I lift my head, look into her eyes, and say, “Just breathe.”
She exhales in a whoosh, and my lips curve up. “You’re so fucking beautiful,” I murmur.
She blinks. “Oh.”
I lower my lips again, and this time, she closes her eyes and relaxes a little. I only kiss her lightly, not wanting to wipe off her carefully applied lipstick. She smells gorgeous, of a sensual scent, no doubt recommended by Carla. Her lips are super soft.
When I finally move back again, I blink a few times. That backfired on me. I can’t go getting hard in front of everyone—there will always be one sneaky photographer who’ll capture it.
It occurs to me then that she’s alone. Where are her friends and family? I look around and say, “Where is everyone?”
“What do you mean?”
“You didn’t come alone, surely?”
“Um, yeah.”
My eyebrows fly up. “What? Why?”
“The people I know wouldn’t feel comfortable here, Kingi.” She lifts the front of her skirt and examines her left sandal. “My strap has come undone. I need to fix it.”
Frowning, I take her hand and walk her a few feet away to a row of chairs. She lowers into one, and I drop to my haunches in front of her. I lift the hem of her skirt to expose the sandal and raise her foot to rest on my thigh while I do up the strap.
“I can do it,” she protests.
I ignore her as I fasten the buckle. The symbolism of this doesn’t escape me. Cinderella’s glass slipper was more than an item of clothing. Obviously, it illustrated her journey from rags to riches. However, it also revealed the connection between her and the prince, showing him that she was his one true love.
I shake off the thought. “What do you mean, they wouldn’t feel comfortable?”
“Kingi, they would never be able to afford clothing like this.” She gestures at us, then at the rest of the people in the lobby.
I look around. That hadn’t occurred to me. “You should have said something. I would have been more than happy to cover the cost.”
She gives me a strange look. “You can’t clothe all my friends and family, honey. They would never accept that. And they wouldn’t be comfortable here, don’t you understand?”
We’ve had this conversation before about our class differences. It irritated me then, and it irritates me now. “I didn’t realize you were such an inverted snob. Nobody here cares about your social standing except you.”
“Sorry, but I don’t agree with you.”
I grit my teeth as I lower her foot to the floor. “We can’t announce our engagement without any of your friends and family here. That makes no sense at all.”
“Nobody’s going to be interested in my friends and family,” she scoffs.
“Chessie, I was looking forward to seeing them again. It’s been years since I saw Mark and I haven’t seen your parents for ages. And if we were really getting engaged, don’t you think it would be odd that you’ve come here alone?”
“I’m not bringing my family here to have these snobs point their fingers at them. I don’t want to read the headlines tomorrow about which high street store they bought their clothing. It’s bad enough that I have to go through it; I’m not going to make them suffer as well.”
We glare at each other.
“Don’t you think you’ll hurt their feelings when they find out we’ve announced the engagement, and they realize they weren’t invited to the ball?”
She gives a grumpy shrug. “I’ll just say it was for club members only or something.”
“I’m going to have to meet them at some stage, honey. It’s only polite. What’s your father going to think about the fact that I’ve asked you to marry me when I haven’t talked to him about it? You did say he wondered why I hadn’t asked his permission.”
“I was kidding.”
“Even so. I’m very disappointed, Chess.”