Zara. Damon frowned at the image that instantly surfaced. Dark hair, direct blue eyes, finely molded cheekbones made more intriguing by a scattering of freckles. A faintly tip-tilted nose and a firm jaw, all softened by a quirky, generous mouth, which added a fascinating, mercurial depth to a face that was somehow infinitely more riveting than conventional prettiness.
The wind gusted more strongly, the chill registering, as an old wound in his shoulder and another at his hip—both courtesy of his time in the military—stiffened and began to ache. Grimly, Damon dismissed the memories of Zara, annoyed that they still had the power to stop him in his tracks, despite his attempts to put the brief fling in its proper perspective.
After all, their involvement had lasted barely a month. On a scale of one to ten, given that he had once been married for seven years, it shouldn’t have registered. Especially since Zara herself, with her usual trademark efficiency, had made it crystal clear she had only ever been interested in a short, very private affair.
“We’re in love,” Ben helpfully supplied now.
The words in love made Damon’s jaw tighten. They echoed through a childhood he preferred to forget, one Ben had no knowledge of because he had been lucky enough to be born after the untimely death of their father. Ben had never been around to experience Guy Smith’s infidelities or his corrosive temper, the long nights when Damon and his mother had borne the brunt of that temper, and the scars.
“In love.” He tried to keep the distaste out of his voice, and failed.
The words dredged up memories of the beautiful women who had hung at the edges of his father’s life, expensive women who had demanded diamonds, exotic holidays and credit cards with dizzying limits that had eaten away at the family fortune. Guy Smith had claimed to be “in love” a number of times despite his marriage. When the money had finally run out, his latest mistress had left him. He had ended up in a bar, drunk enough to make the mistake of picking a fight with someone who could hit back. He had been found unconscious on the street the next morning, and had died of a fractured skull on the way to hospital.
When Adeline Smith had gotten the news of her husband’s death, she had broken down and cried, but the tears had been ones of relief. Damon, at ten years old, nursing two cracked ribs and a broken jaw courtesy of his attempt to protect his mother from Guy’s red-faced fury when he’d discovered they were broke, hadn’t shed so much as a tear. Life had been gray and drained of hope. In the instant he heard his father had died, it had felt like stepping out of the shadows into blazing light. Six months later, Ben had been born.
Now, as Ben’s only close family, Damon had to tread carefully. His brother hadn’t endured the experiences that had shaped Damon. Ben didn’t understand how destructive out-of-control emotions could be, and he carelessly fell in and out of love on a regular basis. In a way, Ben’s cavalier approach to relationships was an uncomfortable reminder of their father. Although, thankfully, Ben had none of their father’s meanness.
Flexing his stiffening shoulder, Damon paced the hard-packed sand of the curving bay, which was punctuated by dark drifts of rock at each end. He forced himself to concentrate on his brother’s latest crisis, which this time impacted Damon directly.
For the past eighteen months he had been training Ben to help run their family’s sprawling security empire. The one his mother, with the help of her brother, Tyler McCall—Damon’s uncle—had pulled from the financial fires of near bankruptcy. Unfortunately, like their father, Ben had proven to be spectacularly disinterested in Magnum Security. It was a fact that Damon would have gotten a great deal more done if Ben had not been in the office. His assistant, Emily, however, had been smart, intuitive and almost as efficient as Zara.
With effort, he shook off a further raft of memories and refocused on the problem at hand: saving Ben from himself and retrieving Damon’s assistant. Emily was significantly involved in a crucial deal he was working on. At this juncture, it would be nearly impossible to replace her.
“Walk me through this. I didn’t think you even liked Emily.”
“How would you know? You’ve had your head buried in the McCall takeover for weeks.”
Damon could feel his blood pressure rising. “So has Emily. If you will recall she’s my PA.”
Although, to put a fine point on it, he had never appointed her to the position. Emily was a temp, the third temp he had employed over the past year while continuing to interview numerous candidates, both male and female, some with impressive degrees. Unfortunately, not one of them had possessed the exacting qualities required for the position. Qualities that had been oddly defined in Zara and which he had not realized he needed until she left him.
“Uh, not any longer. Check your email and you’ll find Emily’s resignation.”
A boarding call echoed through the phone, informing Damon that Ben and Emily were already at the airport.
Damon kept a lid on his frustration. He could live with the inconvenience of losing Emily. What really worried him was what was happening to Ben. The partying and dating aside, he was becoming immersed in the darker, undisciplined passions that had overtaken their father. Passions that had even extended to Tyler McCall, who had become the CEO of Magnum Security and the boys’ guardian following Adeline’s death from cancer when Damon was fourteen and Ben just four. As stable as Tyler, an ex-SEAL and intelligence expert had seemed, in his late forties he had fallen for a spectacularly beautiful model, then died along with her in a car accident on the romantic Mediterranean island of Medinos.
Damon’s chest tightened at the memory of the loss that, four years ago, had hit him hard. Tyler had been the father Guy Smith should have been. He had been a safe haven for both Damon and Ben until he had been ensnared by Petra Hunt, an aging model turned A-list party girl.
To lose Tyler, whose watchwords had been reliability and common sense, to the kind of liaison that had gone hand in glove with Damon’s father’s degenerate lifestyle... It had, to put it mildly, shaken Damon.
Damned if he’d let Ben fall into the same trap.
Damon’s fingers tightened on the phone. Technically, Ben had not run off with Emily yet; they were both still at the airport. There was a chance to nip the relationship in the bud if Damon kept his cool. “Don’t board the flight. I can be at the airport in an hour—we can talk this through.”
“There’s nothing to talk about,” Ben said curtly. “Emily and I have been seeing each other for the past month. Long enough to decide that this is something special.”
“You’re only twenty—”
“Old enough to make my own decisions. Last I heard, I could go to war at eighteen if I wanted. You were younger when you married Lily.”
Damon’s brows jerked together at the mention of his ex-wife. “The two situations don’t equate.”
“Why? Because Lily left you?”
For a vibrating moment Damon was confronted by a past he took great pains to avoid thinking about, because it highlighted the singular difficulty he had with relationships. There hadn’t been one thing wrong with Lily. She had been beautiful, intelligent and sweet-natured and he had liked her, all good reasons to choose her as his wife. Unfortunately, he had never been able to give Lily the two things she had decided she wanted from him after the wedding. First, that he would fall in love with her. Second, that he would give her the children she had decided were now a deal breaker.
There was a loaded pause. “Or is it because you slept with your assistant last year,” Ben asked softly, “and you’ve suddenly decided that’s a forbidden sin?”
Damon stopped dead in his tracks. Flashes of the stark, heated passion Zara had unlocked in him, and which he had constantly failed to control, rushed back at him, making his chest tighten. “How could you know about that?”
Zara had insisted they keep the liaison secret.