She was letting him off the hook, just like that, and perhaps he should have been grateful. But he’d spent enough time with her these past three days to know this wasn’t her. She should be getting up in his face and asking him why he was being an ass**le. Hell, she should even be grabbing him and blowing his mind apart with a kiss to prove without a shadow of a doubt that they were meant to be together.
Anything but this.
Anything but giving up on him. On them. Even if he’d done everything he could this morning to push her into doing just that.
“The call can wait. I brought you in here to talk.”
She looked as frustrated as he felt. “What do you want me to say, Ian? That I was really hurt this morning? That I felt like a fool? That I hated going from feeling as happy as I’d ever been one moment to sobbing my eyes out the next?”
“I swear to you, Tatiana, the last thing I ever wanted was to make you cry.”
“I know that. It’s one of the reasons I fell in love with you. Because you care so deeply, with everything you are, even when you’re trying so hard not to.” She shook her head. “All day long I’ve been trying to figure out what I feel, knowing it would be so much easier if I could stay angry with you. But then I watched you get up on that stage and say all those beautiful, heartfelt things. How am I supposed to stay mad at you? How am I supposed to fall out of love with you? And even if I could do either of those things, how could I ever forget how good making love with you is...or stop wanting to be with you again? I know you must have had lots of fun and meaningless one-night stands.” There was desperation in her voice as she said, “Tell me how to do it, too. You must know how.”
Ian reached for a lock of her hair, couldn’t stop himself from touching her even when he knew he shouldn’t. “You’re right, I’ve always known how. But with you?” He moved even closer. “I don’t have a clue.”
* * *
Tatiana reeled from Ian’s nearness, from the need she could see so clearly on his face...and from the fact that the most honest man she’d ever met had actually faked a phone call to steal her away from Quinn and get her alone.
She’d come to the fundraiser tonight planning to make him see he couldn’t resist her, but now that it seemed to have worked, she couldn’t play any more games with him.
Love would never be a game to her.
“I wore this dress to get back at you,” she admitted in a soft voice.
“I know you did, sweetheart.” The endearment slipped from his tongue as easily, as sweetly, as it had when they were making love. And just as it had last night, it warmed her all over. “You’re beautiful in it. So damned beautiful.”
“I wanted you to see everything you could no longer have.” She’d thrown caution completely to the wind when she’d decided to make love with him last night, and though she knew a wiser, safer, more rational woman wouldn’t make that same choice again now, how could she do anything else but say, “But you can, Ian. You can still have me if you want me.”
“Of course I want you. But you want the fairy tale. You want Prince Charming to carry you off on his noble steed. You want romance and flowers and poetry. And it’s not too much to ask for, Tatiana, not when it’s everything you deserve.”
“Then why can’t it be you?”
“It just can’t.”
“If it’s because of what happened with your ex-wife, haven’t you and I spent enough time together already this week for you to know I’m nothing like her? I’m honest to a fault. I don’t want your money. I don’t need status. I don’t want you for everything that you have. It’s who you are that interests me, Ian.” Maybe it was crazy to lay it all out for him now, especially after everything he’d said to her that morning, but she couldn’t see how keeping it inside would be any better. “I know everyone makes mistakes, but I’m certain that being with you wasn’t a mistake. I was waiting to have sex until I was in love, and even if not everyone does that, it was right for me. I waited this long for you and now that I’ve found you, I’m not giving up. And even if I have to keep waiting, I will.”
“No,” he said, the one word full of such inner conflict it tore at her heart. “You shouldn’t wait for me. There are a million guys out there who would be a better fit for you.”
“I can’t imagine anyone fitting with me better than you.”
As emotion and heady sensuality swirled around them both, Ian told her, “I would take you to bed again tonight, tomorrow, and the night after that, if I thought sex was enough for you. But we both know it isn’t. And I can’t hurt you any more than I already have.”
She could feel, could see, his frustration, and wanted so badly to soothe it, even though she knew she was the cause of it. But how could she when she still didn’t understand why he was so adamant about pushing her away? “How do you think you’re going to hurt me, Ian?”
“Being with me—it will change you.”
“Of course it will. The first time I met you in Napa, everything already started changing. And now that I know you better, now that we’ve finally made love—”
“I’m not talking about good changes, Tatiana. You were with me all week. You know how many hours I work. You need, you deserve, someone who will be there for you. Someone who won’t think twice about putting you first, now and always.”
She could have reminded him that he’d left his staff meeting to track her down on Wednesday morning, but because she was certain he’d brush that piece of evidence away, she simply said, “When I’m filming, I work crazy hours, too. I understand what your life is like, that our schedules will take a lot of work to figure out. But I’m okay with that.”
“You might think that now, but you’d end up hating me. This warmth you feel for me would grow colder and colder until all that’s left is ice between us.”
Pieces of everything she’d seen Ian do during the past week, everything she’d heard him say about love, all swirled together into the answer. “Is that what you think happened with your ex?”
Thankfully, this time, he didn’t put her off, didn’t keep her out. “Yes.”
“She was warm once?” She shook her head. “I can’t see it.”
“Not like you. No one is as warm, as open, as you. But she wasn’t what she is now, either. I made her that. I turned her into what she is now.”