Page 17 of Conning the Billionaire
The guy picked up his fork and went back to his lasagna. “Perhaps I’ll have to buy you something to make an impression.”
Kylie leaned forward and whispered conspiratorially across the table, “He was my first, you know.”
The guy paused, his fork piercing a piece of Mom’s Lasagna, and he looked up at her with a gaze that did not waver. “Your first?”
“I’m twenty-seven years old,” because that was what her driver’s license said. “You didn’t think you were going to be my first, did you?”
“I wasn’t aware that I was in the running to be one of your numbers at all.” He was still looking directly at her. “But I’d like to be.”
Kylie laughed. “Let’s see how dessert goes.”
The guy chuckled and sipped his cocktail. “Perhaps I should buy you something. After all, I am competing with Vincent Bertolini.”
Kylie laughed as if she were joking. “Now you’re talking. Vincent bought me a plastic diamond ring at the Scholastic Book Fair. Let’s see if you can do better than that.”
Yes, she’d put the word diamond out there on purpose. Her scam takings increased a lot when she seeded words like that into the conversation early.
“Diamonds, huh? You look like a woman in need of diamonds.”
She batted her eyelashes. Hey, it worked. “Do I?”
He forked his food and didn’t look up. “Certainly.”
“But, I couldn’t pay you back,” she said. This stupid discomfort at playing the game was new. “I don’t have a lot of money.”
He nodded and touched his napkin to his mouth. His lack of eye contact was dismissive. “It’s fine. I don’t expect anything from you.”
That was weird. The guy actually sounded like he meant it. “Why not?”
He looked up from his plate and finally looked at her. “Because I don’t.”
But that was why men bought her jewelry, because they expected something from her. Because they expected her to be grateful, physically grateful, or else that she would be so enamored with their generosity that she’d fall in love with them, at least for the night.
Why the hell didn’t this man expect something from her? “But—”
He tilted his head, frowning. “It almost sounds like you’re offering something in exchange.”
“I’m not.”
“I didn’t think so.”
“But then why would you?”
“Aren’t you asking too many questions?”
“I don’t think I am. It feels like there’s more here.”
“There isn’t. I’m a nice guy with more money than sense, and I like pretty girls to have pretty things. What, you think I should have to explain myself?”
That. Right there.
Even though he’d said those words, What, you think I should have to explain myself, with a flat California non-accent, the cadence and syntax sounded like her Philly Italian relatives.
“No, of course not,” Kylie said, demurring.
And there were more little moments, things that she couldn’t quite put her finger on, that reminded Kylie of her Sicilian relatives. Little hand gestures, the occasional twitch that, if it had been larger, would have been an Italian talking with his hands.
The cadence of his words was like a waltz under his careful lack of an accent. Ba-da-BING, ba-da-BOOM.
