questionable pictures.
Why? Because he didnât trust his own judgment, thatâs why. He could be seeing things that werenât there. Things that were remnants of days gone by. Maybe Mila would glance through them and not bat an eye. It wasnât like there was anything suggestive about them.
They just looked...cozy. Not a word he would use to describe their current relationship.
Strained. Awkward. Difficult. Those were much more accurate terms. And if Mila didnât desperately need the funding that his medical center could provide, he had no doubt she would have refused to work with him in the first place.
All of this was because of Freya.
He eyed the entry plaque of the Très Magnifique with its gold-plated edging for the fifth time. Still no sign of his dinner date. He had always been punctual to the point of an obsession, while Mila had taken on the characteristics of the Brazilian people sheâd worked with over the years. With them it was about relationships and not about the hands on a clock.
And exactly which relationship was she cultivating this time? The one with that firefighter she used to date? Was she seeing him again? If so, what did the man think of his girlfriend going out to dinner with a former lover?
It wasnât dinner. It was a business date.
And yet it made his skin chill to think of Mila as anyoneâs girlfriend. But heâd given up the right to that titleâor the title of fiancéâa long time ago. One stupid lie had changed everything. And it hadnât even been his lie. But that, combined with his fatherâs dark suggestion, had made him rethink the direction his life had been taking.
Everything with Mila had happened so fast, a flare-up of emotions heâd never realized heâd had.
But Mila was all about family and helping those in need. Maybe because her parents had died, and sheâd been left alone.
Family, unfortunately, was the exact thing James hoped to avoid. His own family had been a disaster. Between the tabloids, the violent arguments and his fatherâs very real infidelities James had always been leery of steady relationships. Then Mila had come along, and he hadnât been able to resist anything about her. For the first time heâd started thinking about forever.
Until Cindy and his father had destroyed the fairy tale. And thatâs all it had been. Mila had never tried to contact him once heâd ended things. Never really tried to ask why heâd backed out of their wedding at the last minute.
If sheâd truly loved him, wouldnât she have wanted to probe a little deeper? Instead, sheâd accepted his âit just wonât work between us...we want different things out of lifeâ explanation at face value.
âSorry to keep you waiting.â The breathless voice rushing toward him brought the gavel down on his thoughts.
Tightening his hold on the attaché case he carried, he turned to look at her. The fact that the first place his gaze parked was her lips, looking for any signs that sheâd been kissed recently, irritated him. He focused on what time it was instead. âI see some things never change.â
That soft mouth heâd been staring at tightened in warning. âI had a patient.â
Damn. She was a doctor. Why had the possibility sheâd gotten delayed due to a case never crossed his mind?
Maybe for the same reason that he saw coy glances passing between them in those pictures.
And she was only six minutes late. It only felt like heâd been waiting for her forever.
Hell, he remembered thinking almost those exact same words at their first meeting. The one where sheâd called him a toad.
Unfortunately for Mila, heâd never really perfected the transformation into a prince. And sheâd discovered far too late that she should have bypassed kissing him altogether.
Except he hadnât given her much of a choice, insisting that she dance with