LITMIR.BIZ

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to be the calm one, she straightened her spine. “Mom,” she said loudly. “Calm down.”

      She called her that so infrequently now that Jackie looked at her with alarm.

      “Now tell me clearly what happened.”

      “Nathaniel is here,” her mother said, awe coating her words. “Apparently he’s some big-shot billionaire who can ruin us with one word or—”

      “He said that to you?”

      “Of course not. He won’t even meet my eyes. It’s as if I’m not there, standing right in front of him. That witch Maria said it. He looks so different too, all lean and so coldly distant and arrogant.”

      Riya nodded, surprised that Jackie had noticed it too. There was something she couldn’t pinpoint about Nathan either. A sort of cool detachment, a layer of frost as if nothing or no one could touch him. And yet he had been so angry when she refused to sign over the estate.

      “Even Maria took a few seconds to recognize him. He just stood there looking as if he owned the place, when he didn’t even ask after Robert all these years.” Riya bit the inside of her cheek to keep from correcting her mother that the estate was his. “He arrived a couple of hours ago. Showed up at the front door and sent the staff into a frenzy. They were all crying and laughing, and Robert’s not even in town. He won’t say why he’s here.”

      How? She hadn’t even seen his car in the garage. “Where is he? Did he say what he wants?”

      “He’s been wandering around the estate, drops in every half hour or so. Maria said he wants to see you.”

      Riya’s heart sank to her feet.

      A calculating look emerged in her mother’s eyes, her panic forgotten. “Why is he looking for you? I’m still shaking from the shock of seeing him, and all this time, if you’d known that he was—”

      “Hello, Riya.”

      Every time he said her name, it was like flipping a switch on inside her. A caress. An invitation. For what, she didn’t even want to speculate. Her skin tingling, Riya turned.

      He stood at the huge arched entrance into the kitchen.

      Once again, Riya felt the impact of his presence like a magnet pulled toward a slab of iron.

      The beard was still unshaved, but he had changed. Now his clothes reflected the casual power he exuded so easily. The rumpled shirt had been exchanged for a white dress shirt and a formal jacket this time. The snowy-white collar a contrast against his sunburned skin. His hair gleamed with wetness, looked more black than brown.

      He looked knee-meltingly gorgeous. Case in point, her knees practically buckled beneath her.

      “You didn’t come back to the office, haven’t been answering my calls,” he said, waving his cell phone.

      “I didn’t realize I was supposed to be at your beck and call,” she retorted, not trusting the invasive intimacy of his smile. In fact, she had liked him better when he was angry and threatening. “Not everything I do is about you.”

      That small smile turned into a grin, and his teeth gleamed against his tanned skin. It lit up his whole face, softening the harsh angles of his features. And the mouth...she had been right. It was made for smiling and something else that she didn’t want to think about.

      “From now on, it’s going to be all about me,” he said, stretching his arms by his sides. The casual gesture drew her gaze to the breadth of his shoulders. That jacket was cut perfectly, following the wide swath of his shoulders and the narrowing of his waist.

      Alarm spiked through her. “No.”

      “I have a proposition for you.” Something glimmered in his gaze. “You’re not chickening out already, are you?”

      Jackie gasped, and Riya wondered if her mother could explode from the tension radiating from her. She infused steel into her voice. “We don’t have a deal.”

      “We do now. You’ve...persuaded me to take a chance on you, Riya.”

      There was no way to arrest the heat blooming up her face. He was doing it on purpose. Saying her name like that, insinuating with that smile that there was more between them than his hatred and her risky gamble. She wanted to run away and hide in her bedroom, hope it was all a bad dream.

      Next to her, Jackie began again. “Riya, how dare you not tell me—”

      Nathan shot Jackie a look. Pure arctic frost, it was the only way Riya could describe it. Granted, he probably was the one man who could shut Jackie up without meaning to, but Riya had a feeling he would have the same effect on all of them, even if he had just been Nathaniel Ramirez. And not the adored heir of the estate.

      He had that kind of a presence. Contained and controlled with a violent energy brimming underneath the calm facade.

      How was it possible that she could notice so much, understand so much about him just in a few hours?

      “Come,” he said in a cajoling tone as if she were a recalcitrant child. When she still didn’t move, he caught her wrist and tugged.

      Her bare skin tingling at the contact of his rough fingers, Riya followed, past the nonplussed staff, who had gathered in the huge dining hall, and her pale mother, through the door and out into the lush acreage behind the house.

      A cold breeze blew her hair in her face, and with a soft huff, Riya pulled it all to the side. The night was inky black, only the moon and carefully placed lights on the ground illuminating the path for them.

      But instead of dulling his presence, the dark intensified her awareness of him. The graceful line of his shoulders, the taper of his lean chest to his waist and the corded energy of his thighs when she stumbled and he steadied her.

      Her own senses revolted against her mind, determined to observe and absorb every little thing about him. They’d reached the well-lit-up gazebo in the south corner of the estate when Riya realized his long fingers were still wrapped around her wrist.

      Dragging her feet on the grass, she tugged her hand away.

      The splish-splash of water from another fountain, the relentless whisper of the cicadas, a hundred different fragrances carried around by the breeze greeted her. The very place she had always found blissfully peaceful was now ruined by the man playing a cat-and-mouse game with her livelihood. And something much worse.

      Grasping the fear that was the only way to puncture her awareness of him, she lashed out. “You couldn’t have given me an evening to brace myself? Let me figure out how and what I’m going to tell my mother, to figure out my future?”

      “You left without a word to anyone. Is this how you run the company?”

      “The very company that you threatened to tear into pieces?” she threw at him. “You asked me to get out. Very clearly.”

      “You were blackmailing me.”

      She bristled at the outrage in his voice. “I was doing no such thing.” And because she couldn’t bear to simply stop thinking of it as her company, she continued. “Even if your plan is to dismantle the company and sell it for bits, you’ll need a skeleton staff to see through the memberships for the rest of the year. I recommend you keep Sam Hawkins on. He’s been there from the beginning and Martha Gomez too. She needs this job and she’ll be invaluable to—”

      All of her panic ground to a halt as his long-limbed stride ate the distance between them.

      “I don’t remember firing you. Are you resigning, then?”

      Riya reached behind her and grasped the wooden column. But there was nowhere to go and he was standing too close.

      The lights from around the gazebo cast him in shadows.

      Close enough to realize how many different shades of blue his eyes could turn depending on the light. Close enough for her

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