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He had a sudden, sharp flashback to their last meeting at her apartment. He hadn’t quite known how she would react but, true to form, she had confounded him. ‘It was just a fling,’ she’d said. She wouldn’t pine away if he never came back.
For some reason, ego probably, her words had stung more than they should, enough to echo inside his head during the weeks of his incarceration. Now he had to hope she would be so swept away by his sudden reappearance that she would be willing to agree to anything. After all, what woman wouldn’t want to marry one of the ten richest men on the planet?
‘Yes, of course. But she wanted me to come in, in person, to reassure you,’ he said quickly, lying again.
‘Which is why she’s such an excellent choice.’ Mason glanced over at the other two men, clearly pleased. ‘But you’ve been through so much, Trip. What you need is some time and space to process everything that’s happened and the best person to help you do that is Lily. You should be with her.’
He nodded slowly. ‘You’re right. I should. In fact, I might just head off there now.’
Not to process what had happened, he thought as he stalked past yet more astonished employees back towards the elevator. But because he needed to catch Lily and convince her to be his fiancée before she heard about their supposed engagement from a third party and blew the whole thing apart.
‘So are you thinking a Kingston or an Empire swag?’
Gazing at the swatches of fabric, Lily Jane Dempsey frowned. She had no idea what she was thinking. Her current curtains were perfectly fine. Perfect, in fact, she thought, glancing over at the draping folds of cream silk. So why was she bothering to change them? Why was she here, talking about swag options with her mother’s interior designer, Samantha?
Her hand moved to her throat, to the pulse beating against the smooth skin like a moth trapped in a jar, feeling, not her fingers, but his mouth.
Trip’s mouth.
The same mouth that had kissed her to the edge of reason as she’d arched beneath him in the bedroom upstairs, and then told her that he was going to Ecuador.
He was the reason she had decided to change her curtains.
Because she couldn’t change the past, couldn’t take back the last words she’d spoken to him, and she had needed something to take her mind off the fact that he was gone and that she was partly responsible because she had told him to get out of her sight, to go to Ecuador and not come back.
And he hadn’t. He had disappeared into the rainforest and, despite the various search teams that had been sent to look for him, he hadn’t been found, and after five weeks he was not just missing but presumed dead.
Only it wasn’t just guilt she felt. Part of her hated him for disappearing like that. Sometimes her fury made it impossible to sleep and then she would pace the apartment, imagining his return and feeling almost giddy with relief that he was alive.
Her hands clenched. But only because she would have a chance to kill him or at least slap his handsome face for being such a selfish, thoughtless idiot. Because that hurt—to think that she would never see those glittering blue eyes again. And when she thought about that, about a world where Trip didn’t exist, she had to distract herself with work or by helping her mother on her various committees. Or by changing her curtains.
But it was hard to distract herself, because she had known Trip her whole life. They had grown up in the same social circles. Their parents had been on first-name terms.
Their relationship had been a little more frosty.
Or it had been when he’d actually noticed that she was there. Which he hadn’t very often because he was all blue eyes and smooth golden skin and tawny-coloured hair falling across his forehead, and that smile, whereas she—
Her eyes moved to the mirror above the fireplace and she felt the familiar twinge of disappointment.
She’d often wondered why her parents had chosen to call her Lily first and Jane second. Lily conjured up flawless creamy petals and a seductive scent and she was neither flawless nor seductive. She was plain, like her middle name.
It wasn’t a humblebrag. It was just the facts. Her hair was mousey and frizzy—although she had learned how to tame it now—her eyes were grey and she had a small bump on her nose that was absent from both her patrician-faced parents. Body wise, she was slim and her legs were long. Too long. Long enough to earn the nickname ‘daddy-long-legs’.
She didn’t light up a room as Trip did. Mostly she was invisible.
Then suddenly three months ago, without warning, without understanding why, they had ended up in bed. And it had been intoxicating and terrifying in equal measure, not least because it was pure happenstance.
If his father, Henry, hadn’t set up the Alessandra Winslow Endowment for Music in memory of his wife, they might have simply remained as occasional sparring partners. But after Henry’s death, Trip had reluctantly taken his father’s place and suddenly he was there in her life, pulsing with heat and energy like a meteorite, lighting up the world, trailing a promise of something that she had never allowed herself to imagine because it didn’t happen to women who looked like her.
She had let down her guard.
And there was no excuse. Not after what had happened the last time with Cameron, when her neediness and longing to be liked had blinded her to what was hiding in plain sight and ultimately put her brother in harm’s way.
Then again, she was only human, and Trip Winslow was the most beautiful man she had ever known. In a crowded room and at a distance, the flawless symmetry of his features and blatant masculinity made him conspicuous. But up close his beauty was astonishing, mesmerising.
Nothing could have prepared her for how it felt to sit opposite him and just gaze and gaze. And every time his gaze had met hers, it had felt like a caress. And that had shocked her, scared her, angered her. How could you be so attracted to someone when you disliked them so much? It defied the laws of attraction.
Feeling Samantha’s gaze on her face, she realised that she had no idea how much time had passed since the woman had asked her about her curtains, or how to reply.
