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Waved.
As if she didn’t have a care in the world. But then she didn’t. It wasn’t her life, her future, that was being held in the balance.
Trip was back in his own apartment now, but by the time he’d realised Lily kept a spare key in a bowl next to the door he’d been stewing in her apartment for over an hour and a half.
He yanked open the drinks fridge, pulled out a beer, and started pacing back and forth across the huge loft space, oblivious to the dazzling view across Central Park.
He didn’t like being on his own. His ADHD played a part in that. As a child he had been incapable of sitting still quietly, much to his father’s irritation. Now that he was older, he had learned strategies—pacing, doodling, foot-tapping.
But there was so much going on in his head right now. He kept having flashbacks to the men in masks and his body was permanently tense with a dread he couldn’t shift. And that was why this whole business with the shareholders was so unfair. Returning to New York, he had known that somebody would be holding the reins, but on his return he had assumed that he would simply take back what was rightfully his.
Only now he had the board and the shareholders on his back, and that was a real problem.
His mouth twisted. And his solution was currently planning to skip the country.
Picturing Lily’s small, furious face, he winced as his shoulders tensed and he reached round to massage his back.
He opened his eyes and stared around the light, casually elegant apartment. It was his home. Had been his home for nearly seven years and yet he hadn’t thought about it once while he was out there. He hadn’t thought about anything much except staying alive.
And Lily Dempsey.
His fingers tightened around the bottle. He had no idea why she’d kept popping into his head. Perhaps it was the soft rainforest air that would slide over his skin at daybreak almost like one of her caresses. Or maybe it was darkness playing tricks on his mind.
It made it even more aggravating that she was refusing to play ball. Was, in fact, threatening to talk to the trustees.
Jaw tightening, he began to pace again. That wasn’t going to happen. He wouldn’t allow that to happen. He couldn’t. One more mess-up and there was a real risk he could lose control of the business.
‘One hundred and thirty years building a business into a household name and you throw it away for a few seconds of thrill-seeking.’
His feet faltered as his father’s voice sounded inside his head and some of the beer spilled onto the polished concrete floor. He frowned down at it.
Henry Winslow II had forfeited any right to sit in judgement on him, he thought, jerking the bottle to his lips. In fact, none of this would have happened if his father had been the man he’d pretended to be. It was his lies, his deceit that had set this whole mess in motion. Without those letters he would never have accepted his friend Carter’s invitation, never have ended up in a cartel hotspot.
But there was no point crying over spilt beer.
What mattered now was getting Lily to change her mind.
He felt his heart rate pick up. Outside, the sun was high above the tallest skyscrapers and the air would still be shimmering with heat.
Trip gritted his teeth. His skin was suddenly twitchy and taut. Nothing could compare to the heat of her kiss.
The effect Lily had on him was still as baffling to him today as it had been that first night. Before her, all his girlfriends had been of a type. Not through any conscious choice on his part.
But she was different.
Always slightly aloof, and serious and hard-working in a way that was unique among her more glamorous peers. Which was why it had been her name he’d plucked out of the air. She was the perfect woman to help him regain control of his business.
It was a pity, then, that she was so resistant to doing so.
He gritted his teeth.
It was all such a mess. He didn’t want to get married, didn’t want to have to make vows of eternal love and devotion, particularly now, after finding those letters. To do so felt wrong in so many ways.
Remembering the moment when he’d realised that the woman writing them was not his mother, he felt suddenly sick.
For a slice of a second, his mind was a flurry of thoughts, tumbling over one another, colliding, splitting apart, reforming, and he felt the same mishmash of anger and shock and pain. Because Henry wasn’t perfect. He was a liar and a hypocrite and Trip was done trying to please his father, to be like his father.
Or he would be, once he had persuaded the trustees that he was the best man to run the company, and for that he needed Lily Dempsey.
