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“Nobody asked you what you liked,” she spat.
Derrick shrugged, never missing a beat while moving to the music. “I just figured that you’d like a man’s opinion. I imagine it’s the reason for this drastic change in your clothes and makeup. That or you’re looking for a drastic change in careers. A lady of the evening, perhaps—or video vixen?”
His words completed her humiliation and tears stung her eyes.
Seeing her distress, Derrick stopped his teasing and loosened his hold. “Oh, I’m sorry. I—I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“No? Telling a woman that she looks like a hooker was meant to be a compliment?”
He winced and finally stopped dancing. “I’m sorry,” he said, and truly looked as though he were. “I was just trying to say I liked you the way you were.”
As quickly as his harsh words had wounded her pride, the new ones had mended it and even caused a warm flush of pleasure to blaze through her body.
Derrick’s keen gaze caught how the apples of her cheeks darkened and he was pleased that he’d finally wrangled his way onto her good side. “All’s forgiven?”
When Isabella lifted her tranquil maple-brown eyes to his, a strange rush of emotion flooded his senses. His brain scrambled, trying to make some sense of what was happening to him; but the only answer that seemed to fit came from an old familiar voice.
When you look into her eyes and her soul speaks to you. That’s a love worth dying for.
Derrick broke eye contact to search for her engagement ring. At the sight of her bare, slender fingers, his smile bloomed wider. “What do you say we head over to the bar?”
Her hesitancy frightened him a moment. What could he really do if she’d said no? After she made a few cursory glances around her, she responded, “One drink.”
He complied with a simple nod and then led her off the dance floor with one arm still locked around her waist in silent possession. However, it took a little work finding a spot at one of the club’s multiple bars.
“Two Incredible Hulks,” Derrick yelled to the bartender.
“Two what?” Isabella inquired.
Derrick turned up the charm to full blast. “Trust me. You’ll love them.” He moved his stool closer so he could have her all to himself in a private alcove. Instead of getting upset, this time his mysterious woman smiled.
“So when are you going to tell me your name?”
She hesitated. “Isabella.”
He repeated the name and then shortened it to, “Bella.”
“I guess anything is better than Izzy,” she confessed. “My friends call me that.”
His brows quirked in surprise. “If you don’t like it, why do your friends call you that?”
“Old habit. I let them get away with it in college and it stuck.” She shrugged. “I guess I was hoping it would grow on me.”
“And it hasn’t?”
She laughed as she shook her head. “I hate it.”
“Your drinks, sir.” The bartender set the radioactive-looking drinks down on the bar. “Enjoy.”
Derrick lifted his drink and proposed a toast. “To your new nickname ‘Bella.’ May you think of me every time you hear it.”
Isabella laughed at the absurd proposal, but lifted her drink anyway. Together they took their first sips, their gazes locking above the rim of their glasses.
She couldn’t describe the charge of emotions his smoldering black gaze caused nor could she rationalize why this gorgeous man seemed so interested in her. Even with her enhanced figure, there were bigger breasts and bigger booties to chase on the dance floor. Yet, Derrick Knight seemed to only have eyes for her.
It was a glorious feeling and it was one that she hoped to enjoy for at least a little while longer.
“So,” Derrick said, setting his drink aside. “Read any good books lately?”
Isabella choked.
Chapter 11
“I think your daughter is having second thoughts,” Randall complained, pacing around Senator Kane’s desk. Now that he’d spat out the words most heavily on his mind, the muscles around his heart nearly squeezed him to death.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” the senator said, not bothering to glance up from his piles of paperwork. “Isabella knows how much I want our families to join forces. This is the perfect political move.” He finally glanced up. “For both of us.”
Randall bobbed his head in agreement, but Kane’s words failed to ease his anxiety. After all, he wasn’t marrying the senator.
“You know it would have helped if you had tossed in a few words about love when you proposed.”
Randall took great care to not bust out laughing—but love? Cut him a break. Anyone who had known him more than five minutes, knew that Isabella Kane was not his type. He was a T&A man, leaning heavily toward the A part. While Isabella wouldn’t scare anyone out of a dark alley, she also never roused his lust either.
“I was nervous,” Randall offered weakly. “Plus, she left me on bended knee for so long I began to take root.”
The senator dismissed the event with a low growling grumble.
“Isabella has been down in Atlanta with her sorority sisters for nearly a week and she has not called me once.” Randall continued to worry. “I, on the other hand, have left message after message.”
“Ah.” Kane finally lifted his chin and removed his reading glasses. “Now we get to the truth of the matter. Has my daughter managed to wound your pride? Perhaps you care for her more than you like to admit?”
Careful not to offend, Randall chose his words wisely. “Of course I have feelings for her. We’re engaged.”
The senator leaned back in his massive leather chair. “In this town, love and marriage have very little to do with anything. I’m sure you’ve learned that much.”
Hell, he had learned it in childhood. Leon Jarrett, a crafty lobbyist turned congressman learned the importance of marrying up when he left Randall’s mother, whose great crime was being the daughter of a man who owned some shady strip bars in Alabama, for his stepmother, Eunice Temple. Eunice had the good fortune of graduating from Oxford and had a political lineage that ran all the way back to the first African-American congressman, Joseph Rainey.
The right political pairing was crucial to one’s career.
“You’re really worried about this thing, aren’t you?” Kane asked. His keen gaze studied Randall.
“I just don’t like any surprises. That’s all.”
The senator nodded. “Very well. I’ll have another talk with her and reinforce my stance on the marriage.”
Randall relaxed. One thing he knew about his fiancée was how much of a daddy’s girl she was. “Thank you, sir.”
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