I sat back against the chair. A breath left my chest in a noisy rush.
“Mm-hmm,” said Rayford, full of himself. “So there you go.”
“There I go what?”
“Lord, do I have to do all the heavy lifting?” he muttered. Then he waggled the paper impatiently at me. “Hello, future Mrs. Jackson Walker Boudreaux?”
I blanched. “You’re . . . that’s . . .”
Rayford said, “You already know each other, it’s clear that she likes you and you like her—”
“I never said I liked her.”
“Oh, be quiet, now you’re just talkin’ trash,” said Rayford, then continued on with his ridiculous explanation. “And there’s a very good chance that if you sweeten the deal a little bit, she’d say yes.”
I was starting to get a bad feeling about this. “Sweeten the deal?”
Rayford sat back in the sofa and crossed his legs again. Smoothing a hand down the lapel of his suit jacket, he carefully said, “Everybody’s got a price. You didn’t know that last time you got engaged, but now you do.”
I said quietly, “Ouch.”
“I know. I’m sorry. But it seems to me that if you go into it with your eyes open, with all your cards on the table, it might work out for both of you.”
He let me process that, then added, “She doesn’t even own a car.”
I closed my eyes and rested my head on the back of the chair. “I can’t believe we’re having this conversation.”
Rayford said, “You told me Cody likes her.”
I groaned.
“She’s smart, she’s got her feet on the ground, and she comes from good stock.”
“Rayford! What century is this? We’re talking about a woman, not a cow!”
“And she isn’t too hard on the eyes, either.”
That made me pause. I had a vivid, fleeting image of Bianca prancing naked around my bedroom and had to shake my head to clear it.
“It’s not gonna happen. What would I do, mosey into her restaurant and say, ‘Oh, hi there, I was just thinking since you’re poor and I need a wife that we should get married’? How romantic! I’m sure that’s the proposal of her dreams!”
Rayford said, “Maybe if you prefaced it with the mention of a million dollars, it would be.”
I jerked my head up and stared at him in outrage. I sputtered, “A million dollars?”
He didn’t even blink. “Oh, I’m sorry, are you not a billionaire? With a b?”
“No! My father is a billionaire!”
“And who’s his only son who’s gonna inherit all that money?”
I threw my hands in the air. “This is completely insane.”
But Rayford wasn’t giving up so easily. He said, “And who gets an annual trust stipend in the gazillions every year before his father dies?”
“Gazillions aren’t units of currency.”
“I’m takin’ poetic license here, sir, cut me some slack.”
A sensible man would’ve withered under the stare I sent Rayford. Obviously he wasn’t sensible.
Being annoyingly reasonable, he said, “You don’t want to go back to Kentucky. You also don’t want to be dead-ass broke, because you’ve never had a job in your entire life, and you don’t know how to do anything except collect overpriced automobiles and mope around in your big ol’ mansion. You wouldn’t last an hour as a poor man. So your only other option is marriage. Ideally you’da had a girlfriend you could ask, but your antisocial self doesn’t have one of those, so we gotta be practical and determine who you could stand livin’ with for the next few years before you get divorced and go your separate ways, and everybody’s happy because everybody’s rich.”
He smiled at me. “And from where I’m sittin’, only one woman in the world fits that bill.”
I had to admit it. The man made some very good points.
Shit.
SIXTEEN
BIANCA
Four days had passed since the benefit, and though I kept hoping Jackson would walk through the front door of my restaurant, he never did.
Now I’m as liberated as the next girl, but one thing I will never, ever do is chase after a man. No matter how much of a fascinating puzzle he is. My mama always said the minute you make a move on a man is the minute you lose control, because then he knows he’s got you.
“A woman worth her salt should be the hardest thing a man has to work for in his life, because then she’s a prize, not a gift,” she’d told me. “Anything you get for free is worth exactly what you paid for it: nothing.”
I wasn’t looking for control in a relationship, but I knew she had a point because I’d thrown myself at Trace like I’d been shot from a cannon, and look where that got me.