He apparently found it funny. “Just what I’ve always longed to hear. How pretty I am.”
I could feel my face flush, and I didn’t know how to respond. I was currently afraid that if I tried to speak I might say something else ridiculous.
“I’m afraid you have me at a disadvantage,” Griffin said, changing the subject for me.
I’d like to have you at a disadvantage, I thought and then immediately hushed myself. “How so?”
“You know my name but I don’t know yours.”
Name. I had a name, right? What was it again? It took me a second before I finally blurted out, “Diana Parker.” I felt actual relief that I had remembered it.
“Pleased to meet you, Diana Parker. You have a lovely name.”
“Thanks. I got it for my birthday.”
He chuckled and then asked, “Were you named for the Roman goddess of the hunt?”
Hardly. My mom had chosen it because she thought it sounded regal, and that it would make people trust me more if she named me after a famous and beloved figure. “My mother loved Princess Diana.”
“She was a distant relation via marriage. Did you know that?”
“No. But everything I do know about your extended family I know against my will.” He smiled again, and before I got suckered into the beauty of his face I asked, “Can I have my shoe back?”
Because at some moment he was going to notice my toes and I was going to be humiliated. All the women he dated probably had perfect pedicures, and I had cracked toenails—plus my left pinkie nail had fallen off after I’d stubbed it hard against a chair.
Not to mention I could feel that the Band-Aid I’d put on the back of my heel was only partially hanging on.
“Yes, I’ve been holding on to this for a long time, haven’t I? I hope you don’t think I have some sort of foot fetish.”
“I didn’t before, but now you’re kind of making me question. I also need it back to keep my foot warm. That way when I stick it in my mouth it won’t be cold.”
“What if I think it’s cute when you stick your foot in your mouth?” When I didn’t answer because his flirtatious tone was short-circuiting my brain, he held the shoe out. “Here. A lovely shoe for a lovely woman. And I am not interested in drinking champagne from it or whatever it is that people do.”
He handed it to me while I tried very hard not to fixate on the fact that he’d just called me lovely. Maybe it was just some British thing and he thought everything was lovely. The slushy, blackened snow surrounding the parking lot. Lovely. My missing toenail. Lovely. Margery Brown’s conversational skills. Lovely.
Griffin started to kneel down, like he was going to help me put my shoe back on me. I did not want him that close to my feet. “It’s okay. I’ve got it.”
He straightened up, looking a little confused, but when I bent at the side to slide the shoe onto my foot, he offered me his forearm to hang on to. It was an impressive and gentlemanly move, but it also made me think about the fact that it meant he had a lot of experience helping women get their shoes back on.
Why would England’s most eligible bachelor be interested in someone like me? I wriggled my foot into place and let go of his nicely formed forearm. With the return of both heels, I was nearly as tall as he was. And by straightening back up, I had somehow moved closer to him. Which was inappropriate and I was invading his personal space like I was the Roman Empire, but in my defense, he smelled really, really good.
Griffin cleared his throat. “Your shoes. That’s my grandmother’s favorite brand.” It was interesting, this statement from him sounded a little off. Like he was trying to distract himself or couldn’t think of something else to say, so he’d settled on that. I got the impulse, but why would he feel the need to do that? He struck me as the sort of man who always knew the right thing to say.
Stepping back and then teasing him was obviously my only recourse. I used his own words. “Just what I’ve always longed to hear. That I remind you of your grandmother. Is that the same one who read you Cinderella as a warning?”
He nodded.
“Who uses a fairy tale as a dating guide?” I asked.
“Controlling people,” he responded grimly.
Well, I definitely wanted to know more about that, but from the way his eyes shuttered, I saw that he wouldn’t be very amenable to further questions.
Not that he gave me a chance to ask. “What made you run from the ballroom like you’d just committed a bank heist?”
“Do most robbers you know wear an evening gown to commit crimes?”
There was no mistaking the interest in his eyes as he studied my dress. “I don’t know any criminals.”
That made one of us.
“Why did you follow me?” I asked, realizing that if he’d seen me fleeing, he had obviously been watching me.
Griffin put his hands in his pockets and shrugged slightly. Like he knew exactly how charming that particular gesture would be. “Perhaps I was hoping to ask you for a dance.”
“What?” My stomach fluttered. It was like my brain was not understanding his words. Because despite some flashes of possible attraction, men like Griffin did not like women like me. “Why?”
“Why does any man ask a woman to dance?” His voice seemed to have dropped an octave and the deliciousness of it was making me feel weak.
I couldn’t be taken in by this act. It had to be an act, right? Nothing else really made sense. “Usually because he wants something.”
“Yes. The pleasure of your company.”
“My company is pretty bad, actually.”
“Shouldn’t I be the one to judge that?”
“Or you could just take my word for it,” I said.
“I prefer to discover things for myself.”
I crossed my arms, ignoring the little tingles racing through me at his declaration. I was not going to be taken in, no matter what his game was. Because everyone had a con, didn’t they? Some sort of scheme in every interaction? Something they wanted? I walked over to an armchair and sat down. “I would have said no. I don’t like to dance.”
He followed me, undid the button of his suit coat, and sat on a sofa right next to the chair, so close that our knees were almost touching. The phantom warmth floating against my kneecaps was making me feel a teensy bit woozy.
“If you don’t like dancing, what do you do for fun?”
“Eat.”
He laughed, but I was dead serious. Eating on the regular in the hotel had so far been the best part of my experience with the Crawfords. I realized he might have been figuring out just how serious I’d been in my reply when his laughter trailed off and he studied my face, intently.
“What about you?” I asked brightly, hoping to distract him. “What kind of stuff do you do for fun? Doesn’t it involve crumpets and . . . what’s it called? The sport you have that’s like baseball, only stupider?”
“Cricket?”
“That’s the one!”
Griffin leaned forward and I had to back up so that our faces wouldn’t be close together. “Cricket is excellent and crumpets are delicious. But I thought we’d already established that in my free time, I enjoy rescuing damsels. And if you’d let me ask you to dance, I would have rescued you.”