LITMIR.BIZ

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let Ben see how much he was affecting her right now—it was best not to equip the enemy with any more ammunition than necessary.

      And Ben was her enemy. If her suspicions were correct, he’d just declared out-and-out war.

      “Call the waiter back right now and order real food,” she commanded. Instead of transforming her facial muscles into a smile this time, she allowed them to settle into her natural expression. The Olivia Winston the world knew by sight was famous for her resting bitch-face, had transformed her naturally surly expression into a comfortable living. Livvie literally got paid to glare at people. “I’m not kidding. Order the fig and prosciutto starter. Or get the wedge salad instead.”

      “But I don’t want the wedge salad.”

      “I’ll get up and walk out of this restaurant. I’ll force-feed you my sea bass until you’ve got at least ten dollars’ worth of fillet inside you.”

      “I’d love to see you try.”

      “Goddammit, Ben.”

      He flashed a smile of understanding. It was that smile, private and small, that was the only thing preventing her from getting up and walking out of the restaurant. There was nowhere she could go—no one she could talk to—who would understand as well as this man the way her throat tightened in a combination of fear and rage. Ben would offer her sympathy and make her smile and put her back on her feet so she could face whatever happened next, no questions asked.

      It was why they were such good friends. Emphasis on friend.

      “I know, Livvie. Believe me—I know. You’d like to kick me in the face with one of your high heels right now, wouldn’t you?”

      “I really would.”

      “We can make that part of the arrangement, if it helps.”

      She choked on a laugh. On the very few occasions she’d allowed herself to imagine what it would be like to be with Ben—really be with him, the way nature and sexual organs and his perfect body intended—dominance hadn’t figured in the picture. She wasn’t against that kind of play as a general rule, but there were a host of other things she wanted to do to him first.

      Not that she ever would. She liked Ben. She loved Ben. He was one of the first men she’d met in New York who’d treated her as an actual human being. Livvie remembered very little about that time in her life except for an overwhelming urge to wipe the world of its male population. At just twenty years of age, her younger bitch-face plastered on billboards across the country, she’d met dozens of men every day—rich and powerful and handsome men, men with every opportunity fed to them with silver spoons—and not a single one of them looked at her and thought, Now, there’s a person I’d like to get to know. At least, not unless the knowing involved biblical implications.

      Except Ben. Suave Ben. Funny Ben. Sitting-next-to-her-at-a-dinner-party-and-making-origami-out-of-napkins Ben. He hadn’t quite reached his current state of intoxicating charm yet, but there had been no denying his animal magnetism was fully charged and ready to go. He hadn’t pressed her for anything beyond friendship, though. For the first time since she was fourteen, a man had shown interest in her that wasn’t sexual in nature, and she’d basked in it.

      She’d been basking in it ever since.

      The waiter came around again, this time with their plates of food and another gimlet. She hadn’t finished the first one yet, but now seemed as good a time as any to overindulge, so she kicked hers back and handed off the empty glass.

      She was grateful for her lush-like behavior about two seconds later, when Ben dipped a hand into an interior pocket. In her experience, that was where men kept things like theater tickets and jewelry and the burner phones they used to separate their wives from their mistresses. The velvet box he extracted clearly fell into the middle category. Livvie felt a profound urge to jolt out of her seat again, but something about the way he pushed it across the table had her frozen in place.

      “You don’t have to open it right away.” He spoke quickly, as if afraid she might flee. “But you should know that I refuse to take it back. If you don’t pick it up, it belongs to the busboy.”

      She didn’t touch it.

      “I also have this.”

      The this in question was as recognizable as the velvet box, and it filled her with an even greater degree of foreboding. He held a crinkled napkin, frayed with age and crushed from its position in his pocket, just out of her reach. Not that her limbs were moving enough to make a lunge for it anyway.

      “‘Number one.’”

      “Don’t you dare read that out loud.”

      He cleared his throat and carried on. “‘You must order the cheapest thing on the menu and drink tap water.’”

      “I wrote that as a joke. A laugh.”

      “We signed it. In my line of business, we call that a contract.”

      He couldn’t possibly be serious. “I don’t recall signing anything. Let me see it.”

      He tucked the paper back in his pocket and gave his chest an almost reverent pat. “You’re not getting your hands on it that easy. It’s our only copy. I fell for a similar trick once in Prague and lost out on an excellent parcel of land overlooking the Vltava. Never again.”

      Ben brought out the business references only when he was trying to impress someone or shut them up. Since Livvie had ceased to be impressed by his career years ago, she could only assume he considered that napkin the last word on the subject.

      But if she remembered that napkin correctly, it wasn’t the last word on anything. That sucker was a Pandora’s box she had no intention of letting him crack open.

      “Technically, you haven’t touched your tap water yet,” she pointed out. She might not be a contract lawyer or have teams of experts like the man seated across from her, but she could fight. No one fought harder than a woman backed into a corner. And by her best friend, too. “You just sniffed it.”

      His smile lifted the corner of his mouth, infusing a touch of the lopsided into his perfect features. It was all that was needed to take him from handsome to gorgeous. One of the first things they taught you in the modeling world was that blandly recognizable beauty would take you only as far as the catalog circuit. If you wanted to make it big, you needed an anomaly, a quirk, something that marred your perfection in the best possible way.

      In addition to being known for her resting bitch-face, Livvie also had a heavy pair of brows she was contractually forbidden from overgrooming. A gift from the father she knew only from a single faded Polaroid, those brows had been the bane of her existence when she was a preteen.

      Now it seemed the bane of her existence was the man seated opposite her.

      Without dropping his gaze from hers, Ben lifted the glass of water to his lips and guzzled. Unlike frat boys and Wall Street tycoons—indistinguishable from one another except by age—he took his time with the act of chugging, his throat working up and down as the liquid made its way into his esophagus. Livvie wanted to look away and pretend she wasn’t witnessing this act that was half defiance and half foreplay, but her eyeballs were glued in place.

      He even made drinking into a sexual act. How was that fair?

      “There. That wasn’t so terrible.” He set the glass down with a satisfied sigh. “Though it tastes metallic. I wonder where it’s pumped from.”

      “Are you asking me or being a conversational dickhead?”

      “The latter, naturally. Now, it doesn’t say I have to eat the salad—just order it—but if this is all that’s going to sustain me until the next meal, I’m digging in. Pass the pepper?”

      She grabbed the pepper and dropped it in her purse, heedless of spillage all over the satin lining. There wasn’t anything in there except her ID and an emergency tampon anyway.

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