He had been. Everything he’d shoved way down deep to survive his mother’s death had come bubbling back up at Carol’s. Except he had found something to console him, eventually. A series of somethings: pills, women, alcohol, in that order. And they’d got him through that loss and out the other side. And then they’d propped him up well into the next decade. Until he’d gone cold turkey on all three a few years ago.
Saved his life.
‘Nothing compared to your loss, I imagine,’ he murmured.
She shut that line of conversation down with the not very subtle zip of her empty suitcase. ‘I always wondered where you’d gone for your knowledge fix after that.’
‘I didn’t. It was never about the knowledge for me.’ It was about having a mother figure in his empty life.
She glanced back up at him. ‘Then why do it?’
He shrugged. ‘I was good at it.’
She turned back. ‘I’m sure you were good at a lot of things.’
Not if you’d asked his father. Or his other lecturers. ‘Really? What else? Cutting up the athletics track? Musical accomplishment? Do you think a masterful maths mind lurks in here?’ He tapped his forehead.
‘Masterful enough to run a successful business. Even more successful recently.’
He stared at her, a warm realisation leaching through his body. She’d been checking up on him. ‘Someone else has been busy on Google, then.’
She stiffened, but ignored him. ‘I thought you walked away from your business for a reason.’
Her green eyes bored into him, towards the truth that lurked deep within. ‘I realised it was easier to change the business than myself.’ And who he’d become was so tightly enmeshed with what he did. He’d needed some healthy distance in order to untangle it all.
‘Changed it to what? From what? It’s so hard to tell from your website.’
Why not? She’d find out eventually. It might as well come from him. ‘I did my Masters in Influence.’
Her snort was the least ladylike and most sexy he’d ever heard. This woman just didn’t care for the slightest pretension. ‘Did you make that up?’
‘No. It’s made me rich.’
‘You have some massive clients. That much I could tell.’
‘Clients who paid generously for a look into the hearts and minds of their future customers.’ She frowned and her eyes grew keen, and he remembered who he was also talking to: Shiloh. But—inexplicably—he also trusted her. ‘Their businesses revolve around knowing where to target likely customers and what will get their buy-in.’
She stared at him. ‘That’s …’
‘The word you’re looking for is “lucrative”.’ It wasn’t, but it was true.
‘Which doesn’t make it any more palatable.’
He tipped his head and granted her that. It was no more than he’d eventually come to think. The day he’d realised how closely all those ‘somethings’ that he consoled himself with were linked to his profession.
‘Show me.’
He looked up. ‘Show you what?’
‘How it works. On me.’
‘Oh Shirley, I don’t think you’re the same as everyone else. I wouldn’t begin to claim I understand how your mind works.’ Disappointment stained her already dark lips. He thought fast. ‘But I can show you how you did it to me.’
Show her how it was inherent in everyone—even the virtuous Shiloh. Bred into the human species.
She sat on the edge of the second bed and folded her hands on her lap. It was entirely demure and insanely provocative.
‘Influence is all about buy-in,’ he started. ‘Once you can get someone to say yes to something small they make a mental commitment to that thing and transitioning them to something bigger is more straightforward. If I want you to buy my car I get you to sit in it. If I want you to borrow money from me as an adult I give you a money box when you’re a child. If I want you to accept my faith I get you to accept something smaller from me first.’
Her eyes slowly rounded as he spoke.
She might as well know who she was dealing with. ‘You wanted me to do the list. You got me to let you into my house first.’
‘Actually, I let myself in.’
‘But I didn’t throw you out. In the exact moment I accepted your intrusion, I bought-into your quest. I gave you something small—my attention—then you incrementally asked for more.’ His eyes fell to her lips, which had parted softly. ‘A few hours of my time to do the dolphins. Then a commitment to spend a lot more of my time working out how to do it on the cheap. Then you triggered my natural competitiveness and got me to buy in even further. And now we’re sitting on a freighter getting ready to go to another country.’
‘All because you let me into your house?’ she breathed.
‘All because you got me to commit a tiny part of myself to this quest. And the moment I made the mental shift there was no turning back.’
‘I didn’t mean to do any of that.’ Heat rushed up her cheeks.
‘Yes, you did, you just didn’t name it. No one does.’ He shrugged. ‘I’ve made my business out of naming it.’
Out of selling his soul. For top dollar.
She watched him steadily. Read him correctly. ‘So why do you still do it?’
The million-dollar question. The answer would be worth that if anyone could give it to him.
‘Because I can?’
‘Is that a good enough reason?’ she murmured. ‘Just because you can?’
‘And because someone else would if not me.’
‘Why don’t you just leave them to it?’
‘Because they won’t do it as well as me.’ He’d chosen that profession and he was good at it. The best. It was about the only validation he got these days.
Her curious green eyes dug deep. Trying to figure him out. There was more he could say, things that would only add to her confusion. But he didn’t because they would only smack of justification.
‘Anyway. That’s how it’s done. In life. In love. In everything.’
‘Not love—surely?’
‘Love isn’t special. Or different. You just have to find the in-point. Something small.’
‘That makes it sound very calculated.’
He shrugged. ‘What is seduction if not entirely calculated?’
‘We were talking about love, not seduction.’
‘What’s the difference?’ Then it hit him. ‘You don’t believe that love is something that just happens without effort?’
She frowned and colour pricked at her cheeks.
‘How can Shiloh operate on the sharp edge of the sword when it comes to every other aspect of contemporary life, yet still buy into the whole romantic love myth?’
‘You don’t believe in falling in love?’ she bristled.
‘That implies some kind of uncontrolled accident of fate. Love is a steady, intentional climb towards a goal.’
‘You speak from experience?’
‘I speak from centuries of experience.’ Other people’s experience. Myriad lives across time.