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Riya nodded, surprised that Jackie had noticed it too. There was something she couldn’t pinpoint about Nathan either. A sort of cool detachment, a layer of frost as if nothing or no one could touch him. And yet he had been so angry when she refused to sign over the estate.
“Even Maria took a few seconds to recognize him. He just stood there looking as if he owned the place, when he didn’t even ask after Robert all these years.” Riya bit the inside of her cheek to keep from correcting her mother that the estate was his. “He arrived a couple of hours ago. Showed up at the front door and sent the staff into a frenzy. They were all crying and laughing, and Robert’s not even in town. He won’t say why he’s here.”
How? She hadn’t even seen his car in the garage. “Where is he? Did he say what he wants?”
“He’s been wandering around the estate, drops in every half hour or so. Maria said he wants to see you.”
Riya’s heart sank to her feet.
A calculating look emerged in her mother’s eyes, her panic forgotten. “Why is he looking for you? I’m still shaking from the shock of seeing him, and all this time, if you’d known that he was—”
“Hello, Riya.”
Every time he said her name, it was like flipping a switch on inside her. A caress. An invitation. For what, she didn’t even want to speculate. Her skin tingling, Riya turned.
He stood at the huge arched entrance into the kitchen.
Once again, Riya felt the impact of his presence like a magnet pulled toward a slab of iron.
The beard was still unshaved, but he had changed. Now his clothes reflected the casual power he exuded so easily. The rumpled shirt had been exchanged for a white dress shirt and a formal jacket this time. The snowy-white collar a contrast against his sunburned skin. His hair gleamed with wetness, looked more black than brown.
He looked knee-meltingly gorgeous. Case in point, her knees practically buckled beneath her.
“You didn’t come back to the office, haven’t been answering my calls,” he said, waving his cell phone.
“I didn’t realize I was supposed to be at your beck and call,” she retorted, not trusting the invasive intimacy of his smile. In fact, she had liked him better when he was angry and threatening. “Not everything I do is about you.”
That small smile turned into a grin, and his teeth gleamed against his tanned skin. It lit up his whole face, softening the harsh angles of his features. And the mouth...she had been right. It was made for smiling and something else that she didn’t want to think about.
“From now on, it’s going to be all about me,” he said, stretching his arms by his sides. The casual gesture drew her gaze to the breadth of his shoulders. That jacket was cut perfectly, following the wide swath of his shoulders and the narrowing of his waist.
Alarm spiked through her. “No.”
“I have a proposition for you.” Something glimmered in his gaze. “You’re not chickening out already, are you?”
Jackie gasped, and Riya wondered if her mother could explode from the tension radiating from her. She infused steel into her voice. “We don’t have a deal.”
“We do now. You’ve...persuaded me to take a chance on you, Riya.”
There was no way to arrest the heat blooming up her face. He was doing it on purpose. Saying her name like that, insinuating with that smile that there was more between them than his hatred and her risky gamble. She wanted to run away and hide in her bedroom, hope it was all a bad dream.
Next to her, Jackie began again. “Riya, how dare you not tell me—”
Nathan shot Jackie a look. Pure arctic frost, it was the only way Riya could describe it. Granted, he probably was the one man who could shut Jackie up without meaning to, but Riya had a feeling he would have the same effect on all of them, even if he had just been Nathaniel Ramirez. And not the adored heir of the estate.
He had that kind of a presence. Contained and controlled with a violent energy brimming underneath the calm facade.
How was it possible that she could notice so much, understand so much about him just in a few hours?
“Come,” he said in a cajoling tone as if she were a recalcitrant child. When she still didn’t move, he caught her wrist and tugged.
Her bare skin tingling at the contact of his rough fingers, Riya followed, past the nonplussed staff, who had gathered in the huge dining hall, and her pale mother, through the door and out into the lush acreage behind the house.
A cold breeze blew her hair in her face, and with a soft huff, Riya pulled it all to the side. The night was inky black, only the moon and carefully placed lights on the ground illuminating the path for them.
But instead of dulling his presence, the dark intensified her awareness of him. The graceful line of his shoulders, the taper of his lean chest to his waist and the corded energy of his thighs when she stumbled and he steadied her.
Her own senses revolted against her mind, determined to observe and absorb every little thing about him. They’d reached the well-lit-up gazebo in the south corner of the estate when Riya realized his long fingers were still wrapped around her wrist.
Dragging her feet on the grass, she tugged her hand away.
The splish-splash of water from another fountain, the relentless whisper of the cicadas, a hundred different fragrances carried around by the breeze greeted her. The very place she had always found blissfully peaceful was now ruined by the man playing a cat-and-mouse game with her livelihood. And something much worse.
Grasping the fear that was the only way to puncture her awareness of him, she lashed out. “You couldn’t have given me an evening to brace myself? Let me figure out how and what I’m going to tell my mother, to figure out my future?”
“You left without a word to anyone. Is this how you run the company?”
“The very company that you threatened to tear into pieces?” she threw at him. “You asked me to get out. Very clearly.”
“You were blackmailing me.”
She bristled at the outrage in his voice. “I was doing no such thing.” And because she couldn’t bear to simply stop thinking of it as her company, she continued. “Even if your plan is to dismantle the company and sell it for bits, you’ll need a skeleton staff to see through the memberships for the rest of the year. I recommend you keep Sam Hawkins on. He’s been there from the beginning and Martha Gomez too. She needs this job and she’ll be invaluable to—”
All of her panic ground to a halt as his long-limbed stride ate the distance between them.
“I don’t remember firing you. Are you resigning, then?”
Riya reached behind her and grasped the wooden column. But there was nowhere to go and he was standing too close.
The lights from around the gazebo cast him in shadows.
Close enough to realize how many different shades of blue his eyes could turn depending on the light. Close enough for her to see the shape of his mouth, which had a hint of gaiety to it. Close enough for her to breathe and learn the scent of him and realize why he affected her so much.
She had never before experienced the weird pull in her stomach, the feverish tremble that gripped her, the constant fascination with every aspect of him.
Fisting her hands by her sides, she clamped down the shaky realization.
His gaze rested on her mouth for a nanosecond. Only an infinitesimal fragment of time, but her lips tingled. “I didn’t quit. But have you left me a choice?”
As if the tension became too much even for him, he moved to her side and leaned against the structure. “The staff’s murderous glares after you left would have turned me into dust if I hadn’t told them you were just having a tantrum.”
Her breath left her in a huge whoosh, the sound amplified in the silence. “Building up their hopes that everything’s okay is just cruel. Does nothing get to you?”
“No.”
His response wasn’t threatening or emotional. Scarily, it was honest.
His watch glinted in the light as he folded his hands. “I’ll give you and your staff one chance. Prove that Travelogue and you are worth taking on as part of RunAway International.”
Catching the immediate thanks that rose to her lips, she turned toward him. Her heart thumped hard in her chest. Whether it was because of how close he was standing or because he was giving her a chance, she had no idea.
Ruthlessly killing her own hopes, she shook her head. “I don’t want to work for you.”
“Why not?”
“What do you mean why not?” She moved away, exasperated by him and her reaction to him. “Because you and I have a history, that’s why. And not a good one. Whatever you think of me, I lied because...”
He gave her such an arch look that she backpedaled quickly. “Fine. I manipulated Maria and you with good intentions. Whereas you...you are doing this out of some twisted need for revenge. That’s it. You want to torture me, guilt me and then—”
He grinned, and his blue eyes glittered. Her knees wobbled. “Have you always been this prone to drama or is it me that brings it out in you?”
How she wanted to say he affected her in no way, but they would both know she was lying. Better instead to focus on fighting it. “Why the sudden change of heart, then?”
“A strong sense of familial duty? A core made of kindness?”
Rolling her eyes, she swatted him. Deftly, he caught her hand in his.
Her breath stuck in her throat. Her fingers moved over his in the dark, registering the different texture of his palm—rough and abrasive, devoid of any softness, so different from her own.
It was his absolute stillness next to her, just as powerful as that latent energy, that made her realize what she was doing.
She jerked her hand away, the air she had been holding rushing out of her.
What the hell was she doing, pawing him like that? He was her employer, her enemy...
No man had been so dangerous to her internal balance as him. No man had ever spun her senses so easily.
Rubbing shaking fingers over her face, she struggled to think back to their conversation. “You’re agreeing to see Robert, then?”
“If you give me a date now as to when you will sign the deed over to me.”
“Stay here in San Francisco until their wedding. See Robert, let him speak to you. And I’ll sign over the estate the day after the wedding. Also, none of my staff will be made redundant. When this is all over, I want you to go away and leave Travelogue alone. Forever.”
“That depends on if Travelogue stays intact that long.”
“If you give us a fair chance, I have no doubt it will.”
His eyes gleamed ferociously. “You’ve got a lot of nerve, setting conditions to sell my mother’s house back to me.”
“You’re a billionaire, you’re your own boss and as far as I understand, you have no one in your life that you’re answerable to. What’s two months in the big picture of your life, Nathan?”
“Everything, Riya.” There was no humor in his smile now, only a dark warning. “This is your last chance to let it go.”
She didn’t take even a beat to think it over. “No. Robert...he...I’ll do anything for him.”
His curious silence swathed her and Riya felt like the rabbit in the story her father had told her when she was little. The rabbit had gone into the lion’s den, determined to change his mind about eating one animal every day.
At that point, she had stuck her fingers in her ears and begged him not to continue. A few days after that, she and Jackie had left. Her father had never seen her again, never called her, never sent a birthday card.
For years, she had wondered if he thought of her, hoped he would write to her, call Jackie to ask about her.
Only utter and absolute silence had greeted her hopes.
Now...now she didn’t even remember his face clearly. On the road with Jackie, hearing her crying at night, not knowing where they would go next—it had been the most uncertain time of her life. Until Jackie had met Robert and he had taken them to his estate, Riya had thought she would never know a stable home again.
And to see Robert ache to see Nathan, to speak a few words to him, she couldn’t back down now. Not when Nathan was finally here.
“Fine. Come to work Monday morning.”
She saw the shadow of something in his eyes—a promise, a challenge.
“I’ll stay two months. I’ll even dance with you at the wedding.”
“I don’t want to dance with—”
“You started this, Riya. I’m going to finish it.”
She breathed in cold gulps of air, only then seeing the faint shape of a chopper. “Stop saying my name like that,” she said, not sure when the words had exactly left her lips.
Frowning, he stepped closer. “Am I saying it wrong?”
There was that strange little tension again. Winding around them, tugging at them.
“No. I just...we’re...”
The helicopter blades began whirring, and he bent toward her to make himself heard. A firestorm danced through Riya as his breath played on her nape.
It was a heated brand, a molten caress. The simple touch of his fingers on her waist as she swayed seared through the cotton of her shirt.
“Mr. Ramirez and Ms. Mathur are too formal when we’re going to work in close quarters for a couple of months. And calling each other brother and sister, especially when we...” Her heart drummed in her ears, a flash of heat bursting all over her as he paused dramatically. “...obviously don’t like each other will just earn us a place on a daytime soap opera, don’t you think?
“Nathan and Riya, it has to be.”
She felt his smile instead of saw it, the faint graze of his beard against her jaw making her hyperaware of him. He lifted his head and Riya stared mutely at the striking beauty of the planes of his face.
All wicked, from the twinkle in his eyes to the dimples in his cheeks. And sexy all the way.
“See you Monday morning.” He stepped back, sending her heart pitter-pattering all over her chest. “And FYI, I’m what they call an exacting boss.”
By the time Riya walked the long way around the acreage back to the house, she was hungry and tired and her head hurt.
Turning the gleaming antique handle on the side door into the kitchen, she stepped in. Even though her stomach rumbled, all she wanted was to get into bed and forget that this day had happened.
She couldn’t believe that Drew had sold her out so easily, couldn’t believe what she had set in motion. And of all things, she couldn’t believe the sharp and stringent quality of her awareness of Nathan, of his every word and gesture, of the flash of the same awareness in his. But she had no doubt, where she was floundering and flailing in the wake of it, it was nothing but a game to him.
The overhead ceiling lights came on, bathing her in a blaze of light.
Jackie stood near the curving staircase, her eyes glittering with fear and fury. “If you knew he was coming, why didn’t you stop him?”
Guilt settling heavily on her shoulders, Riya sighed. If only life were as simple as her mom thought it was. “It’s his estate we’re living in. One of these days, he was bound to return.”
“Just when Robert has finally agreed to the wedding and—”
Unable to hear another word of her mom’s self-absorption, she cut across her. “Robert will be happy to see him. I can’t just send him away, even if I wanted to.”
Her elegant hands wringing in front of her, Jackie walked around the huge dining table. “What does he want with you?”
“He wants the estate back.”
“No,” Jackie said, her tone rising, her gaze stricken. “He’ll probably just kick us out if you do that. You can’t—”
Even as she wished her mother would think of Riya’s feelings for once, she softened her tone. Whatever her weaknesses, Jackie had found stability and peace here with Robert and the estate. “I can’t stop him from taking what is rightfully his, Jackie.”
Jackie’s gaze zoomed somewhere far away, and Riya locked out the urge to shake her mom. That look meant nothing she said was going to get through to her now. “I don’t care what you have to do. Just make sure he doesn’t have the house back. Do something, anything to send him back, Riya.”
“I can’t take him on,” Riya said, looking away. If Jackie found out he was here because of what Riya had done... “If I fight him on this, he threatened to drag us through the courts. I don’t have a choice.”
“Of course you can. You have Robert on your side. He’ll never agree to Nathan taking the estate from you. If there’s a long court battle, then so be it. You can’t lose the house, Riya. I can’t take this uncertainty, this kind of stress at this stage of my life.”
And there was the heart of the matter. Bitterness pooled in her throat, but Riya shook it away. As she always did. “Robert will look after you, Jackie. Nothing will happen to you.”
“Does it occur to you that maybe it’s you I could be worried about?”
“There’s no precedent for me to think that, is there?”
Jackie paled.
Now Riya felt like the green scum that lived under a rock.
Jackie sighed. “You slogged over the estate for years. Where was Nathan when he was needed? Do whatever you have to do, but make sure you hold on to this house.
“You have just as much right to this as he. Or even more.”
Nathan’s dark smile as he’d stood close to her sent a shiver over her skin. His offer for Travelogue was more than she’d hoped for, but she didn’t like the look in his eyes.
It wasn’t just that ever-present energy between them. It was more. As if he could see through her, into the heart of her. As if he could see her fears and insecurities and found them laughable. As if he knew how to use them to trip her up.
She just had to remember that whatever he threw at her, she could cope with it. The only danger was if he had true interest in her. He didn’t. Nathan was a man who traveled the world over.
Like everyone else in her life, she would matter very little to him once he realized she wouldn’t budge from her goal. And then he would leave her alone.
For years, she had lived with the knowledge that her father hadn’t cared about her. For Jackie, she was nothing but a crutch of safety, the one who would never leave her. For Robert, she had been the means to assuage his guilt about Nathan and his mom. Not that she didn’t appreciate his kindness.
But the truth was no one had ever really cared about her, about her fears, her happiness. And Nathan would be no different.
CHAPTER FOUR
WHEN RIYA ARRIVED at work Monday morning, it was to find Nathan leaning against the redbrick building, head bent down to his tablet.
Pulling in a breath, she forced her nerves to calm down. She had agreed to this, actually forced him into this. Now she had to see this through for Robert and for her own company.
The shabby street instantly looked different, felt different. And more than one woman sent him lingering looks as they walked past. But he was unaware of the attention he was drawing.
Today, he was dressed in a V-necked gray T-shirt coupled with blue jeans that hugged his lean hips and thighs in a very nerve-racking way. His hair gleamed with wetness, his beard still hiding his mouth. The veins bulging in his forearms, the stretch of the cotton across his chest. Every time she set eyes on him, something pinged inside her.
So early in the morning, with no caffeine in her system, he was just too much testosterone to stomach.
“You’re wasting my pilot’s time.” His gaze didn’t waver from his tablet.
“Pilot? What are you talking about?” Feeling heat in her cheeks, she dug through her bag for her phone.
For the first time in two years since she and Drew had started Travelogue, she had resolutely refused to check her work email. Now she just felt stupid because she had obviously missed some important communication.
“Not completely together still? Had to abandon the mother ship early today?”
“I need coffee before I can deal with you,” she muttered. “I turned off my email client all weekend.”
She had hardly finished speaking when his chauffeur appeared by her side with a coffee cup. Nathan’s gaze lingered on her as she took a few much-needed sips.
His perception surprised her, but she wasn’t going to confide about Jackie to him. Or anything for that matter. For all his generous offer, she didn’t trust his intentions.
“I thought you slaved night and day, weekends and whatnot to build Travelogue. Didn’t have a life outside of the company and the estate. Apparently you’re a paragon of hard work and dedication and every other virtue. Except for the ‘small incident’ with Mr. Anderson.”
Feeling like a lamb being led to slaughter under his watchful, almost indulgent gaze, she gulped too much on her next sip and squealed. He was instantly at her side, concern softening his mouth.
She jerked away as his palm landed on her back, scalded by his touch more than the coffee. Feeling like an irresponsible idiot, she cleared her throat. “Just...tell me what’s on the agenda today.”
Wicked lights glinted in his gaze. “British Virgin Islands.”
Her leg dangled midway over the footpath as if she were a puppet being pulled by strings. “Like going there? Us?”
“Yes.”
Alarm bells clanged in her head. “Why?”
He moved closer. She caught the instant need to step back. “A project of mine has come to the execution stages. It’ll suit very well to see what your precious team and you are made of. Sort of a test before I flush you guys.”
“A trip to Virgin Islands just to test us seems like the kind of extravagance that adds a lot of overhead to small, itty-bitty companies. I would rather—”
“Didn’t I tell you? Your finances, your projects—everything’s on probation.” Arrogance dripped from his every word, every gesture. “A skeleton crew will keep the website and sales going.”
She swallowed the protest that rose to her lips. She’d have to just show him what she and her team were made of. Navigating to the calendar on her phone, she synced it and opened his shared calendar. Tilting her head up, she leveled a direct look at him. “Robert is back tonight. Should I go ahead and block your time, then?”
A mocking smile lingered on his lips as he studied her. Her breath felt tight in her chest as she willed herself to stay still under the devouring gaze. “We won’t return for a few days.”
“I don’t see the need for—”
“I’m beginning to see why your investors were so eager to jump ship. You don’t want to make money, and you don’t listen to advice or input of any kind. It’s almost as though you live and work in isolation.”
“That’s not true. I...”
Folding his hands, he raised an eyebrow.
Something about the look in his face grated on her. But she didn’t want to give him a single reason to back out of their deal. “Fine. I’m ready to go.”
Faced with her increasingly unignorable reaction to him, she found it tempting to just accept defeat, sign away the dratted estate and walk away. Except she had heard the stunned silence when Jackie told Robert that Nathan was here. She had heard his hopes, his pain in the one request he had made of her.
“Whatever he wants, please say yes, Riya. I want to see my son.”
It was the first time Robert had ever asked anything of her.
Guiding her along with him, Nathan crossed the small, dingy street that housed their office to the opposite side. Every inch of her tautened as the muscled length of his thigh grazed hers.
“Which island are we visiting?” she said pushing her misgivings down. Robert and her company, she must keep her reasons at the center of her mind.
“Mine.”
She slid into the limo and crossed her legs as he occupied the opposite seat. “You own one of the Virgin Islands?”
“Yes.”
“But you don’t even own a home.”
Amusement deepened his gaze. “Been reading up on me?”