For a long moment he stood in the dark and stared out at the city that sparkled beneath a full moon and a starless sky. It was a beautiful night, he supposed, a night made for romance, if one believed in such things. He wondered if his failure to do so was due to the many flaws in his soul.
Growing bored with the view he left the window and turned on every light. Never had the vast marble bedroom in his penthouse apartment blazed with such cold and terrible brightness.
Only when he saw the bright splashes of red staining his sheet did he realize that maybe he’d been wrong about at least one thing.
Had she been a virgin? His heart, which usually felt so solid behind its frozen walls, began to beat with vicious, guilty pain. Surely no virgin would have shown such a wild, uninhibited response. And yet...
When he remembered her little cry when he’d first entered her, and her sweetness, and the admiration in her eyes when he’d discussed some of his projects with her, he recoiled. What if she had been an innocent? What if he, who’d been raised so roughly, had failed to see goodness because it had been such a rarity in his life?
“If I could succeed at even one thing, I’d feel so proud of myself,” she had confided. “And look at you—you turned the family investment firm around right after the last global financial meltdown. Now you’re opening banks and hotels in China and power plants in Malaysia. You conquer worlds—and accept such feats as your due. Your family must be so proud of you.” Her shining eyes had warmed him through.
If he’d been wrong about her virginity, had he been wrong about other things? Had she truly admired his accomplishments? Had she liked him, at least a little? Had he wounded her? And what was she really to Will?
No.
Damn it. He was sure of her ulterior motives. With her famous brother dead, his image trashed and their once popular bistro on the Upper West Side in trouble, she’d been after Will for his money. Then she had zeroed in on Michael at the fund-raiser when she’d seen a better mark. The only reason she’d turned down Michael’s second offer was because he’d wounded her pride.
As he yanked the sheets off his bed, he remembered her radiant complexion and the wonder in her eyes and his own intense pleasure. Sheathed to the hilt, he’d felt all male and powerful and yet happy in a bone-melting way he’d never known before.
If she was what he believed, why had she turned him down? Why?
Michael tried and failed to push his gnawing doubts aside. Damn it, he had to know why. But he couldn’t face her tonight.
They both deserved a few hours to recover from his brutal offer and her rejection. Tomorrow morning would be soon enough to confront her again.
But by morning she was gone.
After he bribed the doorman to let him in to her empty apartment, he stomped about flinging her cupboards open while he dialed her cell phone, which went to voice mail. For more than an hour he searched for some clue as to where she’d gone and found none. His texts were ignored. When he went to Chez Z, her steely-eyed French mother, Bijou, had been in a meeting with the waitstaff.
“She said she had to go somewhere,” her mother said coolly, when he’d insisted upon interrupting her. “She said it was an emergency. She looked upset. I didn’t pry. Now, I wish I’d asked more questions. Are you the problem? Is she in trouble because of you?”
“No.”
“Well! She is no good with men. In fact, that’s an understatement. She’s pathetic. She took after me, you see. Her father did everything he could to ruin my life. If you aren’t going to treat her right, stay away from her, yes?”
What could he say to that? Despite the circumstances, he envied Bree for having such a mother. He hadn’t been so lucky.
When Michael went to his brother’s to warn him about Bree, Will refused to let Michael into his apartment.
“She already told me what you accused her of,” Will said, standing with the door half-closed to keep Michael in the hall. “I don’t know where she is, and frankly, I wouldn’t tell you if I did. You’ve overstepped the line.”
“She said you were seeing another woman? Are you?”
Will, who usually had an easy nature, scowled. “Right now, maybe you can guess why I don’t choose to discuss my personal life with you.”
Then he shut the door in Michael’s face.
Michael felt guilty and uneasy. What was Will hiding? Not only had Bree rejected him, she’d turned his brother against him. Will wouldn’t even confirm he was dating someone else, so did that mean he was still interested in Bree? If Will was involved with another woman, what the hell had Michael accomplished by bedding Bree other than becoming obsessed with her himself?
The odds were he was right about her character. Maybe she was gone, but what good was that if Will felt more protective of her than ever? Instead of turning his brother against her, all he’d done was make his brother angry with him.
Despite everything, Michael burned for her. No matter how hard he tried to bury himself in his work during the weeks that followed, no matter where he traveled or how many glamorous women he publicly dated in the attempt to prove to himself and to her how little she mattered, he couldn’t forget her.
Even when he left on what proved to be a month-long business trip to Shanghai to solve a crisis at one of his hotels, memories of her sweetness and outraged innocence lingered, haunting him.
The perfection of their night together drove him mad—especially after he learned that the same day he’d left New York, she’d returned to her bistro and had lunched with Will.
Had she deliberately remained hidden until he was gone? Was she that afraid of him?
What was her game? How could he stop her and save Will?
Two
Eight weeks later
Will has to be okay. He has to be.
As his heart beat in panic, Michael slammed through the heavy steel emergency-room doors with his dripping briefcase. When Pedro, his assistant who’d notified him about the accident, wasn’t at the entrance, Michael had rushed inside and hurried down a crowded hall that was a blur of nondescript floor tiles and pale green walls, beds, patients and visitors.
Michael had been trying to call Bree from his limo on the drive through thick rain from JFK airport into the city. When all he could get was her voice mail, he’d decided to stop by Chez Z on the way to his office to confront her again. He’d just pulled up at the curb outside the bistro when Pedro had called him to tell him Will had been in an accident.
“Where’s Will North?” Michael demanded of the nurses in dark scrubs at the nurses’ station. “I’m his brother. I got a call a while ago that he was in an accident and that he’d been brought here by EMTs.”
“North?” Nurses looked up from their papers and stilled. When they didn’t answer him, maybe because they had to choose their words carefully, he sensed the gravity of his brother’s condition.
Oh, God. It was bad.
“Where is he?” Michael demanded in a hoarse voice he didn’t recognize as his own. “What happened?”
Ask a tough question....
An older nurse with a kindly face gave him the bare facts.
A head-on collision in the heavy rain. Tony Ferrar, who was apparently his brother’s friend and the driver, died at the scene. The driver of the SUV that struck them, a twenty-four-year-old woman who’d possibly been drunk or texting, had flown across the median of the interstate and collided head-on with Will’s Mercedes. She’d died at the scene. Will