She recognized it and her heart fell into her toes. It was the courier envelope with her own handwriting. She had stuffed it full of all the jewelry he’d given her and sent it back to him right after their breakup.
His expression was implacable. Confrontational.
There’d been no reaction out of him when she’d done it, which had fed her misery. Now she saw there were very strong feelings on his side, so strong she had to look away, getting the sense he was barely holding back a blast at her that had nothing to do with being rebuffed from her bed.
She twisted her mascara back into its base and set it aside. “Is Ramon here?”
“Any minute.”
Damn. Hurry up, Ramon.
She took a half step back from the mirror, gave her hair a flick so it was behind her shoulders and wondered if Henri liked what he saw, then heard her own thoughts and wanted to groan. She wore a blue wrap dress with a satin belt and a tulip cut to the hem. As with any Maison des Jumeaux creation, it was incredibly flattering. Of course, she looked her best.
She still longed for his approval. His hot stare was making her skin sizzle.
“You’re not going to see if it’s all there?” Henri challenged. “Perhaps accuse me of bringing that in here to persuade you into bed?”
She kept her gaze on her reflection, feeling the sting as her cheeks flooded with color, but refused to let her attention drop to the envelope or even back to what she sensed would be his hardened expression. His voice sounded like granite.
“You said last night that all I ever gave you was sex and jewelry. Jewelry for sex, in fact. Whereas I thought we’d settled that argument with this one.” He spoke in a tone that held an undercurrent of danger. He plucked out a bracelet, the first thing he’d ever given her, and dropped it onto the vanity with an air of dismissal. Disgust even.
She gave a cry of protest and reached to catch it before it slithered off the edge and onto the floor. Then she stared at the puddled jewels in her palm, inordinately pleased to cradle them again.
She had worn this bracelet almost every day. It was a line of individually set rubies and diamonds. A tennis bracelet, some called it. “Fireworks,” he had said of the color in the stones when he’d presented it. “I saw it and thought of our first night.”
She had gone through the roof, accusing him of paying her for sex. They’d had a rousing big fight about it. He had been more offended than she was.
“If I wanted to pay for sex, I would have grabbed the first gaudy piece of trash that came along. Same goes for a woman. No, I saw something that made me think of the night we met and I wanted you to have it, because I will always remember—”
He had cut himself off and walked away.
Her? Their first time? That night?
Chastened, she had put on the bracelet and had only taken it off to bathe or if she happened to wear something else for an evening.
“Do you know how angry I was when this showed up?” he said now, the steadiness of his tone belying the latent fury within. He tipped the envelope so everything tumbled out.
She flinched and threw out her free hand, keeping everything on the vanity top.
“This—” he snatched up a bejeweled pendant in the shape of a key “—was never, ever about sex and you know it. It was something I wanted you to have.”
He had given it to her a few days after she’d closed on her office and flat. They hadn’t even made love there until she’d taken possession and she had had the carpets replaced so, no, it absolutely had nothing to do with sex.
“I’m proud of you,” he had said as he had pushed the little velvet box across the restaurant table where they were celebrating. “You worked hard to achieve something and did it. Hell, you’re walking around sparkling with such pride in yourself, I thought you should have something sparkly to commemorate it.”
She’d been bemused yet touched, and had often worn the pendant when she happened to be having a rough time with a work file or even just a gray day. It never failed to pick her up and make her feel good about who she was and how far she’d come.
“This?” He held up an anklet from their first trip to New York. “What sex was I paying for with this?”
She pinched her mouth shut, knowing full well it had been a silly joke between them. She had bemoaned the fact that the Americans seemed to have a fixation with shoes, but she had no interest in which designer was which. He’d given her that cord of gold, the reticulated links heavy on her skin and always a more pleasant conversation piece when the shoe topic came up. She had threatened to get herself a charm of the Statue of Liberty to hang off it, which had earned her such a stare of revulsion, she still snickered thinking of it.