by Fiona Brand
She checked her watch and then looked over at John. It was going to be a long night.
Seven
Eyes grainy from too little sleep, Ben got off his return flight from New York to Miami and strode through the arrivals lounge. Even though he knew he should be checking his emails to make sure there were no changes to his scheduled meetings, he found himself flicking through the news feed on his phone.
A headline from a tabloid stopped him in his tracks. “Eeny, Meeny, Miney, Who? Sophie Messena Chooses Atraeus.”
On some level he was aware of people flowing around him, the annoyed glance of a businessman as his bag caught the edge of Ben’s briefcase. He tapped the link. A photograph of Sophie Messena in a clinch with John Atraeus filled the screen and the bustling noise of the airport dropped away.
He scrolled down. Apparently, Sophie and Atraeus had spent the night at Atraeus’s hotel suite. The lovebirds had ordered room service so they could stay in. Weirdly—because there had been no champagne—a bucket of ice had been delivered along with the food.
Sound and movement seemed to rush back at him, twice as loud and more garish than before. Little more than twenty-four hours since he had gotten out of Sophie Messena’s bed, and she was already with someone else. And not just anyone else. Sophie had been clear on the fact that she wanted in on the retail deal on Sail Fish Key, and John Atraeus was the only one who had the power to open that door for her.
Taking a deep breath, Ben unclenched his jaw. Grimly he wondered what had happened to the cool logic that had underpinned almost every decision he had ever made about his relationship with Sophie, except on two notable occasions when they had ended up in bed.
His attention was drawn back to the photo, particularly the expression on Sophie’s face, which the photographer had zeroed in on. Her head was tilted back, the pure line of her throat exposed, her gaze intense. She looked as if she was about to kiss Atraeus, as if she couldn’t get enough of him.
Fiery tension gripped him. He had no problem identifying what he was feeling. He was jealous. Crazily, burningly jealous.
He didn’t like the fact that she had found someone else. He liked it even less that that person was Atraeus, because in his mind Ben had claimed her. A year ago, to be precise.
And he couldn’t forget that a year ago, she had found a new someone else within a week. If he hadn’t been thousands of miles away, and committed to the complicated process of picking up the reins of his uncle’s sprawling business empire, he would have gotten the next flight back to New Zealand.
Instead, he’d had to content himself with doing some homework on the guy, and the next time he was back in New Zealand, he had made it his business to track Xavier Tate down.
A grin relieved some of Ben’s tension. After a few pointed questions, Tate had caved. Apparently, Sophie had picked him up at a club and cut a deal. She would introduce him to her brother Gabriel, who ran the family bank. In exchange, Tate had done what he was told. He had escorted Sophie for a week and made it look like he was her new boyfriend. Tate had sworn up and down that he hadn’t touched Sophie, that she had been crystal clear on the fact that if he so much as tried to kiss her, the deal was off.
Ben had let him live.
Ben had also concluded that the dates and the media hype, so soon after he had left, had been Sophie’s way of covering up the fact that he had hurt her.
That was one of the reasons he had wanted to see her again. A part of him had always wondered if he had been wrong about her, that somewhere in the midst of the addictive, fiery attraction, there had been a glimmer of true emotion.
The other reason was that he hadn’t been able to forget her, period.
Ben stared at the photo of Sophie and Atraeus, then with an abrupt movement he closed the page. Until that moment he hadn’t understood how fiercely possessive he was of Sophie.
As he made his way toward the exit, he brooded over his obsession with Sophie, the edgy tension that gripped him every time he thought about her, the knee-jerk desire, not just to claim her, but to take her, first from Hunt and now from Atraeus. And all of this, despite knowing from hard, personal experience that, at a foundational level, their relationship wouldn’t work because money lay at the center of it.
He registered that, in a weird way, his own hardline, alpha personality was working against him in this. At some instinctive level, from the first moment he had seen her, he had been fixated. He had chosen Sophie, and it seemed he couldn’t simply unchoose her. He had spent the past year trying to neutralize what he could only describe as a fatal attraction.
Two days ago, all it had taken was one glance across a room to know that he hadn’t succeeded. Jaw tight, he decided he needed to form a strategy to once and for all nix the attraction.
Now that he was irrevocably linked with Sophie through the business deal with Nick, she would be on the periphery of his life for some time. He needed to find a cure, a way to unchoose Sophie.
Although how he was going to achieve that he didn’t know.
He was about to drop his phone into his pocket when it buzzed.
He noted the number and reluctantly answered the call, which was from one of his business partners.
The conversation was short and to the point. Malcolm Holt would be at the investors’ lunch on Sail Fish Key as arranged, only he was bringing his daughter, Buffy, with him. Apparently, Buffy was very much looking forward to seeing him again.
Ben hung up and stared bleakly out the terminal window. He couldn’t help reflecting that life had been a whole lot simpler when he had been a financial nobody working for Nick Messena. Now, in the space of two days, he had given in to the temptation to make a second, steamy mistake with Sophie Messena—a woman who hadn’t wanted him until he had become a billionaire—and discovered that forgetting her wasn’t so easy after all. At the other end of the spectrum he had Buffy Holt, an extremely wealthy young woman he had only ever dated because of his connection with Mathew Holt. Buffy had made no bones about the fact that she had chosen him and wasn’t willing to take no for an answer.
Telling her no wouldn’t have been a problem if her father was willing to be reasonable about Ben’s disinterest. Unfortunately, Holt, an oil and real estate billionaire who had underwritten a major chunk of the Sail Fish Key project, had a reputation for being difficult. He had made no bones about the fact that he wanted his daughter to have everything she wanted, including Ben.
As much as Ben hated to admit it, there was only one way out. He needed a date for tomorrow. It was short notice, so he checked with Hannah. Unfortunately, her daughter, Ellie, had flown out that morning so no dice there. He thought about asking Nick if one of his staff might do it, but discounted the idea. Holt knew Nick and had stayed at his hotels. Chances were he might recognize one of the women. In any case, he would sniff a fake a mile off. Ben needed someone who was confident in the kind of rarified social strata in which Holt moved, someone who could believably be his date and whose very presence would shut down both Holt and his daughter.
Sliding his sunglasses onto the bridge of his nose, Ben walked out into the compressed heat of another steamy Miami day. He found the keys to the Jeep, unlocked it and placed his overnight case on the rear seat. He walked around to the driver-side door, tossed his briefcase onto the passenger seat, waited a few seconds to let the hot air out of the vehicle, then climbed behind the wheel. Adjusting the air-conditioning, he drove out of the overnight parking lot and accelerated into traffic.
The article about Sophie and Atraeus came back to haunt him as he drove. He stopped for a red light, his fingers tightening on the wheel. The problem was, a part of him couldn’t believe that Sophie had jumped beds so fast.
Added to that, he knew what the reporter who wrote the article about Sophie and Atraeus was like. If Sally Parker ever stumbled over the truth, it would be a bona fide miracle.
&nbs
p; Ben accelerated through the intersection but, seconds later, he did something he almost never did: he changed his mind.
Instead of taking an exit for the east side of town, he headed for Sophie’s office, which was downtown, located directly above her newest boutique.
Minutes later he pulled into a parking space. The address was upmarket but nothing like the rarified, high-end luxury of an Atraeus Mall. Although, he guessed, after sleeping with Atraeus, Sophie’s ability to access premium retail space would no longer be a problem.
He stepped into the air-conditioned building, checked the list of businesses and headed for the second floor. Within minutes he found Sophie’s office. His jaw tightened as he took in the sleek neutral space with its luxe linen couch and spare designer coffee table, the avant-garde art. His gaze was drawn to a silver sconce on the wall that had an antique, faintly battered look. From its very simplicity, it looked like it could have once belonged in an ancient villa, maybe even one of the crumbling monasteries on Medinos.
Nick had once told him that Sophie had a passion for Medinian objects, to the point that she regularly spent time poking around in secondhand shops, and brought pieces back from family holidays on the island, sometimes even forcing him to take the overflow from her luggage.
The fact that he remembered Sophie was sentimental about the Mediterranean island from which the Messena family had originally come was unsettling. It signaled that he was thinking about her too much, that he was sliding back into the old obsessive behavior he had sworn off.
He checked his watch. The reception desk was vacant, probably because it was lunchtime. Not prepared to give up, he found an open door.
Francesca pushed to her feet, her expression wary. “If you’re looking for Sophie, she’s out.”
And just like that, he knew he had made a mistake coming to Sophie’s office in the hopes of finding out she hadn’t actually slept with John Atraeus. “With Atraeus.”
A sharp clatter was followed by a muffled, distinctly unladylike word.
Francesca retrieved the cell phone she had just dropped, her expression oddly pale as she checked the screen. “John, uh—” she flushed and shook her head “—went back to New York. Sophie’s in Miami, somewhere.”
Ben frowned at the cell in her hand. “Is it broken?”
Francesca’s gaze clashed with his. “It’s not the phone that’s broken. That’s got a shockproof case.”
Ben had the sudden conviction the conversation was operating on two levels. “So, you haven’t seen Sophie?”
Francesca set the phone down on the desk. “She isn’t exactly keeping me in the loop at the moment. I haven’t seen her since Saturday night.”
Which was unusual. From everything Nick had told him, as well as Ben’s own experience of the twins, normally they were so close they were practically a double act. “So it is true. Sophie and Atraeus are together.”
Francesca’s brows jerked together. “If Sophie spent the night with him, then, yeah, you can pretty much guarantee they’re together.”
The confirmation sent tension spiraling through Ben. It was jealousy, stark and primitive. The very fact that he was jealous meant that he was no longer in danger of sliding back into obsessive behavior when it came to Sophie Messena: he was already there.
“Is there something wrong?”
His gaze snapped back to Francesca’s. “What could possibly be wrong?”
“For a moment you looked...weird.”
Like he wanted to catch a flight to New York and tell Atraeus, point-blank, to leave Sophie Messena alone?
Francesca’s phone made a pinging sound as if a text had just come in. She stared at it as if it was a bomb about to explode, checked the text, then put the phone down, all the color, once again, gone from face. “If this is to do with business you can leave a message for Sophie. Although I thought it was Atraeus who was handling the retail from now on.”
“I don’t need to leave a message.” He had what he had come for: verification that Sophie and Atraeus were a couple.
Half an hour later, Ben turned into the driveway of what had been his uncle Wallace’s beach house—or rather mansion—and which was now his home base. The driveway had been repaired and the grounds restored to their original elegance but the old house still needed work. Given Wallace’s wealth the place should have been pristine but following his “great disappointment” Wallace had become something of an eccentric. Despite his business savvy, his personal life had collapsed around him when his wife Solange had run off with a lover. The divorce settlement had meant Wallace’s first real estate company had had to be sold, leaving him with a large house, which Solange hadn’t wanted, and just enough cash to start again. Feeling broken and betrayed, Wallace had sworn off women, taken some crazy risks with real estate that had paid off massively and had managed to die a rich, lonely old man.
It was not a fate that Ben intended to share, despite the fact that it looked like he was headed in the same direction.
Extracting his overnight bad and briefcase from the Jeep, he walked inside, flicking lights on as he went. His footsteps echoed, owing to the fact that Ben had given away most of Wallace’s dated furniture to charity and the place was in the throes of renovations. Consequently, most of the downstairs rooms were freshly painted but empty. In a month or so the flooring should be finished, and the new furnishings would go in. The emptiness hadn’t bothered him too much until now because he had been doing so much travelling, but he was looking forward to having a real home once again. Tossing the cases down on a couch, he opened French doors and walked out onto a patio that had spectacular ocean views. He stared across an expanse of lawn at the wild stretch of beach and the crashing waves and was instantly spun back two-and-a-half years to Dolphin Bay, New Zealand, and the first time he had seen Sophie Messena.
Nick had thrown a barbecue for him down on the beach to welcome him to the firm. Sophie had arrived partway through, dressed in white jeans and a neutral shirt, her dark hair coiled in a loose knot. Compared to the other women at the party, who were mostly dressed in bright, skimpy dresses, she had seemed low-key and sophisticated. One assessing glance from her dark eyes, and he had known things were going to get complicated.
The conversation with Francesca that afternoon replayed itself in his mind.
When he had met Sophie for the first time, he had also met Francesca. They had looked strikingly alike, except for the way they dressed and wore their hair. Francesca had looked bright and cheerful in a jungle-print dress, her hair loose. He had felt an instant hot punch of attraction for Sophie and absolutely nothing for Francesca, except a basic recognition that she was beautiful, pleasant and, for want of a better word, nice.
That hadn’t changed. As gorgeous as Francesca was, he didn’t react to her at all. She could have been his sister.
Intellectually, he knew the difference was all to do with personality. Something about Sophie got to him. Whatever it was, Francesca did not possess it.
Ever since Ben had walked away from Sophie a year ago, he had steered clear of dating anyone who looked remotely like Sophie. Clearly, that tactic hadn’t worked. Now it occurred to Ben that desensitization—spending time with someone who looked a lot like Sophie—could be the key to “unchoosing” Sophie.
In which case, Francesca could be the ideal date he needed for tomorrow. She was gorgeous, available, wealthy in her own right, and she would handle both Buffy and Malcolm Holt with ease.
He found his cell phone, looked up the number and made the call. Francesca picked up. She was in the middle of a meeting, but to his surprise, agreed to meet him for a drink, even naming the place.
With grim satisfaction, Ben terminated the call. If he could convince Francesca to be his date at the Sail Fish Key lunch, with any luck he would be killing two birds with one stone.
He would be free. Free of the pressure to date
Buffy Holt, and free of his obsession with Sophie Messena.
* * *
Sophie finally made it home to her apartment at around two in the afternoon, following an interview with a prospective store manager for a new property she was opening in Fort Lauderdale.
John had left on an early flight, which had been something of a relief. As nice as he was, she had found out fairly quickly that they did not have much in common apart from a possible business connection.
The sudden ringing of her landline was startling, mostly because almost no one had her number. People rang her cell. It was Francesca, and she sounded oddly breathless.
“Can you meet at Alfresco at six?”
Sophie frowned. Francesca’s apartment was a few streets north of hers. Alfresco was a restaurant and bar situated about halfway between their apartments, so it was easy for them both to reach on foot. “What’s the rush?”
“I thought we could have dinner. And, by the way, Ben...uh...called in at the office looking for you today.”
Sophie’s fingers tightened on the receiver. Suddenly her heart was pounding so hard she could barely breathe. Thoughts cascaded through her mind, including the crazy conviction that, despite everything that had happened, Ben did want her. That, somehow, she had gotten things totally wrong and he hadn’t actually walked out on her.
She didn’t know what could possibly have happened, but maybe there had been some kind of emergency, and now she had ruined things utterly because he would think she had slept with John.
But if there had been an emergency, why hadn’t Ben tried to call her or leave a message? He had her number; he could call her any time he wanted.
Her heart rate flattened out. No, she hadn’t gotten it wrong. Ben had not been able to leave her suite fast enough. And the bunch of red roses that had arrived with no note had underlined that fact.
