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Elation swept through her, quickly tempered when he leaned forward and shook his head.
'There's just one problem. I'm about to sell the farm.'
'Sell it? But where will you live? Where will you work?'
His condescending grin sent a chill of foreboding through her. 'You still see me as some hick bumpkin farm boy, don't you?'
She fought a rising blush and lost. 'Of course not. I just meant that place has been in your family for generations. I don't understand why you'd sell.'
He gestured all around him. 'Because my place is here now.'
Confusion creased her brow as she looked around the hip bar. His designer suit, his patronising smile, his cryptic comments, made her feel as if he’d left her out of some in-joke and the punchline was on her.
'You belong here?' She shook her head, knowing if there was one place a guy like Nick belonged, it wasn't in this ultra-elegant hotel.
He'd always loved the farm, had been proud of his family's heritage, so what had changed? The Nick she'd known and loved thrived under the harsh Queensland sun, harvesting billets of sugar cane, getting his hands dirty with the machinery he'd loved tinkering with, riding down the highway on his beat-up motorbike with the wind in his hair and the devil at his back.
He frowned, his shoulders rigid as he sat back. 'You find that so hard to believe?'
‘This place isn’t you.'
'It is now,' he snapped, his control slipping as anger flashed from those dark eyes she'd lost herself in too many times to count. 'Just because we had a teenage fling, don't presume you know me.'
That hurt more than she could've thought possible after all this time. 'It was more than that and you know it.'
Understanding flickered in his eyes before he blinked, obliterating the slightest sign he acknowledged what she'd said was true.
‘Our past is irrelevant to our business now.' He glanced at his watch and stood. 'Sorry, I have to cut this meeting short. I've got an interview scheduled.'
'You want to work here?'
The corners of his mouth twitched. 'I already do.'
‘You work here?’ She made it sound like he stripped for a living and his upper lip curled in derision.
'Technically, yes.’
'I don't understand.'
As he nodded to someone over her shoulder and held up a finger to indicate a minute, he leaned down, his breath fanning her ear and sending ripples of heat through her.
'I don't work here, I own the place.'
Chapter Four
Nick stared out of his office window on the fifth floor of FantaSea, blind to the exquisite view of Noosa beach stretching to the national park on the far right.
He loved this view when he first built the hotel, and experienced a sense of immense satisfaction every time he sat behind this desk and stared out the window.
Not today.
Today, whether his eyes were open or shut, all he could see was Britt's brilliant blue eyes wide with shock as he dropped his bombshell.
He'd expected to feel powerful, proud, even smug, when he told her the truth. So why the let-down, as if he should've come clean from the start?
What kind of game had he been playing anyway? He didn't have time for games, not these days. On the verge of opening the fifth FantaSea hotel on Pink Sand Beach in the Bahamas and trying to build clientele here, he didn't have enough hours in the day.
That was why he was selling the farm. His excuse and he was sticking to it. He loved that place, had loved it from the first time Pa handed him a piece of sugar cane to gnaw on as a toddler. The farm was as much a part of him as his love of the sea.
