LITMIR.BIZ

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know how much she craved him. She wanted to have a little of the control she’d ceded so easily to him last time, some sort of equality. But she wasn’t sure how to find it.

      The key card for his penthouse apartment had been delivered to her last night, just twenty minutes after he’d left. She held it in her hand. It was the key to something she’d always wanted. Something she hadn’t believed in enough to stick around for the last time. But now…

      The phone rang before she could complete the thought. She picked it up reluctantly. Only two people would call her here. Paige, her business partner, or Alan.

      “This is Shelby.”

      “How’s our plan going?”

      Alan’s voice was deeper, scratchier than his son’s, thanks no doubt to years of smoking. She hated that he never identified himself. She suspected he did it to prove that everyone remembered him.

      “You still there?”

      “Yes, I’m here. I…it doesn’t feel right. I’m here but that’s got to be the end of it, Alan. I don’t want to be talking with you behind his back.”

      “Do you really think that my son is going to accept your past? Do you really think that you can make him overlook the fact that we MacKenzies can trace our ancestors back to the first westward migration and you don’t even know who your father is?”

      His words hurt and made a wave of shame roll over her. Yes, she did think that. Hayden was no snob, and it was more Shelby’s business image and sense of personal privacy that would suffer from the exposure. But she knew she had her work cut out for her in changing Hayden’s opinion of her anyway. “I’ll do whatever I have to.” With those words she hung up on him.

      Her phone started ringing again but she didn’t answer it. The last time she’d listened to Alan, she’d ended up hurting Hayden. Not this time.

      It was exactly seven o’clock when she stepped off the elevator and arrived at Hayden’s door. She hesitated a minute and knocked. Despite the key, she didn’t feel that she should just let herself in.

      He opened the door a few seconds later. He wore a pair of dress pants, a blue shirt that highlighted his eyes and a discreetly colored tie and had a phone cradled between his neck and shoulder. He gestured for her to come in.

      “Sounds good,” Hayden said into the phone. “Call my assistant and set up a meeting for tomorrow.”

      He disconnected the call. “Right on time. I was hoping you’d come early.”

      She didn’t know how to respond to that. She’d been so needy before that she was afraid to let him see how much she still needed from him. Still wanted from him.

      “I had them set up a light breakfast out on the terrace. I’ll give you a tour later, if we have time.”

      She followed him across the hardwood floors through the living room. There was no video equipment or expensive television, which seemed odd to her for a bachelor. The leather sofa and love seat were situated to face a seascape scene on the wall.

      Floor-to-ceiling windows lined one wall and there was a bar along another wall and a small poker table set in front of it. The room was definitely masculine in its decor but so comfortable that she immediately felt at home.

      “I like this,” she said, stopping to take it all in.

      “Good. You can change anything you want when you move in except for my poker area. I host a quarterly poker weekend for some of my friends.”

      “Tell me about them,” she said. She wanted to know more about Hayden. She’d been afraid to meet his friends when they’d been together before. Afraid that they’d make Hayden realize how different she was from his set, how she didn’t really belong with the golden boy he’d been.

      “Well, I’ve mentioned Deacon. He’s a trusted friend as well as a business partner. Then there’s Max Williams—we went to the same prep school. And Scott Rivers—I met him when I was bumming around Europe.”

      She raised her eyebrows. Former child star Scott Rivers was still an A-list celebrity. She hadn’t known he and Hayden were friends.

      “When’d you do that?”

      “After you left.”

      “Why?” she asked. She remembered what he’d said about having paid the million dollars she’d taken from Alan. She’d never thought about how he’d earned the money.

      “I was trying to make the old man give in and release my trust fund.”

      “Did it work?” But she knew it hadn’t. Alan was a stubborn man and he’d been intent on teaching Hayden a lesson. Unfortunately it had worked better than Alan had anticipated.

      “No. It didn’t. Finally I ended up on the Côte d’Azur—with no money. I stayed with Scott for a while and then one morning I woke up hungover and out of cash and realized that I couldn’t keep living that way. The old man wasn’t going to give in. So I went to the first casino I came to and asked for a job.”

      “Why a casino?”

      “I had this idea of showing the old man up.”

      “Did it work?”

      “I don’t know if I showed him up, but it gave me an understanding of where he was coming from and eventually it enabled us to have something to talk about.”

      He led her outside to a wrought-iron table that was set with a carafe of coffee and two plates. “I remembered you liked croissants but I couldn’t remember anything else.”

      “A croissant is fine,” she said when they were both seated.

      There were also eggs, bacon, sausage and home fries. But she wasn’t hungry. She couldn’t think about food when Hayden was nearby. She just…wanted him.

      “What do you think of the view?”

      She glanced out at Vegas. This was the vantage point she’d always wanted to see it from. And knowing that, understanding that she was still that trailer-park girl wanting desperately to escape, she hesitated to say anything else. Because she didn’t really know if she wanted to say yes to Hayden because of the view or because of the man.

      Hayden’s PDA beeped, reminding him he had to be downstairs in five minutes for his eight o’clock meeting. But he wasn’t ready to leave yet.

      “What was that?” Shelby asked.

      “I’ve got to go to a meeting in a few minutes,” he said. For the first time in recent memory he wasn’t ready to go to work. Shelby was more exciting than business.

      She pushed to her feet, dropping the napkin on the table. “I need to get to work, too. Thanks for inviting me up for breakfast.”

      He captured her wrist in his hand, holding her by his side. Her bones felt delicate under his big hand, but he knew that she held all the power. He wanted her. And he’d do whatever he had to do to have her. “I invited you to move in with me.”

      “I know, but if I do that we’ll be in bed together and…I’m not ready yet. I don’t want to make the same mistakes we did last time.”

      “What mistakes are those?” he asked. He’d always figured last time his only mistake was not showering her with presents. But he knew now he’d done other things wrong, too. Frankly, he wasn’t sure he’d do them right this time. He wanted Shelby—she was the only woman he’d never forgotten—but he wasn’t sure he had forever left in him. His world changed with the roll of the dice or the flip of a card.

      “The mistake,” Shelby said, “was and would be letting great sex cloud the fact that we don’t know each other.”

      Back then, they’d spent most of their time together naked. He knew he’d been Shelby’s first lover and to be honest it had seemed as if they’d been made for each other. He still got hard

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