The whooshing turned into a roar. Exhilaration coursed through her and she damped it down. Too many questions lingered in her, and Riya couldn’t untangle professional from personal ones. Only that he would always do this to her...make her wonder about things she shouldn’t want. “I don’t want another job. I want my company back.”
He stood up and faced her, close enough to see the small nick on the underside of his jaw. The scent of his aftershave made her mouth dry. “You’re halfway there, then.”
“Until you remember why I’m not signing over the estate?”
“Excuse me?”
“I would like to know what you have in store for me, how far you’re willing to go for...” When he waited with a grating patience, she said through gritted teeth, “You kissed me.”
Nathan frowned, fighting the impulse to kiss that wide mouth again. It was bad enough that damn kiss was all he could think about. Even the incident it had instigated with Sonia hadn’t been enough to temper the fire it had started in him. “And you kissed me back. I don’t see your point exactly.”
Something combative entered her eyes. “What happened to Sonia?”
The question instantly put him on guard. The hurt expression in Sonia’s eyes had been haunting him the past few days. And the fact that he had caused her pain, even after he’d been careful not to, scoured through him.
“None of your business,” he said, turning away from Riya.
Her hand on his arm stalled him. “Just answer the question, Nathan.”
“You think one kiss gives you the right to take me to task?”
“No. I’m trying to understand you.”
“Why?”
“You hold the fate of my company in your hand. You hold my fate in your hand. I don’t think it’s worth killing myself if you’re unscrupulous. If you make a habit of taking your employees as lovers and then firing them when things turn sour, I’d rather cut my losses now.”
“That’s quite a picture you paint of me,” he said, laughing at the nefarious motives Riya attributed to his actions.
Even preferred it to the truth. Because the reality of losing a friend who had known him for over a decade was all too painful, the hollow in his gut all too real. The number of people who were constants in his life over the past decade were two—Sonia and his manager, Jacob.
The realization that he was condemning his very soul to loneliness still shook him.
But then Sonia had left him with no choice, giving him an ultimatum between her love and her friendship. One time of seeking comfort with her, of breaking his rule, and she had forgotten he didn’t do relationships, forgotten that he lived his life alone by choice, that he’d turned his heart into a stone painstakingly over the years.
That he couldn’t let himself become weak by giving in to emotions.
He’d immediately told Sonia that it had been a mistake, that it changed nothing. That they could never repeat it.
It was his fault that he hadn’t held her at arm’s length like with everyone from the beginning, that she was hurt. His fault that he’d given in to temptation with the woman in front of him, even more ill-suited to handle him than Sonia.
Her fingers bunched in his shirt, Riya’s brown eyes blazed with anger and confusion. “How can you be so...so careless about someone’s pain? So casual about the havoc you’re wreaking?”
“On her?” He gripped her hands with his, feeling a powerlessness course through him. He had punished himself by sending Sonia away, and that Riya judged him for that only fanned his fury. “Or on you and your plan? It was a damn good kiss, Riya, but don’t let it distract you from your plan.”
She let go of him as if he had struck her. “I know I’m nothing more than an entertaining challenge to you. And that kiss...it’s nothing but you proving to me that I’m out of my element with you. But she and you have known each other for a decade, and now no one knows where she is.”
He turned toward the stunning vista, his knuckles showing white against the brown of the wood paneling. “No injustice has been done to her. Sonia is a twenty percent shareholder in RunAway. She’ll be all right.” It was the only thing that gave him solace.
“Then why did she leave?”
“Because I told her in no uncertain terms that she has no place in my life anymore. Pity, because she was my only friend,” he said in a low voice.
Riya reeled at how easily the words fell from Nathan’s mouth. But the affected disinterest didn’t extend to the pain in his eyes. Whatever he had done with Sonia, it hadn’t left him untouched. “Why?”
“She messed up at the one thing I asked her not to do.”
“What could she have done that you removed her from your life like you would delete a file?”
He smiled at her consternation, but there was no warmth in that smile. There was no mockery, there was no humor in his gaze. Only the shadow of pain, only unflinching honesty. “She fell in love with me. Despite knowing I’m allergic to the whole concept.”
The impact of his words came at Riya like a bucket of ice-cold water.
“She knew I didn’t want her love. She knew nothing was ever going to come out of it. But she didn’t listen. Now she’s cost us both a friendship that should have lasted a lifetime.”
It didn’t matter that it hurt him to lose that. He had still cut Sonia out of his life. He had never turned around for Robert. He was exactly the kind of man who walked away without looking back. The why of it didn’t matter in front of his actions.
It was all the proof Riya needed to realize that of all the men on the planet she could have been attracted to, Nathan was the most dangerous of all.
FOR THREE WEEKS after they returned to San Francisco, Riya slept in one of the extra rooms that had been booked at a downtown hotel in addition to the conference room for the Travelogue team.
Nathan had given her team three weeks to put together a package for the launch event, and for her, to build the software model that would support that package. Even though he could still dismantle them if they didn’t come up to scratch, he was definitely giving them a chance first.
It didn’t help knowing that his own team from another company was also putting something together at the same time. He expected her company to fail and she was determined to prove him wrong.
Three weeks in which Riya had backed off from pestering him about their deal, in which she had slept only minimum hours to develop the final model for software, in which he had set a relentless pace, driving every member of Travelogue and his own team crazy. Three weeks in which Jackie had figured out somehow that Nathan was back because of Riya, that she had willingly offered to sign away the estate.
Nothing Riya said helped, not that she had a lot of time.
Nathan worked just as hard as they did, putting in long hours, giving much-needed direction and expertise. If they encountered a problem, there was nowhere to go until a solution was found.
As manic as he had been in his energy, he also had tremendous motivating capabilities. With the entire team working together in a conference hall, exchanging ideas and finding instant solutions for challenges they encountered, it had been the best workweek of her life.
There was something to his energy, to his credo of doing everything right then, of implementing an idea as best and as soon as possible.
Now the beta testing they had done of the model had been