“Are you crazy?!” I demand, ready to call security, but he’s already walking away.
I drop my bag that’s killing my arm, push off the wall, and face the bathroom, looking for a sign; certain that man was a jerk to hide his embarrassment for going into the women’s restroom. Instead, the sign reads “Men” and I want to crawl into the hole my embarrassment is digging in the floor.
I turn to make a rapid departure, grab my bag, and proceed to run into another hard body. “Oh God. I’m sorry. I—” My gaze lifts and I gasp at the familiar man now holding my arms, touching me for the first time in six years. I’m touching him, too, my hands curled on the black tee that stretches over a chest that proves to be more impressive than ever. He’s a man now, but then Roarke Frost was always all man. “Roarke,” I whisper as if the name in my mind isn’t enough confirmation. I need it on my lips, the way I once needed him on my lips.
“Hannah,” he breathes out, his voice low and rough. His brown eyes are still that warm milk chocolate, but I was always the one who melted in the heat of any moment spent with this man.
“Oh my God, I’m so sorry,” Linda gushes, appearing beside us, huffing and puffing. “I was stuck on the call, and I couldn’t call you and well, as you know, I directed you to the wrong bathroom.” She’s rambling, her attention turning to Roarke, who is still holding onto me. Who is still focused on me and me alone. “Sorry,” Linda repeats. “Sorry—she went the wrong way because I told her wrong.”
“I’m not sorry at all,” Roarke says, his eyes warming with the words. “I can’t believe you’re here.”
“In the men’s bathroom?” I joke, trying to get off the topic of why I’m in Dallas. “It’s a game we play in LA.” I cringe with the stupid comment.
His dark brows dip. “Game?”
“That was a joke that’s going nowhere. There is no game.”
The air thickens between us, memories pushing and pulling, pushing and pulling. I want to push him away. I want to hold onto him and pretend nothing ever went wrong. “You look good, Hannah,” he says finally. “Your hair is longer and I swear your eyes are a little greener.”
Anger bristles inside me. My hair. My eyes. That’s all he has to say after—well, everything that happened? “Why are you here?” I ask.
“I’m on my way to Kentucky to work with a horse,” he says, which isn’t a surprise. His family always trained horses, but he’s taken that to a whole new level. He’s now a YouTube sensation, The Horse Wrangler. Which I know because I’ve been watching the videos that I will never admit to watching. “Are you home to visit?” he asks. “Aren’t your parents in Austin now?”
“I’m here for work,” I say because it’s not a lie. I am here for work and for a place to live, but that’s beside the point. “A fast in and out trip.”
A man clears his throat, and Roarke grabs my bag and motions me toward the wall, and when I nod, he catches my hand the way he used to catch my hand. It’s familiar. He’s familiar. So is the heat rushing up my arm and across my chest. No one makes me feel what this man makes me feel, and this makes me angry. He betrayed me. He hurt me. He hurt me.
“I get back Friday night,” he says. “We need to talk. We’ve needed to talk for a long time. Can I see you?”
Of course, he returns Friday, I think. Of course, he wants to talk now when he hasn’t tried once in six years. “I leave Friday morning.”
An announcement sounds for a flight and he grimaces. “I’m late. That’s my flight, and I have to head through security. Damn it. We need more time.” He scrubs his jaw, a good three-day dark shadow there, dark like the hair on his chest where my fingers used to play often. But that was then and this is now. “There are things I’ve wanted to say to you for a long time.”
“It wasn’t meant to be,” I say. “Let’s just leave it at that, Roarke.” And the truth is that there is nothing that he can say that changes anything.
His gaze lingers on mine and then lifts skyward before lowering. “I have to go. Hannah—”
“Go, Roarke. That’s what you told me years ago. That’s what I’m telling you now. Go. Because it’s what’s right for you and me. And you’re holding my hand.”
“Yes, I am, and I don’t want to let it go.”
“But we both know you will. Just like you did before.” The words burn out of me, anger in their depths.
His jaw clenches, and he lifts my hand, kissing my knuckles. “Goodbye, Hannah.” He turns and walks away, bypassing the bathroom by necessity, no doubt. He’s leaving. Even when I left, it was because he’d checked out. I lost him before I lost him or what went down would not have gone down.
Linda steps in front of me. “You know the Horse Wrangler? Oh my God, I need details.” She glances over her shoulder. “That man’s butt in jeans. That’s part of what makes him an internet sensation, you know? Women love him.”
I grimace. Yes. Yes, they do. Just one of the reasons I’m not going to share details of a long time crush on my next door neighbor that became a summer engagement gone wrong.
“The way he was looking at you,” she continues. “Did you and he—” She joins two fingers. “Did you—”
“Bathroom,” I say. “I need a bathroom before I can properly decline to share details. Now all you get is a grunt.”
She grimaces and motions me forward. “After the bathroom.”
I grab my bag and we start walking. And yes, I get my bathroom escape, but Linda gets nothing on Roarke. That’s a closed subject, just as it’s a closed chapter of my life, and yet, when I lay down in her spare bedroom that night to sleep, I can almost smell that man’s cologne: an earthy, rich scent that is all man. The wrong man for me.
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THE NAKED TRILOGY
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One man can change everything. That man can touch you and you tremble all over. That man can wake you up and allow you to breathe when life leaves you unable to catch your breath. For me that ONE MAN is Jax North. He's handsome, brutally so, and wealthy, money and power easily at his fingertips. He's dark, and yet, he can make me smile with a single look or word. He's a force when he walks into a room.
Our first encounter is intense, overwhelmingly intense. I go with it. I go with him and how can I not? He's that ONE MAN for me and what a ride it is. But there are things about me that he doesn't know, he can't know, so I say goodbye. Only you don't say goodbye to a man like Jax if he doesn't want you to. I've challenged him without trying. He wants me. I don't want to want him, and yet, I crave him. He tears me down, my resistance, my walls. But those walls protect me. They seal my secrets inside. And I forget that being alone is safe. I forget that there are reasons I can’t be with Jax North. I forget that once he knows, everything will change.
Because I need him.
Because he's my ONE MAN.
***
CHAPTER ONE OF ONE MAN
Jax...
The moon glows with white light and hangs low and round over the nearby ocean darkened by night as if it, like the hundreds of guests in the garden of one of the San Francisco Knight hotels, is watching the beautiful brunette and star of the night. Emma Knight, the twenty-eight-year-old heiress to the hotel chain’s worldwide empire, and who, in fact, lost her father one month ago. Now, her brother Chance rules their hotel empire and her mother has fled to Europe for reasons few, I suspect Emma included, knows.
But I know.
She stands next to Randall Montgomery, her brother's right-hand and confidant, a man who might be fit enough and decent enough looking if he didn’t act like he has a stick up his ass. A man on my radar for reasons he’ll soon regret. He wants Emma and her money. She is the furthest down the food chain of them all, and based on her history with her father, even further down than would be expected. No doubt,
she inherited with her father’s death, but I wouldn’t be shocked to discover she was given a token instead of a goldmine.
The announcer stands at a podium and begins lavishly speaking of Emma’s father with purpose. Tonight, with women in fancy gowns and men in tuxedos, ice carved into sculptures and champagne poured in glasses, Emma is here to accept a philanthropy award on his behalf while her brother is curiously absent. If he were here, I wouldn’t be here. Neither I nor any of the North family could stand her father, not that I find her brother any more palatable. Her father is gone, though, and now Emma is the proverbial queen of the hour. And the queen, unaware that she is, has had my attention for quite some time.
There’s irony in the fact that I, Jax North, the eldest now of the living North family offspring is, in fact, the man who watches her. An irony she’ll understand soon, but not too soon. For now, I stand at one of the rows of white-clothed tables, deep enough beyond in the crowd of people to be as good as in the shadows, a man whose family has done business with her family for decades, though l have been in the shadows in those endeavors just as I am here now. Present but unseen.
Emma steps to the podium, but not before I catch a glimpse of her pale pink floor-length dress that is elegant in its simplicity, in the way it highlights her slender but womanly figure. Her hands grip the sides of the podium and for a long moment, a full minute at least, she simply looks out across the crowd but doesn’t speak. There’s a charge of expectation in the room, a sense of the crowd pushing her to speak and when finally, her pink-painted lips part, the microphone crackles and squeaks. This seems to jolt her and she laughs nervously, a soft sweet laugh to match her sweet little ass. Perhaps the only sweet things about the Knight family.
“Thank you all for being here,” she finally says, and her voice is strained but suitably strong. “It’s emotional to be here tonight, among those honored who are living while my father is no longer with us. To be here at a hotel that was the center of the world for him.” She cuts her stare and I can almost feel her struggling for composure, the way I struggle when I speak of my older brother.
“I loved my father so very much,” Emma adds, and the pain in her voice is it for me. I run a hand over the silk of my light blue tie, barely contained impatience in the action, but tonight isn’t the time; it’s not when I’m meant to find Emma and Emma me. It’s a thought that has me turning away and disappearing into the gardens, entering the hotel by a side door. I’m here in this hotel for one reason: Emma. She’s here and it’s long past due that we meet. It’s long past due that she learns about the connection between her family and mine. I stroll a carpeted hallway with elegant chandeliers dipping low at strategic locations, about to turn into the bar when I come face to face with Eric Mitchell, a man who is quite literally a genius. He’s also vice president in one of the largest corporations in the world.
“Long time, man,” he greets, offering me his hand. It’s a strong hand, and when I look into his blue eyes, I see the man born a savant, the man who see numbers more than words. I see the man who helped Bennett Enterprises reach beyond a legal powerhouse to a conglomerate, even before acquiring an NFL team.
“Doesn’t Bennett own hotels, which would make you the Knights’ competition?”
His lips curve. “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. I went to school with Chance. Good guy.”
Good guy my fucking ass. “We should talk.”
“About?”
“All things green. How about lunch tomorrow?”
“I can make that happen. “
We setup the meeting and the ways this little encounter has inspired me are many. I cut right into a dimly lit bar that’s desolate at the moment and thank fuck for it. The damn hotel is filled to the rim for that awards ceremony. Alone suits me just fine right about now and I walk to the back of the bar and sit down in a red leather booth that overlooks a room with couches, cushy chairs, and dangling lights but also provides a curtain for privacy. The Knight name is all about luxury and comfort, but at its core, it’s about greed. At my core right now, I’m about that speech Emma was giving, about the pain at its core. That pain is why I’m here.
A waiter appears and I order whiskey, North Whiskey, my family’s whiskey, which is in every Knight hotel in the country and beyond. I don’t give a fuck if it stays or goes or I wouldn’t be here. “Bring the bottle.”
He’s just filled my glass, and the glass is at my lips when Emma walks into the bar. Alone. She’s done her time on stage and ran for cover. The hotel might be hosting the event, but she isn’t. She’s halfway into the bar when voices sound behind her. She peeks over her shoulder and then with a panicked look, darts in my direction.
To my surprise—and I don’t surprise easily—she slides into the booth with me and pulls the curtain shut. “So sorry,” she says, claiming the seat next to me. “I really need to avoid a conversation and well, breathe a moment or ten. The only way to do that is to be having a private meeting that looks as if it’s just that: private, not to be disturbed.” She takes my glass and downs my whiskey.
Interesting that she didn’t run to Randall for comfort, but in fact ran away from him.
She glances at me, and when her beautiful pale green eyes flecked with amber meet mine, there is a charge between us, an awareness that parts her lips and has her turning away from me. Because she knows who I am?
“I’ll buy that bottle of whiskey for you,” she says, “for letting me intrude.”
A statement that either proves she has no idea who I am or that she’s playing me the way a Knight will play.
It doesn’t really matter. It’s like the sky opened up and delivered her right to me. “Considering I’m a North and that’s North Whiskey,” I say, refilling the glass. “I think I can handle paying for the bottle and helping the lady of the night hide out.”
Her eyes go wide. “You’re Jax North.” She blinks. “Of course you are. You look like the North family, all tall, blond, and handsomely brooding.” She drinks a bit more. “And that’s the whiskey making me overly verbal. My father didn’t approve of me being overly verbal.”
Except she just downed that whiskey and hasn’t been drinking all night. She’s nervous, rambling in a rather charming, vulnerable way that I find attractive, for reasons I don’t try to understand.
“I didn’t know ‘overly verbal’ was a thing.”
“You didn’t know my father well, then. Actually, no one did.” She swallows hard. “Back to you.” It’s a hard push from any question I might have made about that statement “no one did.” “You really do look like your father and brother. I can’t believe I didn’t immediately place you.”
“You mean Hunter, I assume, since my younger brother, Brody, beats to his own drum. A drum that doesn’t include running the core whiskey operation or any involvement with the Knight Hotel brand.”
“Yes, Hunter,” she says, and there’s a flicker in her eyes, an understanding that we’re talking about a brother that is no more with us on this earth than her father. “I met them both, briefly. I ah—”
I narrow my eyes on her waiting for her to finish that sentence, prodding when she does not. “You what?”
“You—”
“Lost them both, as you did your father,” I supply. “Yes. My father to a ski accident, a year ago next week. Six months ago next month for my brother.” I leave out the cause of death. That isn’t a place either of us wants me to go with the Knight family tonight. “And yes,” I add, “time helps, but anyone who tells you it makes the cut heal is lying. It just stops the bleeding.”
“Thank you for saying that,” she says in a deep breath, “because if one more person tells me time will make it better, I might scream.” She softens her voice. “I’m sad to say that I barely knew your father and brother, and only know you now because of this moment in time, that you neither chose nor invited.”
“Should I have?”
“Why would you?
You don’t know me.” She laughs a bitter laugh. “Well, there is my family money. That’s what everyone knows and wants. They think they know my worth, but they know nothing.”
I don’t ask what that means. I dare to slide closer to her. I dare to allow my leg to press to hers, the current between us charming the air. “I am a North, which means that I have power and money. I don’t need yours.”
“Money feeds greed. What you have is never enough.”
“There are other things to want besides money.”
“Do you know who I am?”
“Emma Knight.”
“Can I deny that perhaps for the rest of my life?”
I lean closer, the scent of her distinctly warm—amber and vanilla, I believe—my interest in this woman piqued in both expected and unexpected ways. “Why would you want to?”
“A complicated answer to a simple question.” Her voice cracks and she turns away from me. She reaches for my glass again and downs every drop in it. She sets it down.
“More?” I ask.
She glances over at me. “Yes, but I should warn you that I’m a very bad drinker.”
I refill the glass and sip before handing it to her. She stares at the glass before her gaze lifts to my mouth. Unlike moments before, she’s now thinking of exactly what I intended: about her mouth where my mouth was moments before. “I promise to catch you if you fall,” I say softly.
“Don’t start this relationship off by making promises you won’t even try to keep.”
Relationship. She’s planning on this encounter leading to more, which of course could simply be because I’m now in charge of my family empire, not just the contact for all things both North and Knight. Or perhaps it’s more. I plan to make it more.
“I never make a promise I don’t keep,” I say, and I will catch her if she falls, because once I catch her, she’s mine. Once she’s mine, everything comes full circle.
“Never?”
“Never,” I assure her, “which is something my friends value and my enemies dread.”
Part Three: Dirty Rich Secrets, #3 Page 7
