Page 8 of Conning the Billionaire
But she didn’t hear any regional accent in his perfectly neutral American inflections.
She hadn’t even meant to ask, but she blurted out, “Where are you from?”
“Around,” he said. “Where did you grow up?”
“Here, and that’s why I can usually tell where people are from. Tourists from all over the country and the world come to Atlantic City. I can even tell what parts of states people are from, like North Jersey or West Texas. But your accent is from nowhere. I mean, it’s American, but it’s neutral like a newscaster or an actor. Are you from California, maybe?”
At the periphery of her vision, the hem of his dark blue suit jacket moved as he shrugged. “You’re very perceptive. Are you always so sharp?”
Fluster. Impostor syndrome. Shame-spiral. “Oh, I don’t know. I mean, it’s nothing.”
“I’ll bet that you often see things others don’t.”
Kylie was a born con artist. She saw a lot. “Well, sometimes.”
“And you’re sensitive. You feel more than others.”
Like when her father’s mangled body had been fished out of the Schuylkill River up in Philly when she’d been twelve, or when she’d walked into her house when she was sixteen years old and found her mother and little sister had moved out while she’d been in school and were just gone, she’d felt like her whole body had been slashed apart. “Maybe.”
“And yet you’re more responsible than other people. You take on their needs and help them.”
Kylie stopped like a needle scratch and looked up at the guy for the first time, asking, “Do I know you?”
He looked down at her.
No, she didn’t know him.
If she’d ever met this man before, she would have remembered the sharp angle of his jaw, his thick ash-blond hair, neatly cut above his collar and falling over his forehead, those broad shoulders filling out his impeccably tailored three-piece suit, and his eyes.
Dear Lord, dear Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, his eyes.
The guy probably had to fill in on his driver’s license that his eyes were gray, but that didn’t do justice to the dark ring and silvery sheen of his irises and the sapphire blues, aquamarines, and pale grays surrounding an amber center flecked with black.
She could drown in his eyes. She wanted to drown in his eyes.
The clanging of the slot machines and shouts and mutters of the poker tables faded away like the world was disappearing. Even his light skin didn’t seem marred by the flashing lights around them.
She would have remembered if she’d ever met him before.
No, she didn’t know him.
The man looked straight at her, and his arrogant posture made what he said next seem like a dare. “Would you like to?”
Yes. Yes, she did. She wanted to know him biblically.
Her panties metaphorically hit the floor.
Kylie stammered, “Well, I don’t know. I was just asking if we’d met before.”
“I think I would remember if we’d met,” he said, his amazing eyes steadily looking into hers. He didn’t rake his gaze over her body like every other lascivious asshole she’d met.
His intense stare into her eyes never wavered.
“Yeah. Maybe,” she allowed.
Her voice sounded breathless.
He said, “You’re perceptive and sharp and beautiful. That significant other of yours doesn’t deserve you. Break it off with him.”
