Page 31 of Royally Knocked Up
At least, he thought she was. Enzo was a modern man. He knew that you shouldn’t and couldn’t make any assumptions about what a woman wanted based on the way she was dressed. But it was impossible to ignore the way Hailey was dressed. It was a black sheath that clung to every curve of her body. The neckline was low, and the garment was held up by a pair of barely-there straps.
She’d brought a cardigan with her, but the moment they had entered the bar, she had taken that off and laid it on the seat beside her, and now all Enzo could think about when he looked at her was the sea of her smooth skin and his desire to touch it. The dress was so tight that he felt more aware of her body than he would have if she was actually naked, as if he was looking at her from through a lens that obscured it slightly, as if he was fighting for his view of her.
Shehadto have known the effect that dress would have on him.
They’d had a bottle of champagne brought to their table. It was quiet enough here, in the VIP room, that they could carry on a conversation.
If he had been here with his friends — his other friends, his friends who weren’t Hailey — they wouldn’t have gone into this VIP room. They would have stayed out at the main bar.Where the action is, as Luca would have said.
But he and Hailey — they would create their own action, he thought.
The only question was, what form would it take?
Hailey poured champagne into each of their glasses and held hers up. “Cheers,” she said. “To our success today. What a great event.”
“It was, wasn’t it?” Enzo agreed. “I’m sure my father is going to be impressed by it — not that that’s my reason for wanting to do it, of course. But I have to say, it does add something.”
Hailey grinned. “I get it,” she said. “We all want to make our parents proud.”
He took a sip of his drink. “You know,” he said, “I’m really happy I met you, Hailey. I never would’ve thought I’d be lucky enough to meet someone out here in the middle of nowhere who would come to mean so much to me. But now… I think we’re going to have to stay in touch when you go back home after all this. I mean, if you don’t mind.”
“I’d be upset if you didn’t want to,” she assured him. “This has meant a lot to me, Enzo. Meeting you. Getting to know you. I don’t… I don’t get to make a lot of new friends in my line of work.”
“Really, you don’t?” He laughed. “I would have thought that as an events planner, you would meet people all the time.”
Color came into her cheeks. “Right,” she said. “Well, it’s not as easy as you think. I mean… it’s important to keep things…”
“Professional?”
“Right.”
“You don’t always have to do that.” He risked moving a little bit closer to her, reached out, and tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. “You don’t always have to separate yourself from the people you meet in the course of your work. You don’t have to hold yourself apart for the sake of being professional.”
She looked into his eyes, and Enzo knew that she understood exactly what he meant.
“I don’t know,” she whispered. “What if I do?”
“You don’t. What’s the worst that could happen?”
Hailey shook her head and said nothing, and Enzo had no idea what she was thinking. How badly he wanted to ask her!
But what if the answer wasn’t what he wanted to hear?
What if she’d put on that black dress because it made her feel beautiful, and not for his benefit at all? What if she wasn’t even thinking about what he might be feeling about her?
It wasn’t a question Enzo was accustomed to asking himself.
And if this had been any other situation with any other woman, he realized, he wouldn’t have been asking. Because it wasn’t just the dress. It was the way she was looking at him, as if he was the only thing that mattered. It was the way she was moving closer to him, even as he moved closer to her, so that the distance between their bodies had all but disappeared.
“I have no idea,” she murmured.
“Maybe we should find out.”
He allowed his thumb to trail along the curve of her jawline, holding her gaze.
She swallowed hard — so hard that he felt the way her muscles worked against his palm.
He wanted to put his hands all over her body, to feel every inch of her. He wanted to discover everything there was to know about her.
