Winning Back His Doctor Bride. Tina Beckett
soft mouth he’d been staring at tightened in warning. “I had a patient.”
Damn. She was a doctor. Why had the possibility she’d 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 he’d been waiting for her forever.
Hell, he remembered thinking almost those exact same words at their first meeting. The one where she’d called him a toad.
Unfortunately for Mila, he’d never really perfected the transformation into a prince. And she’d discovered far too late that she should have bypassed kissing him altogether.
Except he hadn’t given her much of a choice, insisting that she dance with him.
Forcing himself to come back to the present, he motioned toward the door. “They’re holding our table for us. Shall we?”
Mila glanced at the sign, and then the hand-carved door, her teeth catching her lower lip.
Had she been here before?
Not likely. This wasn’t the kind of place the Mila he’d known would have frequented. So why had he brought her here?
The hostess guided them through the front part of the fancy establishment, and James tensed as his glance trailed over Mila’s formfitting dress and the staccato twitch of her hips as she followed the woman. She didn’t generally like dressing up, and when she’d heard the name of the restaurant there’d been a long pause over the phone before she’d finally accepted the invitation.
Now that they were here, he realized he should have made sure the restaurant knew this was a business dinner and nothing more—because the employee was taking them back to the table he was normally seated at when he dined here: a secluded spot in the very corner, away from prying eyes...and cameras.
He probably should have chosen a different place to eat. But they knew him here and it was generally easier to get a last-minute reservation than at the places where celebrities normally hung out. There were some of those at Très Magnifique as well, but the dim lighting, specially coated glass and tight security made it hard for the paparazzi to gain access to its patrons. Another reason why this was one of his go-to restaurants.
The distaste of having his face splashed across the tabloids was a holdover from his childhood, when his parents’ every move had made the front pages. James had seen his own mistakes—including his broken engagement—paraded for all the world to see. Because of that, he’d become adept at avoiding the places those kinds of photographers frequented.
Mila slid into her seat, setting her small clutch purse on a corner of the table. “I assume you have them with you.”
He had to smile at the way she lowered her voice, since it mirrored some of his own thoughts. Leaning forward, he mimicked her hushed tones.
“Yes. I have them. They’re in my briefcase. But I think you went into the wrong line of work, Mi.”
“Come again?”
“You should have been a spy.”
Her lips went up as well. “Am I being too paranoid about this whole thing?”
A possible reason for her behavior slid up from somewhere inside him. He didn’t know if she’d started seeing someone else since breaking up with Tyler, but it was a possibility. Or maybe they’d even gotten back together. “Will this be a problem for your boyfriend? I’d be happy to call him and explain, if you’d like.” Although the last thing he wanted to do was call Mila’s boyfriend and tell him this meeting was purely platonic.
Not when the last thing he wanted it to be was platonic.
Not with her sitting across from him in a dark green dress that hugged her form and showed just a touch of creamy curves at the neckline. Curves he’d once explored at his leisure. He forced his eyes back to her face, noting she was biting her lip again.
What the hell? Had she gone and gotten engaged or something? His stomach sank like a rock.
“No. You don’t need to explain anything.”
Because this guy, unlike him, would need no explanation as to why Mila was dining with her ex-fiancé? If she were still his, he sure as hell would have wanted to know why she was having dinner with another man. Especially since she was a physician and not a CEO, which meant there was no need to dine with clients.
“He must trust you.” He forced the words to sound impartial.
“It’s not that.” She toyed with the clasp of her purse for a second or two. “I’m not seeing anyone. I told you I’d broken up with Tyler.”
She had told him. But people changed their minds.
James stared at her for some clue as to what might have gone wrong between them.
“It was me,” she continued. “This time.”
Said as if she needed him to know that James wasn’t the only one capable of backing out of an unwanted relationship.
“I’m sorry.”
Sorry for the way he’d treated her? Or that his past actions might be affecting the way she navigated current-day relationships?
“Don’t be. I don’t believe in stringing someone along when I know how the story is going to end.”
The barb sank deep. Because that’s exactly what he had done to Mila. Strung her along, even when he’d known that he was eventually going to break things off. Both because of Cindy and the bombshell she’d dropped, and because of his own father’s response to it. He couldn’t follow in the award-winning actor and egotistical bastard’s footsteps. He would not father a child that he would be no good at nurturing. Or throw money at the mother of that child to make the whole thing go away. So James had done neither, deciding to break it off with Mila and do the right thing by Cindy. Only it had all been a lie.
Mila’s dreamy words the last time they’d slept together about starting a family had hit him at the worst possible moment. Their courtship had been such a whirlwind affair that children had never been discussed. And then Cindy had dropped her bombshell and almost immediately afterward Mila had wistfully expressed her own desire for children.
His reaction had confirmed what he’d believed about himself all along: that he truly was like his celebrity parents, who had left him and Freya to the mercy of a string of nannies. He was no nurturer.
Even his attempts at standing in for his parents when it came to his sister had ended in disaster. He’d been overbearing and overprotective. In some ways he blamed himself for the eating disorder Freya had developed, wondering if it was because he’d been too controlling about what she did...who she went out with. He sure hadn’t practiced what he’d preached back then, because he’d gone out with scads of women who’d meant nothing to him. Including Cindy.
Hell, he’d been the worst possible role model for her.
His regrets over his mistakes with Freya and the scare of that unplanned pregnancy with Cindy had given him a fear of having children of his own. It had gotten so bad that he had stopped treating children in his medical practice, referring them instead to colleagues. Which had left him treating insipid socialites and celebrities. People very much like his parents—a peck on each cheek, a little nip, a little tuck, and they were good to go.
Only he’d grown tired of it all. Weary in a way that he didn’t understand.
“Drinks, sir?”
He blinked back to the present as the server handed them each a menu.
Maybe Mila had been lost in her own thoughts as well because she wasn’t staring at him like he had two heads. He waited as she asked for a glass of wine, and then he did the same, adding an order of stuffed mushrooms—something he remembered her loving. Although why he felt