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The Man to Be Reckoned With
Tara Pammi


She wanted peace…Riya has always lived in the shadow of elusive billionaire Nathaniel Ramirez, her adoptive father’s son. Determined to reconcile and put the past behind them, she lures Nate home with the one thing he’s always wanted: his family estate.But she’s started a war!Even though he’s furious that Riya has brought him back to face his past, Nate can’t refuse her bait. The only glimmer of hope is the attraction he sees burning in her eyes. He’ll use every sensual weapon in his considerable arsenal to claim his heritage and get her in his bed!Praise for Tara PammiThe Man to be Reckoned With 4.5* RT Book ReviewPammi’s romance is a bittersweet tale, set on a grand English manor. Her enigmatic, loner hero bent on revenge and innocent, intelligent heroine wanting forgiveness play their roles perfectly. But it’s the intensely heart-wrenching conclusion that’s the perfect icing on this drama cake.The True King of Dahaar 4.5* RT Book ReviewExotic locales and ostentatious riches enhance this disturbing, poignant second-chance desert romance. The willful, broken Arabian prince and offbeat Middle-Eastern heroine doctor both harbor destructive secrets and thwarted passion in this painfully sincere twist-of-fate tale.A Deal with Demakis 4.5* RT Book ReviewPammi’s romance is a losing (but entertaining!) battle of wills, set on a jewel in the Greek Isles. It stars a know-it-all, emotionally damaged Greek tycoon and a down-but-not-out heroine, whose interludes are meteoric.







“That’s what this is all about? What I offered wasn’t enough?” Nathan said, coming closer. Satisfaction practically coated every word. “Name your price.”

“I don’t want money. I was trying to explain how much that estate means to me … I was—”

“Then what do you want?”

It took every ounce of her will to stand still, bearing the judgment in that gaze. The pain in his words cut through her. “I want you to see your father.”

The silence that dawned was so tense that Riya felt the tension wind around them like a tangible rope. The knot in his brow cleared, the icy blue of his eyes widened. It was the last thing he had expected to hear. That she had surprised him left her only shaking in her leather pumps.

“No.”

Fisting her hands behind her, Riya pushed the words that refused to come under his scornful gaze. “Then I won’t sign it over. Ever.”

She could practically hear him size her up, saw him reassess his assumptions about her in the way disbelief and then pity filled his gaze. He looked at her as though he was seeing her anew.

“Don’t push me into doing something I don’t want to. That estate—it’s the one thing in the entire world that means something to me.”

His words were laden with emotion and so much more. And she understood that attachment—because she loved the estate too. But she couldn’t weaken now … now that he was here in San Francisco, so close to Robert.

“I’ve already made my decision.”


TARA PAMMI can’t remember a moment when she wasn’t lost in a book—especially a romance, which was much more exciting than a mathematics textbook. Years later Tara’s wild imagination and love for the written word revealed what she really wanted to do. Now she pairs alpha males who think they know everything with strong women who knock that theory and them off their feet!


The Man to Be Reckoned With

Tara Pammi






www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)


From mathematics class to master’s degrees, through crushes on boys to crushing debts, through fights with our moms to marriages and babies—you’ve always been constant and unflinching in your support and love. This one’s for you, Sushma.


Contents

Cover (#u52e441b7-c464-5093-b701-e60811b732f4)

Introduction (#u02d043dd-5e19-5a99-87e6-6fdc4cec3690)

About the Author (#u0530a9b5-4177-5f48-b31f-d145d29fdd1b)

Title Page (#u736ef3e4-104b-5a13-964a-5681dd19fbdf)

Dedication (#u15e429d0-0605-5451-9a20-4333305ede6e)

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

EPILOGUE

Extract (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)


PROLOGUE (#u6b9ecfc9-1ff4-5611-904a-414345ea5406)

“HE MIGHT DIE any minute of any day or he might live to be a hundred. There’s nothing to be done for it.”

Nathaniel Ramirez looked up at the snowy, whitecapped mountain peak and gulped in a big breath. The words he had overheard the cardiologist say to his mother all those years ago reverberated inside his skull. The cold air blasted through his throat, his lungs expanding greedily.

Would this be the day?

He raised his face to the sky as his vision cleared and his heart resumed its normal beat.

At some point during the trek, he had realized he couldn’t finish the climb today.

He didn’t know whether it was because, after almost twelve years of courting death, he was finally bored of playing hide-and-seek with it, or because he was just plain tired today.

For a decade, he had been on a constant go across the world, without planting roots anywhere, without returning home, making real estate deals in corners of the world, making millions.

An image of the roses in the garden his mother had loved, back in California, their color vividly red, the petals so soft that she had banned him from touching them, flashed across his mind’s eye.

A stab of homesickness pierced him as he followed the icy path down. Sweat drenched him as he reached the wooden cabin he had been living in since he closed the Demakis deal in Greece six months ago. Restlessness slithered under his skin.

And he knew what it meant. It meant he was thrashing against the cage he had made for himself; it meant he was getting lonely; thousands of years of human nature were urging him toward making a home, to seek companionship.

He needed to chase a new challenge, whether clinching a real estate deal or conquering a new corner of the world he hadn’t stamped with his name yet. Fortunately for him, the world was vast and the challenges it presented numerous.

Because staying still in one place was the one thing that made him weak, that made him long for more than he could have.

* * *

He’d just stepped out of a hot shower when his satellite phone beeped. Only a handful of people could reach him via this number. He pushed a hand through his overlong hair and checked the caller ID.

The name flashing on the screen brought an instant smile to his face.

He connected the call, and the sound of their old housekeeper Maria’s voice coming down the line filled him with a warmth he had missed for too long. Maria had been his rock after his mom passed.

Suddenly he realized he missed a lot of things from home. He clamped down on the useless yearning before it morphed into the one thing he despised.

Fear.

“Nathan?”

“Maria, how are you?”

He smiled as Maria called him a few names in Spanish and then asked after him as if he were still a little boy.

“You need to come home, Nathan. Your father... It’s been too long since you’ve seen each other.”

The last time Nate saw him, his father had been the epitome of a selfish bastard instead of a grieving husband or a comforting father. And despite the decade and the thousands of miles that Nathan had put between them, the bitterness, the anger he felt for him was just as fresh as ever.

Maybe there was no running away from a few things in life.

“Is he ill again, Maria?”

“No. He recovered from the pneumonia. They, at least that woman’s daughter, she took good care of him.”

Praise from Maria, especially for that woman’s daughter, as she put it, meant Jackie’s daughter had slaved to take care of his dad.

Nathan frowned, the memory of the one time he had seen his father’s mistress’s daughter leaving a sour taste in his mouth. She had been kind even then.

That day in the garage, with the August sun shining gloriously outside with blatant disregard to the fact that Nathan’s entire world had crumbled around him. There had been blooms everywhere, the gardeners keeping it up for his mother even though she had stopped venturing into the garden for months.

The grief that his mother was gone, the chilling fear, the cold fist in his chest that he could drop dead any minute like her, and the little girl who had stood nervously by the garage door, a silent witness to the choking sobs that had racked him.

He hated everything about that day.

“I’m so sorry that your mother died. I can share my mother with you if you want,” she had said in a small voice.

And in return, he had ripped through her.

“He’s getting married, Nathan.” Maria’s anxiety cut through his thoughts. “That woman,” she said again, refusing to even speak Jacqueline Spear’s name, the loathing in her voice crystal clear even through the phone line, “she’ll finally have what she wanted, after all these years. Eleven years of living shamelessly with him under his roof...”

Nathan grimaced as Maria spouted a few choice words for Jacqueline Spear. Bitterness filled his veins at the thought of his father’s mistress, the woman he had taken up with even before Nathan’s mother had passed.

“It’s his damn life, Maria. He has every right to spend it as he pleases.”

“He does, Nathan. But your mama’s house, Nathan...she’s preparing to sell it. Just two days ago, she asked me to clean out your mother’s room, told me to take anything I wanted. Your mama’s belongings, Nathan—all her jewelry’s in there. She’s putting the entire estate on sale—the grounds, the furniture, the mansion, everything.”

Every piece that had been painstakingly put together by his mother with love. And now in the hands of a woman who had been everything his mother hadn’t been.

“If you don’t come back, it will forever be gone.”

Nathan scrunched his eyes closed, and the image of a brick mansion rose in front of him. A strange anger gripped him. He didn’t want that house to go to someone else, he realized.

He had lived the life of a loner for a decade, and the image of the house he had run away from hit him hard in his gut. “She doesn’t have the right to sell it.”

The silence on Maria’s end stretched his nerves taut. “He gave it to her, Nathan. As a gift.”

Nausea rolled around in his mouth. His father had killed his mother, as clearly as if he had choked the life out of her, with his disgusting affair, and after he’d lived in her house with his mistress and now... His knuckles turned white around the phone.

This he wouldn’t, couldn’t, tolerate.

No matter that he didn’t want to live in the house any more than he wanted to put roots down and settle anywhere in the world.

“He’s giving away my mom’s house as a wedding gift?”

“Not to Jackie, Nathan. To her daughter, from her first marriage. I don’t know if you ever saw her. Your father deeded the house to her a few months ago. After he was dreadfully ill that first time.”

Nathan frowned. So Jackie’s daughter was selling his mother’s house. Getting rid of it for the monetary value it would yield, he supposed.

The restlessness that had simmered inside him a few hours ago dissipated, washed away by furious determination.

It was time to go home. He didn’t know how long he would stay or if he could bear to even stay there at all after so many years.

Neither could he let the house, his mother’s house, fall into some stranger’s grubby hands. He just couldn’t.

He bid goodbye to Maria and switched on his laptop.

In a few minutes, he was chatting with his virtual manager, Jacob. He gave orders for a local manager to look after his cabin, for his airline tickets to be booked to San Francisco and last but not the least, for any information the man could dig up on his father’s mistress’s daughter.


CHAPTER ONE (#u6b9ecfc9-1ff4-5611-904a-414345ea5406)

“I HEARD THE investors sold the company to some reclusive billionaire.”

“Someone in HR said he’s only bought it for the patented software. That he intends to fire the whole lot of us.”

“I didn’t realize we had value to attract someone of that ilk.”

What ilk? What billionaire?

Riya Mathur rubbed her temples with her fingers, slapping her palms over her ears in a gesture that in no way could silence the useless speculation around her.

What had changed in the week she had been gone for the first time in two years since Drew and she had started the company? What wasn’t he telling her?

Her chat window from their internal IM program pinged, and Riya looked down at her screen.

A message from Drew: Come to my cabin, Riya.

Riya felt a knot in her stomach.

Things had steadily been going from bad to worse between her and Drew for six months now. Since New Year’s Eve to be exact. And she hadn’t known how to make it better except to put her head down and do her job.

Stepping out of the small cubicle she occupied, only separated from the open cabins in the huge hall by one movable shelf, she marched past an anxious, almost hyper group of staff amassed in the break room toward the CEO’s cabin. She had spent the better part of the morning waiting on tenterhooks, walking around the different teams and trying to persuade them to get back to work while Drew’s door remained resolutely closed.

But his continuing silence, even after an email from her, peppered with little tidbits of gossip, was making her head spin. Running her damp palms over her baggy trousers, she came to a halt at the closed door.

She tapped a couple of times cursorily, and every whisper gathered momentum in pitch and volume. Without waiting for an answer, she turned the handle and the pandemonium behind her descended into a deathly silence.

Stepping inside, she closed the door.

Drew’s lean frame was molded by the sunlight streaming through the windows, the San Francisco skyline behind him.

He opened his mouth to speak but stopped abruptly. Her heart in her throat, Riya took a step in his direction. He stiffened a little more and tilted his head.

That same awkwardness that had permeated their every conversation filled the air thickly now.

But this was work. Their company truly had been a product of them both. “The whole office is buzzing with rumors...” She came to a stop a couple of steps from him. “Whatever our personal differences, this is our company, Drew. We’re in it together—”

“It was your company until you took the first seed capital from an investor,” a new voice, every syllable punctured with a sardonic amusement, said behind her.

Riya turned around so fast she didn’t see him for a few seconds. Blinking, she brought her focus back to the huge table and the man sitting at the head of it. The chair faced away from the window. With his long legs sprawled in front of him, only his profile was visible to Riya.

The entire room was bathed in midmorning sunlight and yet the man sat in the one area of the room that the light didn’t touch. Ungluing her feet from the spot next to Drew, Riya walked across the room so that she could see better.

She felt the newcomer’s gaze on her, studying everything about her. Her usually articulate mind slowed down to a sluggish pace. The feeling that he had been waiting to see her tugged at her, a strange little premonition dancing in her gut.

“I’ve been dying to meet you, Ms. Mathur,” he said, turning the vague feeling into solid dread. “The smart mind that built the software engine that drives the company,” he added silkily. He had left something else unsaid. She knew it, just as surely as she could feel her heart skidding in her chest.

He had even pronounced her last name perfectly, elongating the a after the M just right. After knowing her since her freshman year at college, Drew still didn’t say it right. It was a small thing, and yet she felt as though this stranger knew her entire history.

Taking the last step past the overfilled bookshelf, Riya came to a halt. Her stomach did a funny dive, her sharp exhale amplified to her own ears.

Her first thought was that he belonged in a motorcycle club and not in a boardroom.

Electric eyes, a brilliant shade of ice blue, set deep in a starkly angled face, collided with hers. That gaze was familiar and strange, amused and serious. A spark of recognition lit up inside her, yet Riya had no idea where she had seen him.

Dark blond hair, so unruly and long that her fingers itched to smooth it back, fell onto his forehead. Copper highlights shimmered in his hair. The sunlight streaming in played hide-and-seek with the hollows of his cheekbones, the planes darker than the hollows. Which meant he spent a lot of time outdoors.

His skin, what she could see of it, was sunburned and looked rough. An untrimmed beard covered his jaw and chin, copper glinting in it too.

That beard, those haphazard clothes, his overall appearance—they should have diluted the intensity of his presence in the small room. It should have made him look less authoritative. Except those eyes negated everything.

They had a bright, alert look to them, a sardonic humor lurking beneath the sharp stare he directed at her.

He wore a dark leather jacket that had obviously seen better days, under which the collar of a faded shirt peeked through.

A cough from behind her brought her up short and Riya felt her cheeks heat up.

Amusement deepened in those eyes.

“Who are you?” The awkwardly phrased question zoomed out of her mouth before she realized. Suddenly it was tantamount that she remember him.

Because she did, Riya realized with a certainty.

He leaned back into his chair, not in the least affected by her tone. There was a sense of contained movement about him even though he remained seated. As though he was forcing his body to do it, as though staying still was an unnatural state for him.

“Nathaniel Ramirez.”

Riya’s mouth fell open as an article she had read just a few months ago in a travel magazine flashed through her mind’s eye.

Luxury Travel Mogul. Virtual Entrepreneur. Billionaire Loner.

Nathaniel Ramirez had been called a visionary in developing hotels that were an extension of the environment, a man who had made millions with zero investment. The string of temporary hotels, which he’d envisioned and built with various landowners in different parts of the world, were all the rage for celebrities who wanted a private vacation, away from prying eyes.

He had tapped into a market that not only had met an existing demand but had opened a whole new industry to the local men in so many remote corners of the world.

And more than any of that, he was an enigma who’d traveled the world over since he was seventeen, didn’t stay in one place past a few months, didn’t own a home anywhere in the world and worst of all, had no family ties or relationships.

Even the magazine hadn’t been able to get a picture of him. It had been a virtual interview.

The quintessential loner, the magazine had called him, the perfect personality for a man who traveled the world over and over. The fact that he made money doing it was just a perk, someone had heard him remark.

He’d only said his name, and nothing more about what he was doing here, in San Francisco, in Travelogue, in their start-up company’s headquarters.

Why? Why would he give his name instead of stating why he was here?

She threw a quick look behind her and noticed Drew still stood unmoving at the bay windows, his mouth tight, his gaze swinging between her and Mr. Ramirez.

“You make a living out of traveling the world. What can a small online travel sales company do for you?” She shot Drew a look of pure desperation. “And why are you sitting in Drew’s chair?”

The intensity of his gaze, while nothing new to Riya, still had a disconcerting element to it. Men stared at her. All the time.

She had never learned how to handle the attention or divert it, much less enjoy it, as Jackie did. Only painstakingly cultivated an indifference to those heated, lingering looks. But something about him made it harder.

Finally he uncoiled from his lounging position. And a strange little wave of apprehension skittered through her.

“I bought controlling interest in Travelogue last night, Ms. Mathur.”

She blinked, his soft declaration ringing in her ears. “I bought a gallon of milk and bread last night.”

The sarcastic words fell easily from her mouth while inside, she struggled not to give in to the fear gripping her.

* * *

“It wasn’t that simple,” Nathan said, getting up from the uncomfortable chair. The whole cabin was both inconvenient and way too small for him. Every way he turned, there was a desk or chair or a pile of books ready to bang into him. He felt boxed in.

Walking around the table, he stopped at arm’s length from her, the fear hidden under her sarcastic barb obvious. Gratification filled him even as he gave the rampant curiosity inside him free rein.

Like mother, like daughter.

He pushed the insidiously nasty thought away. True, Riya Mathur was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and as a man who had traveled to all the corners of the world, he’d seen more than his share.

She was also, apparently, extremely smart and as possessed of the talent for messing with men’s minds as her mother, if everything he had heard and Drew Anderson’s blatantly obvious craze for her was anything to go by.

But where Jacqueline met the world with a devil-may-care attitude, flaunting her beauty with an irreverent smile, her daughter’s beauty was diluted with intelligence and a carefully constructed air of indifference.

Which, he realized with a self-deprecating smile, made every male of the species assume himself equal to the task of unraveling all that beauty and fire.

Exquisite almond-shaped, golden brown eyes, defiant, scared and hidden behind spectacles, a high forehead, a straight, distinctive nose that hinted at stubbornness and a bow-shaped mouth. All this on the backdrop of a golden caramel-colored silky smooth complexion, as though Jackie’s alabaster and her Indian father’s brown had been mixed in perfect proportions.

She had dressed to underplay everything about herself, and this only spurred him on to observe more. It was like a cloud hovering over a mountaintop, trying to hide the magnificence of the peak beneath it.

A wary and puzzled look lingered in her eyes since she had stepped inside. Which meant it was only a matter of time before she remembered him.

Because he had changed his last name, and he looked eons different from the sobbing seventeen-year-old she had seen eleven years ago.

He should just tell her and get it over with, he knew. And yet he kept quiet, his curiosity about her drumming out every other instinct.

“I had to call in a lot of favors to find your investors. Once they were informed of my intent, they were more than happy to accommodate me. Apparently they’re not happy with the ways things are being run.”

“You mean disappointed about the bucket loads of money they want us to make?” A flash of regret crossed her face as soon as she said it.

She was nervous, which was what he’d intended.

“And that’s wrong how, Ms. Mathur? Why do you think investors fund start-ups? Out of the goodness of their hearts?”

“I don’t think so. But there’s growth and there’s risk.” She took a deep breath as though striving to get herself under control. “And if it’s profits that you’re after, then why buy us at all?”

“Let’s just say it caught my fancy.”

Frustration radiated out of her. “Our livelihood, everything we’ve worked toward the past four years is hanging in the balance. And all you’re talking about is late night shopping, things catching your fancy. Maybe living your life on the periphery of civilization all these years, cut off from your fellow man, traipsing through the world with no ties—”

“Riya, no....” She heard Drew’s soft warning behind her. But she was far too scared to pay heed.

“—has made you see only profit margins, but for us, the human element is just as important as the bottom line.”

“You make me sound like a lone wolf, Ms. Mathur.”

“Well, you are one, aren’t you?” She closed her eyes and fought for control. “Look, all I care about is what you intend to do with the company. With us.”

Something inched into his features, hardening the look in his eyes. “Leave us alone, Mr. Anderson.”

“No,” Riya said aloud as Mr. Ramirez walked around the table and toward her. Panic made her words rushed. “There’s nothing you have to say to me that Drew can’t hear.”

Stopping next to her, Drew met her gaze finally. The resignation in his eyes knocked the breath out of her as nothing else could. “Drew, whatever you’re thinking, we can fight this. We own the patent to the software engine—”

“Does nothing else matter to you except the blasted company? Statues possess more feelings than you do.”

Bitterness spewed from every word, and the hurt festering beneath them lanced through her. She paled under his attack, struggled to put into words why.

“I’m done, Riya,” Drew said, with a hint of regret.

“But, Drew, I...”

His hands on her shoulders, Drew bent and kissed her cheek, all the while the deep-set ice-blue gaze of the arrogant man who was kicking Drew out stayed on her without blinking.

Something flitted in that gaze. An insinuation? A challenge? There one minute, chased away by a cool mockery the next.

But Riya didn’t look away. Locking her hands by her side, she stood frozen to the spot.

Stepping back from her, Drew turned. “I’ll set up something with your assistant, Nathan.”

Without breaking her gaze, the hateful man nodded.

“Goodbye, Riya.”

The words felt so final that Riya shivered.

Leaving her flailing in the middle of the room, Drew closed the door behind him. It felt as if she were locked in a cage with a wild animal even as her mind was sifting and delving deeper.

Nathan...Nathan...Nathaniel Ramirez. Owns a group of travel and vacation companies called RunAway International, has traveled the world since he was seventeen...

A strange shiver began at the base of her spine, inched everywhere. She pushed her fingers through her hair, a nervous gesture she had never gotten over. “What did Drew mean?”

“Mr. Anderson decided he wanted to move on. From...” His gaze swept over her, a puzzle in it. “...Travelogue,” he finished, leaving something unsaid.

Riya felt as if he had slapped her. He had said so much without saying anything, and she couldn’t even defend herself against what she didn’t understand. She had never felt more out of her depth. “Who the hell do you think you are? And you can’t just kick him out. Drew and I own—”

“He sold his share of the stock. To me. I now own seventy-five percent of your company. I’m your new partner, Riya. Or boss, or really...there are so many things we could call each other.”


CHAPTER TWO (#u6b9ecfc9-1ff4-5611-904a-414345ea5406)

AND JUST LIKE THAT, her name on his lips, spoken like a soft invocation, unlocked the memory her mind had been trying to grasp from the moment she looked into that ice-blue gaze.

“She’s dead. And she died knowing that your trashy mother is just waiting at the gates, ready to come in and take her place. I hope you both rot in hell.”

The memory of that long-ago day flashed through her so vividly that Riya had to grab the chair to steady her shaking legs.

Robert’s wife had been Anna. Anna Ramirez.

Little shivers spewed all over and she hugged herself. She had brought this on herself. “You’re Nathan Keys. You’re Robert’s son. I read about you and I never realized...”

He nodded and Riya felt her breath leave her in a big rush.

Her little lie had worked and here he was, with the largest of her company’s stock, her livelihood in his hand.

Robert’s son, the boy who had run away from home after his mother’s death, the son of the married man with whom her mother had taken up, the son of the man who had been more a father to her than her own had ever been.

The son she had been trying to bring back to Robert.

She had lied to Maria about selling the estate, hoping it would lure him back home. Thought she would give Nathan a chance she had never had with her own father.

A hysterical laugh rose through her.

Leaning against the far wall, his legs crossed together in casual elegance, he smiled, his tanned skin glinting in contrast against the white of his teeth. “What? No ‘welcome home’ greeting for your almost stepbrother, Riya?”

There were so many things wrong about his fake greeting, the worst of which was how aware she was of him in the small room. Mortification drenching her inside, Riya glared at him. “You’re kidding me, right?”

“My acceptance of your offer for familial solidarity is almost a decade late, but—”

Her chest fell and rose as she fought for a breath. “You...you waltz in here, get rid of my business partner, wave the biggest chunk of my company in my face—” she pushed her shaking fingers through her hair “—and you want welcome?”

He stayed silent and her stride ate up the distance between them. Fear was a stringent pulse in her head. “If this is revenge for my mother’s affair with your father, let me tell you—”

“I don’t give a damn about your mother or my father.”

The very lack of emotion in his words stilled Riya’s thoughts. He was going to be livid when he learned what she had intended. “Then what is this?”

“You refused every offer I had my lawyers put forward for the sale of the estate.”

Her gut twisting with fear, Riya flopped into a chair. Hiding her face in her hands, she fought through it. He had moved to acquire her company because she refused his escalating offers for the sale of the estate.

What would he do when he learned she had never intended to sell it in the first place? What had she brought on herself?

* * *

Nathan stared at the lustrous swath of dark brown hair that fell like a curtain over Riya. Even as impatience pulled at him, he stood transfixed, stunned anew by the sharpness of his reaction to her.

Every minute they spent in this confining room, his awareness of her grew like an avalanche that couldn’t be stopped.

How she wore no makeup and yet the very lack of it only heightened her beautiful skin and sharp features.

How everything about her beauty was underplayed like her professional but bland brown dress shirt and trousers.

And how utterly she failed at masking that beauty.

How exquisitely expressive her wide, almond-shaped eyes were and how she fluttered those long lashes down when she wanted to hide her expression.

Her slender shoulders trembled and he felt a pang of regret. “All I want is the estate. However high I went, you kept refusing my offers. Refused to even give a reason.”

She looked up, the flash of fear in her eyes still just as obvious. But now there was a resolve too. “So you made a play for my company?”

“Yes. It’s called leverage. Believe me, as innovative as your software engine is, your little company is not RunAway International material. Sign on the dotted line today and you’ll leave here a rich woman. I’ll even leave you to run your boring company. Of course, you’ll run it into the ground in two years the way you’re going, but being the uncaring bastard that I am, I’ll let you ruin your and your staff’s future.”

“What about all the money you spent on acquiring it?”

“A drop in the ocean. I’m sure the stock will be worthless in a couple of years anyway.”

Riya chafed at his grating confidence that she would only ruin the company. But she couldn’t focus on that now, and there was no good way to put it.

“I didn’t accept those offers because I never intended to sell the estate to anyone. I still don’t.”

“Then why did Maria assume that...”

Every inch of his face tightened as if it had been poured over by concrete and had permanently set with the fury in those chilling eyes. He was still leaning against the table, and yet he looked as if the seams of his control would burst any second.

But he didn’t move, didn’t lose control even by the flicker of a muscle. Only the sheer frost in his gaze was testament to the fury in his eyes. Finally he blinked and Riya felt the tightness in her chest relent infinitesimally.

The most unholy glint appeared in his eye, sending a ripple of apprehension through her.

“You manipulated Maria and me.” His words rang with awe and derision, his gaze studying her, as if he was reevaluating and coming to an unsavory conclusion. He moved toward her slowly. “You laid bread crumbs very cleverly to make sure I trailed after you.”

“Yes.”

The single word sounded like a boom in the wake of his silent chill.

“You took advantage of my attachment to that estate. You knew I would go as high as you wanted.”

Forcing a laugh, which sounded as artificial as it felt, she took a step back, her nerves stretching tighter and tighter.

“Actually I took advantage of your hatred for me and Jackie.” And because his silence confirmed it, she continued, battling the ugly truth. “I wasn’t even sure it would work. Maria just barely tolerates me. How would I know she would come tattling to you?”

Shaking his head, he covered another step. Though it was cowardly, Riya couldn’t stop herself from stepping back again. “Don’t minimize your accomplishment now. You knew exactly what you were doing.”

Heat flamed her cheeks. “Fine. Something she had said a few months ago stuck with me. About how you might have considered coming back long ago if only Jackie and I were gone. About how much you loved the estate, even the staff, and how dare Robert give it to me? About how I was stealing even this from you.”

“So you decided luring me here would make you the maximum amount of money on the estate.”

“That’s not true. I felt guilty. I never asked Robert for the estate. I know it’s not—”

“And your guilt, your insecurities give you the right to play games with me?”

The depth of his perception awed Riya. Despite constantly reminding herself that she had been too young to change anything, she had remembered his grief-stricken words again and again, felt guilt carve a permanent place inside her gut.

His gaze met hers, an icy resolve in it, and Riya forgot what she had been about to say. There was not an inch of that grief-stricken boy in him. Only a cold fire, an absolute detachment.

He reached her, and her heart slammed against her rib cage. She couldn’t blink, couldn’t look away from that piercing blue. And a slow tremor took root in her muscles. Like the time when she’d had the flu. Only in a less hurting and more disconcerting way. As if every fiber of her were a stringent pulse vibrating in tune to his every move.

His lean body neatly caging her against the alcove, his gaze was a fiery frost. “Why are you doing this?”

“You were gone for eleven years. Eleven years during which time I helped Robert with the administration of the estate, with the staff, with everything. You were off doing who knows what and I slogged over every account, every expense and income number, in the face of a staff that hated the very sight of me. I did everything I could to keep that place going.” She had tried to be a model daughter to Robert and Jackie, had taken care of him when he fell sick.

Nothing she had done had removed the shadows of guilt and ache in Robert’s eyes.

“That’s what this is all about? What I offered wasn’t enough?” Nathan said, coming closer. Satisfaction practically coated every word. “Name your price.”

“I don’t want money. I was trying to explain how much that estate means to me...I was—”

“Then what the hell do you want? How dare you manipulate me after your mother turned my mother’s last few days into the worst of her life?”

It took every ounce of her will to stand still, bearing the judgment in that gaze. The pain in his words cut through her. “I want you to see Robert.”

The silence that dawned was so tense that Riya felt the tension wind around them like a tangible rope. The knot in his brow cleared; the icy blue of his eyes widened. It was the last thing he had expected to hear. That she had surprised him left her only shaking in her leather pumps.

“No.”

Fisting her hands behind her, Riya pushed the words that refused to come under his scornful gaze. “Then I won’t sign it over. Ever.”

She could practically hear him size her up, reassess his assumptions about her in the way disbelief and then pity filled his gaze. He looked at her as though he was seeing her anew.

“Don’t lose what you’ve built trying to alleviate some weird guilt. Don’t push me into doing something I don’t want to. That estate, it’s the one thing in the entire world that means something to me.”

His words were laden with emotion and so much more. And she understood that attachment, because she loved the estate too. But she couldn’t weaken now, now that he was here in San Francisco, so close to Robert.

“I’ve already made my decision.”

He ran his fingers through his overlong hair, his gaze a winter frost. There was a tremble in the taut line of his shoulders, a hoarse thread in his tone when he spoke. “I’ll drag you through the courts. Your company, I’m going to tear it to pieces. Is it still worth it?”

Riya swayed, the impact of what he was saying sweeping through her with the force of a gale. To see her company pulled apart and sold for pieces... Every inch of her revolted at the mere thought. Desperation filled her words.

“I deceived you. My staff has nothing to do with this. Can you be so heartless to take away their jobs?”

Their gazes locked and held. And every second felt like an eternity to her.

Finally he spoke, his mouth a tight line. “Yes.”

The fight deflated out of Riya and she held herself together by sheer will. Her company was everything to her. But if Robert hadn’t been there for her when she needed an adult with a kind word, Riya couldn’t bear to imagine what her life would have been today.

“Fine. The estate, it’s rightfully yours, I believe that. And eventually it will be. But a legal battle will take years. Robert said he made sure the deed was ironclad, exactly to avoid this kind of battle if he died suddenly.”

“Because he’s determined to rob even this from me?”

“No. You’re misunderstanding him. He thought he was going to die. He... A long, drawn-out court battle is what you want for your mother’s house? For Maria and the staff who have looked after the house all these years, for your mother’s memory?”

His jaw flexed tight, the vein in his temple flickering threateningly. “You have no right to speak of her.”

The utter loathing in his words slashed through her. Because he was right. His fury was justified.

She had no right to even speak of his mother, no right to her estate. To this day, she was equal parts amazed and perplexed that Robert had even deeded it to her.

For the first time in her life, she truly wished she was more like her mother—carefree, blissfully ignorant of everything around her but her own happiness. Wished she could turn her back on this man who threatened everything she had built, wished she could turn her back on the shadows that haunted Robert’s eyes.

“I’ve no right to speak of her, true, but I’m sure she would never have wanted you to hate him all your life. Everyone’s always talking about what a generous and kind lady she was and—”

He flinched as though she had laid a hand on him. “You have no idea what she’d have wanted.” He stood at the window, just as Drew had done, his wide frame blocking the sunlight from coming in. Contrary to the cold, heartless man she had called him, he looked like a volcano of simmering emotions.

“Get out. I have nothing more to say to you.”

Riya closed the door behind her, her legs shaking. Panic pounded through her.

Would he break Travelogue into pieces? How could she fight to keep what was hers? How was she to convince him that it was only Robert’s haunting pain that had driven her to this?

Her head reeling, she stepped into the huge, open area laid out with open cabins.

The staff had already figured out that Drew was gone. The faint scraping and shuffling of chairs, the concerned glances in her direction—they were looking to her to provide some direction.

But Riya had no way to save the day, no answer to give to those hopeful looks. She grabbed her handbag and left, unable to think of anything else but temporary escape.

* * *

Nathan stared at the closed door, still trying to control his raging emotions. One flimsy, fragile woman had so nearly eroded his self-control.

It had taken him a few years to get over the grief of his mother’s death, to accept the fatality of his own condition. He’d been so scared, alone and he’d lashed out at the world.

But in the end, he had not only accepted it but also tailored his life to live it without being haunted by the fear of dying every minute. Had made sure he’d not formed an attachment to anyone, made sure that no relationship could leave him weak. Like the way it had left his mother in the end.

Had gloried in each day he had, lived it to the fullest.

Today, he hadn’t been able to help himself from taunting the manipulative minx, from pushing her. But for all the steely will with which she had manipulated him, there was a naiveté to her that cooled his interest. In a million years, he wouldn’t have expected his father to command such loyalty in anyone. So much that she was risking everything she owned.

But nothing he did or could do would shake that resolve. Despite the very clever way she had manipulated Maria and taken advantage of his attachment to the estate, he had to admire that resolve. And she was right about one more thing.

Engaging his father in a legal battle would gain him nothing but a deadlock for years to come. He would win in the end, but when, he didn’t know.

Time was the one thing that Nate didn’t have the luxury or certainty of.

He wanted that estate, and convincing Riya to sell it back to him as soon as possible would be the biggest win of his life. He couldn’t dismantle her company for no good reason, couldn’t just play with the livelihood of so many people.

But he had learned enough about the smart, steel-willed beauty. Just the thought of those beautiful eyes widening with awareness and shock, the way she held herself rigid when he had neared her, brought a smile to his face.

He was going to enjoy convincing her to sell the estate to him.


CHAPTER THREE (#u6b9ecfc9-1ff4-5611-904a-414345ea5406)

BY THE TIME Riya drove past the electronically manned gates and along the gravel driveway lined with the tall century-old oaks, she was still wondering what she would say to Jackie or how she would bring up the subject of Nathan. Jackie had the most singular way of looking at the world and the people in it. Only interested in how they affected her own life and happiness.

Riya pulled the window down and took a deep breath. The smell of pine needles and the fragrance of the roses greeted her.

The sight of the mansion emerging just as the driveway straightened always revived her, filled her with an indescribable joy. For her, the brick mansion meant home.

Driving around the courtyard, she pulled into the garage, parked and leaned her forehead on the steering wheel. Disappointment and a perverse anger filled her. Nathan didn’t love the estate as she did, had been gone for a decade without a thought for it.

Would probably kick them all out, her especially, without a second thought. And to leave this place, to say goodbye finally? The very thought made her chest hurt.

Grabbing her laptop bag and her handbag, she stepped out of her car. All she wanted was to have a bath and sink into her bed and deal with everything tomorrow. She entered the vast, homely kitchen through the back door intending to go up quietly when Jackie called her.

Dressed in a cream silk pantsuit, she looked perfectly put together, as always. Except for the frown marring her brow.

“Riya! I’ve been calling you for hours and you didn’t answer a single time.” Her painted mouth trembled. “He’s here, just...appeared out of thin air, after all these years.”

Riya froze, her gaze flying around the house, her heart ratcheting in her chest. Fighting the rising panic, because of course it had always fallen to her to be the calm one, she straightened her spine. “Mom,” she said loudly. “Calm down.”

She called her that so infrequently now that Jackie looked at her with alarm.

“Now tell me clearly what happened.”

“Nathaniel is here,” her mother said, awe coating her words. “Apparently he’s some big-shot billionaire who can ruin us with one word or—”

“He said that to you?”

“Of course not. He won’t even meet my eyes. It’s as if I’m not there, standing right in front of him. That witch Maria said it. He looks so different too, all lean and so coldly distant and arrogant.”

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 (#ulink_ec6ce20a-8ad1-5253-9727-d5aaf2cf2662)

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?”

She shrugged, as if she hadn’t devoured the internet looking for every scrap of information on him over the weekend. “There wasn’t really much.”

“What were you hoping to find?”

“Not the list of your assets,” she said, remembering the article he had been featured in in Forbes about the youngest billionaires under thirty. It galled her to admit it, but the man was a genius investor and apparently also one of the leading philanthropists of their generation.

He donated millions to charity and causes the world over, but there hadn’t been a byte about his personal life. What was she to make of him?

“I was looking for something of a personal nature.”

He leveled a shocked look at her. “Why?”

“Jackie told Robert you were back and he asked me a thousand questions about you. I had nothing to tell him apart from the fact that you’re a gazillionaire and an arrogant, heartless SO...”

He narrowed his eyes and Riya sighed. Antagonizing him was going to get her precisely nowhere.




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