“Maybe not, but it’s still way too much money to spend on a girl you hardly know. As you said yourself earlier, you don’t know me very well at all.”
He reached out and took my hand, stroking his thumb gently over my knuckles. “I know enough about you to have wanted to get you a gift. If it will make you happier, you can always see it as an investment instead of a gift.”
“An investment?” I cocked my head at him, holding my mug close to my lips but not taking a sip just yet. “How so? I’ll be able to do your design on my current laptop. You don’t need to worry about it. It might be old, but trust me when I say that it can still do the job.”
“You would probably be able to do the job without a laptop at all, so I’m not worried about it, but I do think that you deserve it. You’re incredibly skilled, Larisa. Chances are that I’m probably going to invest in future properties down the line, and I’ll want you to do the interior design for those as well. So sure, you could do the job without it, but it’s definitely going to make your job easier.”
Glancing back at the laptop, I sucked my lower lip into my mouth and bit it. I wanted to take him up on it more than anything, and the arguing back and forth was definitely weakening my resolve, but it was just so damn expensive that I would feel indebted to him forever.
“I really can’t, Tanner,” I said softly. “It’s far too much and I’d never be able to repay you.”
“It’s a gift. No repayment required. In fact, no attempt at repayment will ever be considered, never mind accepted. I wanted to get you this and I’ve already bought it. If you don’t take it, it’s just going to lie around here and it will go to waste. You don’t want to do that to it, do you?”
“No,” I grumbled and inhaled a deep breath. “Fine, I’ll take it, but only because it’s an incredibly thoughtful gift and you’d have trouble finding someone else to give it to if you’re not going to use it yourself. You could’ve returned it, though.”
“Nah, I’m not returning it. It’s yours. It wouldn’t be right of me to take it back to the shop when it was never meant to be mine.”
“Well, thank you,” I said. My throat constricted again when I saw the joy sparkling in his eyes. “It’s pretty bold of you to make an investment this big in my work when you don’t even know if you’re going to like it yet. You haven’t even seen any of the ideas I have for the house. You might hate my work in the end.”
“I won’t,” he replied confidently. “I don’t see a single scenario where I’m going to be disappointed in your work. I have complete faith in you.”
He seemed so intense and sincere when he said it that I wanted to kiss him again, but I knew if I did, things would go further. It was already late, and as much as I didn’t want to cut our evening short, especially not after the gift he’d just given me, it was probably better that I left before something else happened.
“I should probably get going soon,” I said. “It’s getting really late and I have to wake up early for a meeting with another client. Plus, I have to put together the design for your house and send it to you so we can start tweaking it as soon as possible.”
Swallowing the sip of coffee he’d just taken, he looked at me with that intensity still flowing freely from his eyes. It burrowed its way under my skin and made my chest feel warm. “Can’t you just take the day off tomorrow? We could spend it together.”
And just like that, I was again reminded of our differences. I couldn’t just reschedule with a client at the last minute. I had to give my career my all. Getting a bad reputation could completely wreck everything I’d worked for.
Unlike him, I couldn’t just treat the world like my sandbox. “Thank you again for the incredible gift. I’ll put it to good use, but I really can’t just take the day off.”
I saw the flash of disappointment in his eyes, but I didn’t really get it. Surely he hadn’t seriously expected me to toss all my responsibilities into the wind and take off to gallivant with him whenever he wanted me to. Then again, maybe that was exactly what he had expected.
Sighing internally, I wondered if it was possible for two people who lived such very different lives to ever really connect.
I wanted to believe it was possible, but somehow, I doubted it. One of us would have to compromise too much of who we were to make it happen, and I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to make those kinds of compromises.