One of her eyebrows crept upward. “Clearly you’ve proved him wrong.”
“I don’t have anything to prove to anyone.”
“I guess you don’t,” she said softly. “What business are you in?”
“I’m a former security specialist. My firm dealt with high-profile clients, and I made myself personally responsible for the high-stakes cases. Celebrities, dignitaries, you name it. When they wanted the best, they asked for me.”
“So why former?”
He pressed his lips together. “Sold the company.”
“Why?”
An ache crawled up his leg. The pain was a constant companion, a reminder of a dumb mistake that had cost him the job he loved, and none of her damn business. “It’s not relevant,” he said.
She pressed her lips together, not entirely hiding the beginnings of a frown.
They hadn’t dated, he and Zoe. He wasn’t sure they’d ever spoken. He’d wanted her in the worst way, but there had been a lot more between them than the picket fence straddling the property line they shared. Her side boasted neatly trimmed grass and new landscaping perfectly coordinated for every season. His was adorned with his father’s discarded beer cans and weeds. Though they were neighbors, the only real exchange they ever had was her glaring at him while he worked on his car. As if he’d stop because of a dour look from the princess. That car kept him out of the house. Away from his father, who thought a hell of a lot more about his addictions than he had his son.
The car was Ryder’s escape.
It wasn’t something he expected her to understand. She’d been handed the perfect life on a silver platter…she probably hadn’t needed to escape anything in her life.
Until now. What the hell had happened back home? Had some of that silver tarnished? Ryder hadn’t watched a television or logged onto a news site in weeks, since he’d been scrambling to get Latitude 13 ready in time for opening day. He knew she was there to sidestep a personal scandal—one not of her own making—but beyond that, details were sparse. Now he wished he knew more, but it wasn’t in his nature to ask questions. He’d worked a number of times with the cop who’d arranged her visit, and they’d only ever exchanged pertinent details. But with Zoe, everything was pertinent.
His gaze fell to the coffee cup he’d left on the table. She probably thought he was a slob. Like father, like son. He’d been impetuous. Blind. He’d had dreams of getting out of the house that sat dimly in the shadows of life where nothing would ever flourish.
But he’d made it. So why did he suddenly feel so uneasy?
His fists tightened, and he realized he still held her bag. Wordlessly, he walked it to her bedroom and set it on a table inside.
When he turned, he nearly walked straight into her. Soft, sensual, and woefully hidden under the business-casual attire. But he knew better. He’d studied every curve enough to know that when eighteen-year-old Zoe felt his eyes on her, her nipples tightened, and her breathing grew shallow. Now, her lightweight silk shirt gave him enough of a glimpse to see that much hadn’t changed.
His body went into lockdown. Only his gaze moved, drifting to her lips. They were natural. Nothing painted on…just soft and moist, if soft and moist had a look. He’d lost count of the times he’d caught her staring down at him from her bedroom window over there on the right side of the tracks.
He’d stared right back.
This time, she wasn’t looking down. Though her thick lashes threatened his view, he felt as much as saw her attention. It raked over him with a physical force, reigniting old urges that had no place in his life. However much he wanted her now, he couldn’t touch her. Because as much as he enjoyed riling her, if he actually gave in to that decade-old need to taste her, he’d lose more than his heart.
He’d lose every penny he had.
Chapter Three
Zoe couldn’t move. What had been a somewhat awkward exchange shifted into treacherous territory, and the look in his eyes suggested dangerous was an understatement. A memory of the old Ryder flashed through her mind. Even then, he was built. Brooding. Rebellious. Sexy. Forbidden.
If she had the first instinct for survival, she’d kick off her sensible heels and make a run for the tarmac. But apparently, she wasn’t so interested in her own well-being, and she didn’t have the urge to run. What she had was a parched throat and an utter lack of oxygen. She swallowed. Hard. “Are you planning to always share a suite with your…guests?”
His eyes darkened, and a corner of his mouth tipped in defiance. “Why don’t you ask me what you really want to know?”
He shifted, and every cell in her body realigned to him. Her nerve endings tingled. So did the apex of her thighs. “What are you so sure I want to know?”
“Whether I plan to take my guests to bed.”
“You are an arrogant jerk if you think I care,” she lied. Because in reality, she was breathless and on fire, and the tilt of his mouth suggested he knew it. “And I’m not a real guest.”
The rebellious declaration escaped before she had time to consider the suggestion therein. This isn’t real. Fuck me hard.
Bemusement slanted his lips. “I’ve been called worse. And the answer is no.”
She jerked her attention from his mouth and begged the universe to put six more inches between them. Or eight. She glanced in the direction of his package, which had the well-worn denim all out of sorts. Definitely eight. Maybe more. Like she’d know. The last time she’d had sex had been months before her pseudo-fiancé came into the picture. At the time, she’d been more interested in the infomercial playing in the background than she had Mr. Missionary, and the smoothie maker the show suckered her into ordering had come before she had.
He still stared, studying her. Waiting.
She turned, taking a step away from him in the process. “Why would a man who owned his own island be content to share a suite?”
“Should I be locked in a tower somewhere?” His tone suggested she had her fairy tales all wrong.
“I just find it hard to believe you would…not value your privacy.”
“I had privacy until you got here.”
“So why did you say yes?”
“I didn’t know it was you until I had to send your flight information.”
“What if you had known right away?”
When he didn’t answer, she forced herself to look at him. He stared at her intently. “I would have said fuck yes.”
She blinked. Reconsidered. Danger might be an understatement. It would also be a risk worth taking. “Why?” The forced word came in a breathy staccato that would have been over the top even in a porn flick, not that she’d know.
“Because I wanted you.”
Shock skated through her veins. She hadn’t forgotten him over the years. To the contrary, the eighteen-year-old version of Ryder Nash was the yardstick by which she’d subconsciously measured every man since. The situation was less than convenient, especially considering she had never known his touch. He was a fantasy—a standard to which no mortal man could compare.
Not until now.
Now the fantasy was within reach. He’d wanted her then. The confession twisted her insides, thoroughly wrecking any possibility that she’d gotten over him. Maybe it was just a case of wanting what she couldn’t have. Was that why she’d carried a torch so long? Of course it was. Because if he’d added her to the Friday-night lineup years ago, she wouldn’t be standing there wondering how those rough hands would feel on her skin or just how perfectly he’d fit between her thighs.
But he’d spoken of wanting her in the past tense, and though the heat in his eyes suggested otherwise, she wasn’t going to throw herself at any man. Not even the one who had filled her teenage dreams and rapidly ignited a grown woman’s fantasies.
He was watching her watch him. Self-conscious, she dragged her lower lip in her mouth with her teeth. The half grin that formed as he stared left her reeling.
“As for why I’m sharing my suite,�
� he said, all slow and dangerous-like, “the answer is twofold. One, my guests deserve only the best.”
“And two?” She asked with nonchalance, though her heart was in her throat.
“I suspect you’ll be safer with me than you would be with the other guys who were just ogling you.”
She wasn’t so sure about that. She wasn’t some helpless woman. She knew how to say no. She couldn’t deny that they were easy on the eyes, but not one of them had affected her the way Ryder had. Even before she’d known her bad-boy ex-neighbor was the billionaire proprietor, the sight of him had reawakened every sexual urge in her body. “Surely you can trust your employees.”
“Wrong kind of trust.” The possessive growl on which he delivered the words said what they didn’t. His darkening blue-green stare had hardened, but it was hot. And while he did a better-than-average job of actually looking at her face, his attention had taken more than one languid tour of her body.
“Not the kind with whom you would trust a guest?”
“I thought you weren’t one.” The low, husky overtone of his words lent the distinct impression she was in over her head, but if she had to drown, there was no better way to do it.
“I think the proper verbiage is that I’m not just a guest.” Her official cover story was that she was there to serve as an interior consultant. What the staff didn’t know was that the idea that she, an attorney with a wardrobe full of drab blues and grays, could offer any real insight into the aesthetic pleasures of the rich and famous was laughable. But the fake job title gave her a reason to be there before the resort’s opening. The few employees on the premises wouldn’t blink over her presence, and arriving on a private tropical island under an assumed name was about as close to anonymous as a person could get. Hopefully, the press would never find her.
“You always had a reputation for being a smart ass,” he contended.
“And you always were…”
“What? The trash next door?” He asked lazily, as if it meant nothing to him, but it was a loaded question if she’d ever heard one.
Indignation flared. “I never once said that about you. I never once thought it.”
“Yeah, that’s why you and your cheerleader friends used to look down on me.”
“We looked down at you because we were next to the second-floor window, you ass. Looking up wouldn’t have afforded the same view, though I could have done without the carousel of skanks you paraded through your backseat.”
A grin only partially masked the flash of pain that tainted his features. “Were you jealous, princess?”
Yes. But she couldn’t say it. She didn’t have to.
He leaned against the wall, his muscles flexing with the movement. The sweat had mostly dried under the air conditioning, but the damp waistband of his jeans left a powerful reminder of what that moisture had done to his body. “Did you wish it was you?”
She blinked. “What?”
He took a step closer, helping himself to her personal space and all the oxygen within. “Did you want to be the one I undressed?” he asked, his voice low. Threatening. “Did you want to lay there naked under the glow of the street light through that dirty glass and feel my hands on you? For my teeth to rake over your skin, to bite down on those tight little nipples and tug until the whole neighborhood heard you calling my name? To ride me so hard the car fell off the jacks, and then to keep going because we just didn’t care?”
She swallowed and wondered when the air conditioner had stopped working.
“Tell me, Zoe. Is that what you wanted? To get fucked until you couldn’t move? Until you couldn’t get the taste of me out of your mouth?”
She couldn’t breathe. She may have broken a sweat, and she just might be using her last breath on him, but so be it. “Are you always so quick to share the details of your conquests? Because frankly, I think all those details about you and the girls in your car are disgusting.” And hot. So hot, but he didn’t have to know that. Frankly, she wished she didn’t.
He grinned. Grinned. “That wasn’t a conquest, princess, and I’m not telling tales outside of the backseat. I’m too much of a gentleman for that.”
Sure he was. That was why she couldn’t breathe…because he was a gentleman. “Then what are you talking about?”
“That wasn’t real, and it never happened.” He leaned until his lips touched her ear, then grazed the tender skin when he spoke. “It was my own private fantasy, and the only woman I wanted in it was you.”
Chapter Four
Zoe had seldom been rendered speechless, but in that moment, she couldn’t have spit out a word if her life depended on it.
Ryder retreated, but only far enough to meet her eyes. He was still impossibly close. Horribly, wonderfully, brutally close. “Is the feeling mutual, princess?”
She blinked, but he didn’t go anywhere. “Is this the part where I confess that I spent my teenage years staring wistfully at the backseat of your car, wishing I could take a turn?”
“Now would be the ideal time to reciprocate, yes. Although I already knew you had a thing for staring. I just hoped you were staring at me, not my car.”
She had stared at him. Plenty. But to admit that out loud? Not in this lifetime. “Am I supposed to be flattered? Or maybe just giving up my entire life to hang out here on your island servicing your desires?”
The sarcasm flopped.
His smug expression faltered, his eyes darkening briefly before focusing on her. “No,” he said. “I don’t do relationships. Nor do I do long term arrangements, so any servicing you might anticipate will be temporary, at best.”
Jerk. She stood silent, speechless, because his asshat words shot a thrill through her that made her want to kick him. Finally, she sputtered, “Get over yourself, if that’s even possible with that ego.”
He grinned, somehow having managed to return to a place so close to her that the slant of his lips nearly touched hers.
Her breath quickened. If she didn’t take a deep hit of oxygen at some point, she was going to have to start breathing into a paper bag. What the hell had happened to her life? Three weeks ago, she’d been planning a pretentious, over-the-top wedding with an incumbent Senator her father had hand-picked as the perfect son-in-law. Now here she was, on a private tropical island with a man who had once been every father’s worst nightmare, only now he’d become the stuff of which dreams were made. She didn’t even care that he was rich…it was the sex oozing from his every masculine pore that had her turned inside out. It was the fact that her denial hadn’t deterred him.
It was that she didn’t want to be deterred.
Get it together. Opposing counsel had never made her quake like this.
“You wanted me?” Her words came out with the shrill grace of a chew toy. So much for getting it together.
The smirk she expected didn’t come. Instead, those beautiful, clear-blue eyes of his were honest. “Yes.”
And now? The ache between her thighs spread to her heart. She didn’t know why, really. Ryder was at best a missed opportunity—nothing had been broken between them. There never had been anything there to break, but in the aftermath of the tabloid fodder her life had become, she couldn’t help wondering what might have been. As if getting involved with a confirmed playboy could possibly have ended better than her fiasco of a relationship with the esteemed Senator, ten years her senior and nowhere near as photogenic as he thought himself.
Ryder was still looking at her, his gaze resting lazily, though intently, on her. Her attention fell unwittingly to follow the trail past his waistband. He was probably photogenic as hell. But considering he was young, hotter than the noonday sun, and a self-made billionaire, he was likely the world’s most eligible bachelor. There would be no shortage of paparazzi surrounding him in the real world, and she’d had enough to last a lifetime.
She cleared her throat. “That was a long time ago.”
“That could easily be my point. I haven’t forgotten, Zoe. Feels
like yesterday I stood there on the wrong side of the tracks wanting all the wrong things.”
“And now?”
“Money can’t buy everything, sweetheart.”
His heated gaze and its lazy appraisal of her suggested sex, but she had little doubt he could get that for free. Just not from her.
The ache between her thighs protested the unspoken denial, and the involuntary clench she hoped would silence them accomplished the opposite. She summoned all her nopes. All other reservations aside, there was no way she’d fall into bed with him, especially now that he was rich. It didn’t matter how much she’d crushed on him when they were teens…she hadn’t acted then, and acting now made her no better than the interns who had ridden her ex-fiancé reverse-cowgirl-style into infamy.
She swallowed a dry bundle of nerves and met his aqua stare. “No, it can’t.”
He looked at her for a long moment before he spoke. “Why are you here, Zoe?”
“My fiancé made himself an ex in a very public manner.” She blurted the words, surprised when the usual shame didn’t follow. Surprised when Ryder didn’t immediately adopt the same look of pity that had become a permanent mask among her co-workers.
“So why isn’t he the one in exile?”
“To be honest, I don’t care enough to know. I just wanted out of the three-ring DC circus that popped up when he…when the scandal broke.”
One Night With the Billionaire (Men of the Zodiac) Page 2
