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Instead of answering, the billionaire only said, “I missed you, Erie.”
“Hmph.” But her toes had already curled hard, not just because he had told her he missed her but also because he was calling her ‘Erie.’ Even now, remembering how that came to be made her heart skip a beat and made it even harder to feign irritation.
The first time he had paid her a visit at the law firm in Miami, the billionaire had been oddly quiet and unsmiling. When they had a moment alone to themselves, she had worriedly asked him what was wrong, and he had told her stiffly, “They all call you ‘Freddie.’”
“That’s because they’re different from the guys in Rockton. Those guys didn’t treat me as their equal. The people here are cool, and we’ve become friends.”She had thought the answer was sufficient, but when the frown on the billionaire’s face only became more pronounced, she had asked tentatively, “Something’s still wrong?”
“It makes them sound they’re intimate with you.”
“They’re not,”she had gasped.
“But it’s how they sound, because they call you...Freddie.”
“B-but you call me pchelka,” she had stammered, all the while wondering if it was possible that the billionaire could be jealous.
“That’s an endearment, not a nickname.”
The difference was lost on her, but the look in the billionaire’s dark eyes was clear as day. She hadn’t dared put a name to it, but she knew what it was, and the thought had her knees buckling.“D-do you want to call me Freddie, too?”she had asked weakly.
She had only wanted to appease him, but instead the billionaire had dealt her a cold look, and his voice had been dangerously silky when he asked,“Does that mean I am at the same level with the other men here?”
“No way.”She hadn’t even taken the time to think of what to answer, and when she had seen his form visibly relax, the tension leaving his powerful body, she knew she had said the right thing, probably the only answer he would have accepted.
“Erie,”he had then said after a moment. At her blank look, he had clarified,“I will ignore the ‘Fred’ part in your name because that is what most of them seem to concentrate on. So it leaves ‘Ericka.’”
Her confusion cleared.Erie,taken fromEricka,was to be his special nickname for her. The thought of him calling her a name that was his alone felt strangely intimate, and heat suffused her face.
“Erie?”
The past faded and blended with the present, and Fredericka realized with a start that Sergei had been calling for her.
When she looked up, the billionaire murmured smoothly, “Let’s dance.”
Before she could even think of protesting, he had already pulled her up to her feet and into his arms.
As he drew her closer, she hissed under her breath, “You’re making them hate me.”
“It is for your own good,” she heard the billionaire say calmly over her head.
Fredericka looked up with a gasp. “Excuse me?”
“Hate is better than pity,” he murmured.
Oh.A reluctant smile touched her lips as she was forced to acknowledge the truth in the billionaire’s words. So much had changed in the course of a year, Fredericka thought reminiscently. After having won the case for the Christakos twins, her dream had come true and she had been made state’s attorney a short while after.
For a time, it had been everything she wanted, and every morning she would look at herself in the mirror and imagine that it was her dead father she was seeing on its surface.
Can you see me now? I’m the child you ran out on and refused to acknowledge. Look where I am now, and look where you are.
But soon, the pleasure she derived from her success began to pale and the emptiness of her life began to gnaw at her. Two months ago, she had finally submitted her resignation, determined to start her life over. She had realized she wanted to build a law firm that operated on contingency fees, which would allow it to represent clients who weren’t presently able to afford effective legal presentation.
But as this weekend’s event had made Fredericka realize, her dream was a nightmare for most other lawyers. Even worse, she had learned that most of them believed that her resignation had merely been a ruse, meant to cover up the fact that she had pissed off a high-ranking official and had been forced to quit.
She looked up at the billionaire, saying wryly, “You’ve known from the start, didn’t you? What people were thinking?”
Sergei answered evenly, “There was no reason for you to know about the opinion of people who should mean nothing to you.”
So overprotective, she thought helplessly. Knowing that there was no point discussing his high-handedness, a trait that was as intrinsic to him as his Russian lineage, she changed the subject instead, asking, “What do you think you’re doing?” For the past five minutes, the two of them had been swaying slowly to a beat only the billionaire seemed to hear, and it had everyone staring at them.