“I think I’ll order room service. I’m hungry.” Her appetite had increased over the past couple of days. Maybe the awful morning sickness was finally passing.

“I have a better idea.”

“What?” she asked, feeling wary.

“Let’s go out.”

“I don’t know…” Being seen in public with a man of Seungri’s wealth was always a risk for media exposure. His eyes warmed with sensual lights.

“We can stay here if you prefer.”

“I’ll get my jacket.” A woman had to know how to weigh her options and the risk of staying in the suite with a ually charged Seungri far outweighed her concern about being caught in his company by the media.

The muted glow of candlelight lent entirely too intimate an aspect to Harumi dinner with Seungri. He’d surprised her once again by taking her to one of the see and be seen restaurants so popular among the sophisticated Tokyo social set.

Dim lighting didn’t stop recognition and surreptitious glances from one table to another. Harumi tried to concentrate on the food in front of her and ignore her compelling dinner companion.

Seungri had ordered a much larger meal for her than she usually ate and she had surprised herself by consuming almost all of it. The same thing had happened at lunch that afternoon. If nothing else, sparring with her ex-lover seemed to spur her appetite.“Alexandra—”

“My name is Harumi,” she said, before he could complete his sentence. “Alexandra is dead.”

Something passed across his face when she made that statement, but in the dim lighting she couldn’t tell if it was pain or irritation.

“You had no plans to go back to modelling after the baby was born?” he asked, conspicuously using the past tense for her plans, implying she had new ones.

“No.” He studied her like a man trying to decipher a complicated puzzle.

“Why?”

“There were many reasons.”

“Very cryptic.” He smiled in a way that used to send her pulse to hyper speed. “Tell me some of them.”

She gave a mental shrug. Why not? This at least was better than arguing over custody rights and his insulting notion that now he believed her about the baby she should fall all over herself getting to the altar before he changed his mind.

“I want to spend more time with my baby than that type of career would allow and it would be too difficult to maintain two separate lives with a baby in tow. It was hard enough for me, but I think a life like that would be confusing and probably even frightening for a child.”

He mulled that over much longer than she thought necessary. “Explain to me again why the Alexandra image.”

Had she explained it a first time? She couldn’t remember. She knew she’d alluded to it.

“My mother did not approve of my working. Women in our family do not work,” she said in a fair imitation of her mother. “But it was my choice of career that really upset her. The idea of her daughter traversing a catwalk in front of her peers or worse, doing swimsuit or lingerie ads sent her into hysterics.”

“You chose to create a different persona rather than give up your desire to become a model?” he asked.

“I didn’t have a choice.”

“Explain this to me. Where was your father?”

“Dead.”

“That is unfortunate.”

The words were formal, but the emotion in his voice left her in no doubt to his sincerity.

“He was a dear man, a fossil collector. Old bones interested him; business did not. Unbeknownst to the rest of us, the family had been living completely on credit for two years before he died.”

“When did this happen?”

“Six years ago. I’d just graduated from boarding school and thankfully the cousin of a school chum had shown some interest in my modelling for his magazine.”

She took another bite of her lobster fettuccine. It practically melted in .

“It’s the family tradition. All girls from the family have been French convent educated for the last six generations.”

“No wonder it was so easy for you to adopt a French persona. Your accent is flawless, your gestures often gallic and your outlook quite European.”

“Yes.” She’d selected France for the debut of Alexandra Kogemi for those very reasons.

“Go on,” Seungri prompted.

She grimaced. “There’s not much else to tell. Mother would have ignored the redundancy notices until the sheriff showed up to evict us from our home. Chessie still had two years left at the convent school and I couldn’t bear for her to lose that stability after we’d all just lost Papa.”

“So you went to work.”

“Under an assumed name. I was trying to spare my mother’s feelings. It didn’t work.”

“She could not reconcile herself to the thought of her daughter working?”

“No.” She smiled ruefully. “I’ve always felt guilty, that I had failed her, but I simply could not think what else to do. I hadn’t gone to college yet. I was too young for most well paid career choices. Modelling looked like my only option. My friend’s cousin helped me create Alexandra. It was cloak and dagger stuff and he really got into it. He made sure the only people who knew about the connection to Alexandra were me, my family and him.”

“So this man knew you were Harumi, but I, your lover for a year did not.” He sounded mortally offended.

“Got it in one. I didn’t know about Phoebe, the patiently waiting bride-to-be, either. I guess we’re even on that score.” felt dry from all the talking and she took a long cool sip of water. He didn’t take the bait, surprising her.

“Your mother’s sensibilities are the reason you refused Tokyo assignments.”

“Yes. I never took an assignment in the Japan. I was careful to avoid doing commercials for international products and as you know, I tried to stay out of the media limelight in my personal life.”

“Yet, you were well-known in Europe.”

“Yes, but only as a French model, not a supermodel. My biggest claim to fame was being your lover and you were careful to keep that fact under wraps.”

“Not completely,” he said enigmatically.

“You did your family a great service and your mother should be proud of you.”

His words warmed her, but Harumi felt a burble of laughter well up and let it out.

“Proud of me? Her scandalous working daughter who got pregnant without the benefit of matrimony? She hadn’t forgiven me yet for not saving the family home. I’ll be the black sheep of the family forever at the rate I’m going.” She tried to hide the hurt that knowledge caused her. She didn’t want Seungri to see her weakness.

“Your mother lost her home?”

“My income as a model kept my mother in Chanel suits and provided a complete education for my sister. She graduated a month before she married Hunter last year.” Pride in Chessie’s accomplishment tinged Harumi’s voice.

Then she sighed. “The money did not stretch far enough to keep up payments on a heavily mortgaged mansion and the staff necessary to run it. Mother was forced to sell and move into a converted apartment serviced by a daily maid. Although it’s still in a socially acceptable, it is not the Mansion we use to live.”

“And she blames you for this? Not your irresponsible father who left his wife and daughters in debt?” She didn’t take exception to Seungri view of her father.

Seungri was a responsible guy, someone who would never leave his family in the lurch. He couldn’t comprehend a man who had absolutely no sense about money.

“Mama doesn’t exactly blame me for losing the mansion, but she was furious when I wouldn’t stop modelling after it was sold. She would have much preferred I married well rather than work to support her and Chessie.”

“But you did not wish to marry well?”

“I wanted to marry a man I loved, not a bank account.”

“Then it should please you to marry me. If the words you spoke at The Ritz true, I can give you both.”

“They were true then,” so much so that parts of her heart were still cracked and bleeding after the abrupt way they’d broken up, “but I don’t love you anymore.”

“I refuse to believe a woman of such strong character could fall out of love at the first sign of adversity.”

She was beginning to have a horrible suspicion he was right, but she wasn’t about to feed his smug pride admitting it.“I wouldn’t call you ejecting me from your life with the force of a rocket launcher so you could marry another woman the first sign of adversity.”

“Yet I did not marry her.”

“Because your brother beat you to the punch.”

He sighed. “You are sure I would have married her otherwise?”

Why was he asking her that? Of course she was sure. He’d made his position very clear that last meeting in Paris.“Yes.”

“If I told you I had already decided not to go through with the marriage, you would not believe me, hmm?”

Was he saying that? No. This was just another one of his subtle manipulations. “Don’t tax your personal integrity making the claim. You’re right. I wouldn’t buy it.”

“And yet I had hired a detective agency to find you within days of you leaving Paris.”

“I waited for you to change your mind for a whole week, SeungHyun. You didn’t even call. I can believe you started to consider the consequences if I’d told the truth about the baby, but I don’t think you were prepared to call off your wedding because of it. I didn’t matter to you then, and I don’t matter to you now. It’s all about the baby and I’m not stupid enough to forget that.”

His hand gripped his wine glass very tightly. The same hand that still wore a bandage from the night he’d come to Chessie and Hunter’s party.

“How did you cut yourself? I never asked.” Her mind had been on other things that night.

He carefully put his wine glass down, staring at it as if it held the answer to an important question. Then he looked up at her and she gasped. His eyes held a torment that was haunting.

“When your sister told me you were dead, I crushed the glass in my hand.”