Just Deserts - Brenda Jackson [22]
Well, to her it was certainly something. She had gone without for almost eight months. Marc had been just that neglectful. She had been satisfied with the promise he’d made, so she hadn’t nagged him about the times they hadn’t been intimate. But now she knew he hadn’t been with her because he’d had two other wives to sleep with. How could she not have detected something?
“You okay?”
She glanced over at Tristan. There was no way she was going to tell him what she was thinking. Mentioning Marc might dampen the mood and she didn’t want that. So instead, she said, “I was wondering why it took me so long to seek you out as a lover.”
He glanced over at her when the car came to a traffic light. “I think the main reason, Dani, was that you were married.”
“Before then, when I was single and living in New York. You even came to see me a few times, spent the night at my place.”
“Yes, but if you recall most of the times I showed up, Paul was with me. That one time I showed up by myself you were sick.”
She nodded, remembering, surprised that he did. “I thought I was going to die.”
He chuckled. “It was a toothache. Most people don’t die from it, Dani.”
“Well, there was more to the story than I was telling at the time.”
“You don’t say? What else was there?”
She turned toward him. “Because of the toothache, I had to be replaced for a photo shoot by the one person I hadn’t wanted to replace me. I think she deliberately wished that toothache on me.”
He raised a dark brow. “Boy, that’s deep. She must have been a real witch.”
She knew he was teasing her, but she didn’t care. As far as she was concerned, she was serious. “Yeah, I thought so at the time, but it doesn’t matter. She can have all the photo shoots she wants. That’s not my life anymore.”
There was a lot of traffic flowing in their direction, which caused Tristan to slow down again. Keeping his eyes on the cars in front of him, he asked quietly, “And what do you see as your life now, Dani?”
She gave a small shrug. “First I want to make sure I have one. Once I can finally put the past behind me, then I want to move on. I like what I’m doing at A&T, but I want to do more.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Possibly start a foundation in Paul’s name. He was a big soccer fan, so I might give a soccer scholarship each year to a deserving student who needs it for college.”
“That’s very generous of you.”
She grinned. “It will be generous of you, too, since it’s also your money. I wasn’t going to just give it out of my share but ours.”
“Ours?” Tristan asked, coming to a stop at a traffic light and looking over at her.
She met his gaze. “Yes, ours.”
Their gazes held and for some reason she felt there was a deeper meaning in what she had said and she didn’t know why. Since she had stepped in after Paul’s death, they had always thought of the company as theirs. They were partners, true enough, but she never considered that she had just a share of the company. In her mind it was theirs. Together.
Tristan released Danielle’s gaze when traffic began moving again. He figured she might not have realized the significance of what she’d just said, but he had. Whether they had acted on it previously or not, they had always shared everything, and tonight they would share each other in the most intimate way. He got turned on just looking at her. And he had no idea what perfume she was wearing, but the scent was like an aphrodisiac, making him fully aware of just how breathtakingly sexy she was. Even when she had sipped her iced tea at dinner, he had gotten aroused. Seeing that straw between her lips, watching her suck