‘Then why the interest?’ he urged. ‘Why him?’
Her chest tightened. ‘He knew my mother.’
Aiden snorted and tugged her around behind a large potted arrangement, out of view of the arriving guests. ‘Then go hang your neediness on one of her other friends. Leave my family out of it.’
Her breath backed up in her gridlocked chest. The term needy cut her much deeper than it should have but something bigger than that stole focus. A clue about what this was all really about—and who this man really was.
‘Family? I thought we were talking about money.’
His nostrils flared wildly. ‘Because it’s always about money with you?’
It was almost never about money with her. Even with Kyle she’d believed he had genuine feelings for her. Money was just what brought them together. That and necessity. ‘I think that’s just what you expect. Because it’s the language you speak.’
He snorted. ‘You’re trying to tell me money doesn’t talk.’
‘It talks; I’m a realist. But it’s not what makes the world turn.’
She might as well have sprouted antennae; he looked at her as if she were from another planet. ‘Please don’t say love,’ he sneered.
‘I was going to say people. People are what matter, but, yes, love is part of that. For each other. For our families.’ She leaned on the word extra-hard.
‘You’d rather be loved than wealthy?’ Disbelief dripped from his handsome lips.
‘You say that as if it’s worse than preferring to be wealthy than loved.’
‘Maybe it is.’
She stared at him. ‘Is your mother like this?’
Instant granite. Eyes, face, body. ‘What does my mother have to do with anything?’ he gritted.
‘You are so unlike your father, attitudinally. I can only assume it’s your mother’s influence that has made you like this.’
‘Like what? Unlike you? If you are so damned hippy about love and people and flowers and sunshine, I’d have expected you to be more accepting of the differences between us.’
That would have niggled less if not for the peace-symbol tattooed on her ankle. ‘I’m not unaccepting of the differences. I’m just trying to understand them.’
‘Why? You don’t like me. You don’t want to be around me. What the hell does it matter?’
Was it possible that he was wounded by her lack of interest in him—way down deep where the bluff and bluster didn’t penetrate? She stared into those hard eyes and found it impossible to believe.
‘I guess it doesn’t matter.’ Though that didn’t stop her from being interested...way down deep where her protective veneer didn’t penetrate. ‘Except that you’ve made stalking me your personal project so I get the feeling we’ll be seeing a lot of each other.’
His laugh was short. ‘If I’m stalking you I’m doing a lousy job.’
‘No. Not stalking. Your brand of creepiness is much more overt.’
The moments the words were out, she regretted them. Not that anything he’d said to her these past minutes was particularly polite but branding a man creepy was quite an indictment. Especially when he was commissioning your next work.
He reeled for just a moment, astonishment vivid on his face. ‘I’m not sure I’ve ever been summed up quite like that before.’
But she wasn’t backing down. She straightened and drained her glass. ‘What did the last woman you subjugated like to call it?’
His lips twisted and his eyes darkened and, in that moment, the little corner he’d backed her into shrunk just like Wonderland around Alice. Yet he still found room to take one more half step forward.
‘The last woman I subjugated begged me to do it,’ he breathed. His eyes flicked down and he stretched out a finger and ran the knuckle down the laces of her arty bustier. Instant heat rushed up into her chest and bloomed tellingly in her décolletage.
She twisted away from his cloying presence and crossed back to the bar. ‘Nice try.’ She laughed, one-hundred-per-cent casual and two-hundred-per-cent fake, and signalled the bartender for a repeat of her drink. ‘But I’m not buying it.’
He was right behind her. ‘Buying what?’
‘All of it. The charming, rich bad-boy act, the overbearing son, the interfering business partner.’
‘Are you saying I’m not all those things?’
‘Oh, you’re definitely all of them, but I don’t buy that that’s all you are. There’s something else going on. I’ll just have to work out what it is.’
‘I’m no mystery, Tash. What you see is what you get.’
She turned to face him. ‘You’re in business, Aiden. What you see is never what you get.’ She glanced around. ‘Now if you’ll excuse me, there’s someone over there I’m sure I should meet.’
She spun, skirts flowing, and left him standing speechless in her wake.
* * *
Tash Sinclair worked the room like a professional. Ten days ago, he would have imagined the wrong kind of professional, but now he watched her through a different lens. A Tash-coloured lens. One not quite so tinted by what he thought he knew.
She’d summed him up so accurately earlier this evening, nailed him to the cross of his own bad behaviour and then promptly ignored him for the next two hours. She flitted from guest to guest charming the men, engaging the women and drafting them into the ranks of Team Tash. She was exactly as she promised him to be: intriguing enough to have multiple curious eyes follow her around the room, but appropriate enough to give the tabloids nothing tangible—or even intangible—to work with. She’d brushed past his father several times and the glances they exchanged were carefully neutral, blank enough to give no cause for comment whatsoever.
Unless you were looking for cause.
Or was he still digging for something that just wasn’t there? Reacting to a decades-old incident that he still didn’t fully understand. Something had happened twenty years ago, something that had created tension in his extended family and a wedge between his parents. Something to do with a woman. And he’d grown up with the echoes of that event and the memory of his mother sobbing in the wine cellar where she’d gone not to be heard and cursing a name he’d only ever heard whispered by his aunts and uncles thereafter.
Porter.
That was all he knew. But it was enough to teach him an early lesson about fidelity. And about how many different things a man could be at the same time. Successful businessman. Loving father. Cheating husband. He’d learned to compartmentalise the same way his mother presumably had in order to continue living with—and loving—the man that could do something like that. They’d worked their way through it and onto another twenty years of marriage and Aiden had, too.
But he’d never forgotten it. Or the lessons it taught him about trust.
His eyes tracked Tash the length of the room.
‘She’s something else, isn’t she?’ The voice came out of nowhere, low and edgy to his left. ‘Have you slept with her yet?’
Aiden spun to face the question.
‘Something