead, I held Ava's gaze, the whites of her eyes fully visible. Her chest and neck were bright pink as she stared down at me. David didn't need an answer—I'd spent far more money on far more trivial things than this, and he knew that damn well. "All right, fifty thousand dollars, going once."

I broke my gaze away from Ava as I pushed through the crowd toward the side of the stage she'd climbed up on.

"Going twice."

I cleared the crowd and made it to the bottom of the steps. "Come on," I said to her.

"Fifty-five thousand."

"You've got to be fucking kidding me," I snapped.

The man holding up the paddle stood in the front row. He must have been pushing eighty, at least an entire foot shorter than me, and as far as I could tell, didn't have many teeth left. But his suit screamed wealth, as did the neatly pressed pocket square. Old money.

Literally.

"Sixty-five," I shot back. I climbed the steps, my patience waning.

"Please don't spend that much money on me," Ava said as I stepped up beside her. "You can talk to me after, just don't?—"

"Any more offers?" David asked, his voice practically booming through the speakers as he leaned a little too close to the microphone. The man in the front who'd held up his paddle shook his head, turned, and pushed back into the crowd. "Sold, then, for sixty-five-thousand dollars to Adrian Stone."

————

"You didn't need to spend that much money to fucking talk to me," Ava said quietly. I had one hand wrapped around her fingers and the other on her waist as we moved in time to the music.

Thankfully we weren't the only ones on the dance floor, and I felt like I could breathe for a second without every single eye on us. There were still a few stares, though, of course. It would be hard for anyone not to notice her, not when she looked as beautiful as she did, not when she seemed to be the talk of the evening due to how much money I'd dropped on her.

I didn't quite understand it—others had spent hundreds of thousands on auctioned stocks.

"Are you saying you would have answered the phone if I tried to call your real number?" I challenged, raising one brow at her.

Her cheeks, which had finally returned to a somewhat normal color, began to turn pink again. "Probably not."

"Then I'd say sixty-five thousand dollars to speak to you was a decent enough purchase price when you're clearly avoiding me," I said.

Her lips thinned as she glanced up at me. "I…look, it must have been jarring for you when you realized, and I'm sorry about that. But we don't need to speak about it."

We shifted, and for a second, David Riley's form came into view. He was deep in conversation across the room, his back to us, and I took my opportunity to ruffle her feathers a little without worrying about his reaction.

I leaned down closer to her, bringing my lips to the shell of her ear.

"Did you think I didn't know who you were that night?" I asked, my voice barely more than a whisper. "Did you genuinely believe that you were fooling me by pretending you didn't know me?"

Her hand squeezed mine like a fucking vice as we spun again, but my position held firm with the occasional glance at the back of David's head. "You knew?"

A laugh bubbled up from my throat. "Of course, I fucking knew, Ava. You look different but not like an entirely different person."

"You should have said?—"

I lifted my head, stretching my neck as I took her in. "You knew the moment you saw me. There's not a chance you didn't. And you didn't say a word."

Her mouth parted before shutting again, her jaw steeling. Even annoyed, she looked like a fucking dream. "I should have."

"Maybe we both should have," I shrugged. "It wouldn't have made a difference."

She took an unexpected step back, her eyes widening and twinkling due to the chandeliers above us. "It absolutely would have made a difference, Adrian. None of it would have happened if we had been honest with one another."

I slipped my arm around her waist instead of just holding it gently with my hand, pulling her body closer until it was flush with mine. "Liar," I hissed. "It would have ended exactly the same. Don't pretend like you wouldn't have let me touch you just because I knew who you were."

She swallowed, her throat bobbing as her eyes flicked up to meet mine. Her nose and her cheeks were turning a bright fucking red, and if I wasn't surrounded by a sea of eyes, I probably would have done something far more drastic than just watching her.

"Do you want to lie again and tell me you haven't thought about it?" I challenged, my lips tugging upward as I slowly released her hand. I let the fingers of my free hand brush against the front of her neck as I swept a lock of hair off of it, and the way her breath caught sent my blood rushing to my cock. "God, you have."

She didn't say a fucking word, but her eyes narrowed at me, turning almost to slits as she stared me down.

"I'll tell you a secret, love," I said, lowering my head again until I was speaking directly into her ear, minimizing the risk of anyone overhearing as the music began to dwindle. "I've barely stopped thinking about it."

We slowed to a stop as the song came to a close, and although it took nearly everything in me to unlock my muscles, I released her.

She took a step back, giving me just enough room to drink every inch of her in, but before I could do so much as memorize how she looked, she bolted.