When reporters pestered him, she refrained from asking questions, offering him empathetic silences that had in turn prompted him to share what he knew about his father’s crimes and how that had torn his family apart.
“You can’t possibly imagine yourself going from where you live now to this,” he said, picturing her Midtown apartment with its high ceilings, spectacular views and stylish furnishings.
She returned to the middle of the empty room and crossed her arms. He kept his face impassive as he took her in. She wore ripped jeans, leopard-print pumps and a fuzzy white sweater that invited him to run his hands all over her. That she wore a stubborn expression kept his libido in check, but the more time he spent with her, the less he understood why he was resisting his attraction for her.
“It’s affordable,” Sammi persisted. “I made a budget and I intend to stick to it.”
“I don’t want my child living here.” Oliver faced her, mirroring her stubborn defiance, equally determined in his opinion. “Let me find you a nice building with a doorman.” He’d considered offering her the house in Falling Brook he’d bought years ago and never used, but he wanted them nearby so he could keep close tabs on both of them.
“That will cost me double what I’d be paying up here.”
Oliver ground his teeth at her resistance. This was the fifth apartment she’d brought him to and no more suitable than the last four. “Then let me help.”
“No.”
She was growing more independent by the day, and while Oliver cheered her budding self-reliance, he wished she’d listen to reason.
“When I agreed to help with your apartment hunting, I assumed that you asked because you wanted my opinion.”
“I do.”
“Then take it.” He caught her by the elbow and turned her toward the exit. “This is not the place for you.”
She made a half-hearted attempt to free herself but in the end allowed him to propel her out the door. No doubt she wasn’t as optimistic about the units they’d toured as she wanted him to believe.
“It’s been two weeks since I gave my thirty-day notice,” she told him, approaching the town car that had been driving them around Manhattan all afternoon. “I’m going to be homeless if I don’t find something this week.”
While Sammi slid into the back seat, Oliver murmured instructions to the driver, before following her in. As the car started off, he noticed that her earlier energy had washed away. She looked defeated, and he put his arm around her shoulder. The gesture was meant to comfort her, but the delightful softness of the white sweater beneath his fingers made it nearly impossible to avoid petting the fuzzy fabric and the slim arm beneath. With her tucked against his side, the craving to taste her soft lips increased. He pinched the bridge of his nose with his free hand and wrestled with temptation.
He wasn’t accustomed to feeling possessive about any woman. The girls he dated in high school blurred into a string of women he could barely remember from the years he’d spent modeling. These days, sobriety hadn’t made him any less selfish, but he’d grown more mindful of his actions.
“You aren’t going to be homeless,” he assured her, his voice gruff with the desire flowing through his veins. “You don’t have any furniture to move, just some clothes and personal items, so you could find something temporary while you keep looking.”
“I’m trying to save money.” She bent over her phone and began tapping the screen. “There’s one more place to see. Maybe this one will be better.”
“No.” Oliver plucked the phone from her hands and held it beyond her reach. “We are not going to look at another apartment in a rat-infested walk-up.”
“Oh, please,” she countered. “Every one of those buildings was perfectly nice. They just don’t happen to be up to your overly inflated standards.”
“My standards are perfectly reasonable,” he said.
“You grew up in a big house, with a chef, chauffeur and maids to keep everything running smoothly.”
“I’m not suggesting we hire you staff.” Oliver exhaled in exasperation. “I just want my child to have the best of everything. Is there something so wrong with that?”
“I’ll have you know that until I walked my first runway, my mother and I lived in places even smaller and less cared for than what we looked at today.”
Oliver winced at the hurt in Sammi’s voice, starting to see where he’d gone wrong. “I didn’t mean—”
“Those were the happiest days of my childhood, because even though we didn’t have much, my mom was always finding ways to have fun for free. Whether it was trips to the library or picnics in Central Park, Thursday evenings at the Children’s Museum of the Arts or a ride on the Staten Island Ferry.”
As he listened to Sammi recount her fondest childhood memories, Oliver found himself envying her. He thought about the fishing rod his father had sent from the Caribbean two months earlier and how the gesture had been too little, too late. What he wouldn’t give to have a collection of father-son experiences he could draw upon when his own child arrived.
“Sounds like she was a great mom and that you two were really close.” Yet given the tension he’d witnessed between mother and daughter, he couldn’t help but wonder when things had changed. “I don’t have any memories like that.”
Sammi shot him a sideways glance. “No, I imagine you did the sort of things I couldn’t dream of. Like box seats for a Yankees game or helicopter rides around the city. Luxury vacations and backstage passes to the hottest concerts.”
“I guess I did some of those things,” Oliver said, recalling his friend’s birthday party where they’d spent the night at the American Museum of Natural History. “But I honestly don’t remember my parents being around for any of them.”
“Why were they gone so much?”
“They had a hugely active social life because of the success of the hedge fund my father
