Tate was Linc’s fiancée and the reason his best mate now walked around with a dopey, having-great-sex look on his face. Actually, all the Ballantyne men had lucked out with their women. It was strange to see his childhood friends settled down. It wasn’t that long ago that they were all running around Manhattan, enjoying their status as the island’s most eligible bachelors. But recently, each of them had fallen and fallen hard. Reame, a die-hard bachelor and commitment-phobe, had laughed his ass off.
He liked Piper, Cady and Tate and respected his friends’ choices. But settling down wasn’t something he was interested in. The thought of placing himself in that situation caused his throat to close and his stomach to cramp.
Marriage, the emotional equivalent of antifreeze...
Pulling his attention back to Shaw, Reame realized that he had yet to answer his question. “Well?”
“Kind of.”
That meant no. Before Reame could chastise him, Shaw turned those big blue eyes on him. “It was a ’mergency, Uncle Ree. I would’ve had to go to Auntie Piper’s house ’cause dad wanted to talk to that lady. And I’d have to play with the babies,” Shaw complained. “Since you were only working, I thought we could hang out.”
Only working... If that’s what he could call running a multimillion-dollar international security business. “I needed you to save me from playing with the babies,” Shaw stated dramatically.
Master manipulator, Reame thought, but, damn, he was cute. Reame sighed and shook his head. He’d survived brutal training, fought in intense battles both in war and in the boardroom, but he was putty in Shaw’s hands. The reality was that if Shaw—or any of the Ballantynes—called he’d drop everything. They were family. It was what they did.
“That lady was pretty,” Shaw said, cleverly changing the subject.
Pretty? No. She was heart-stoppingly, spine-tinglingly beautiful and he hadn’t had such a primitive reaction to a woman in, well, years. Possibly not ever.
Reame looked down into the mischievous face of his godson and lifted his eyebrows. “Aren’t you a little young to be noticing pretty girls?” he asked.
Shaw wrinkled his nose, bunching his freckles together. God, he loved this kid. “She’s my Grandpa Connor’s real daughter. But she wasn’t ’dopted by him, like Dad was.”
“So I heard, bud.”
When the Ballantynes first heard of Lachlyn’s possible connection to their family—thanks to her brother, Tyce Latimore—Reame had immediately ordered his best investigator to dig into her life. On paper, she seemed like nothing special. She lived alone, worked at the New York Public Library, seemed to keep to herself. Nothing about her raised any flags but looking at the photo in the file, his stomach had flipped. Back then, for some reason, and although he’d yet to meet her, she’d bothered him. Despite not knowing anything about her except that she was Connor’s daughter, she’d made him feel queasy, unsettled.
The same instinct that had saved his ass on many hot situations as a Special Forces operative had screamed that Lachlyn Latimore would have some impact on his life.
Meeting her hadn’t done anything to quiet the raging bats-on-speed in his stomach, Reame thought, keeping a light hand on Shaw’s shoulder as they walked to a baseball center a few blocks away from The Den. The photos in Lachlyn’s file hadn’t done her justice. Her eyes and face were Connor’s but her eyes were a deeper blue, almost violet, her face finer, her cheekbones more pronounced, and her mouth looked like it was made to be kissed. She was tiny, she barely reached his shoulder, but curvy and strung tighter than a steel guitar.
It had taken every ounce of his willpower to wrench his eyes off her exquisite face in order to catch Shaw’s midair flight. Reame shuddered, thinking that if he’d taken a second longer to react, Shaw would have hit the deck at lightning speed. The kid really had to stop thinking he was a superhero. Or Reame had to keep his concentration around pretty women.
Not something he generally had a problem with.
Women liked him and he liked women, when he had time for them. He usually didn’t; running and growing a business took all his energy and what little free time he did have that wasn’t spent at work or with his friends—particularly the Ballantynes—was taken up by his demanding sisters and slightly neurotic mother.
But his me-time was finally here. His business was established enough and his staff competent enough for him to step back a fraction, freeing up some precious spare time. His family was also, for all intents and purposes, off his hands. For ten years, since his father had decided to go AWOL after twenty-five years of marriage, he wasn’t his mother’s and sisters’ sounding board, their bank manager, the payer of bills. His youngest sister was starting a new job next week and that meant, thank God, he was free of being responsible for her.
In two weeks his mom would take a three-month cruise with his aunt and he would be free of what his mom called her “little problems.” Since Reame was the only one of her children close by, she tended to call him. A lot. She also wasn’t averse to guilting him into visiting, and when that didn’t work, she made up little stories about her health or problems with her house to bring him running.
Those two weeks and freedom couldn’t come soon enough. He was going to party hard and date wild women, women who knew the score, who wanted nothing more than a good time. He was going to sow all the wild oats he’d been storing up over the past ten years and he was going to sow them hard and sow them well.
The thought that he might be wanting wild because he was avoiding love and commitment jumped into his head. He was self-aware enough to realize that his quest for me-time went deeper than a simple desire to walk on the wild side. He prided himself on being responsible and part of that responsibility was not subjecting any woman to the chance that he might, like his dad, fail at a relationship, at being what a woman wanted, or needed. He’d never failed in his life and he didn’t intend to start now.
Deeper reasons or not, he damn well deserved to live life hard and fast, responsible only for himself. His motivations could wait until he worked this restlessness out of his system.
Approaching the baseball center, Reame decided that he could start tonight, if he was so inclined. After he dropped Shaw off with Tate, he could go out, do something. Reame shook his head, thinking that he didn’t feel like hitting a bar and spinning a line. He’d joined a dating app a few months back and maybe it was time he actually put it to its full use. New York was a big city and, in the little free time he had, he trawled through the photos, swiping right when he found someone he found attractive. He’d had a couple of quick conversations with a few women but hadn’t made any firm plans with anyone to meet in real life.
That brown-eyed blonde was hot and there was that psychologist who intrigued him more than most. He tried to remember what she looked like but Lachlyn Latimore’s face jumped onto the big screen of his mind.
Dating Linc’s new sister wasn’t an option for a hundred and ten reasons. Not constructive thinking, dude, not constructive at all. Frustrated with himself, Reame decided to work and, as per usual, he promised himself that in the morning he’d make it a priority to find himself a date.
Reame pulled open the door to the baseball center and looked down when Shaw tugged his coat. “You really aren’t listening to me, Unca Reame.”
Reame winced. He hadn’t heard a word Shaw had said. “Sorry, bud, what’s up?”
Shaw reached inside his jacket and Reame saw a scaly tail, tiny feet and the pissed-off face of Spike, Shaw’s bearded dragon. “Spike’s going to want pizza when we’re done. Batting makes him hungry.”
Yeah, food wasn’t what he was hungry for. But if Lachlyn Ballantyne offered to eat pizza with him, preferably naked, he was sure he could force down a slice or two.