“He’s taking the loss of the hotel very hard,” Ava declares. She stirs her coffee delicately then glances at the view from the balcony of my suite at the Rosemont. She invited herself over to join me for breakfast and discuss her brother, Evans Sinclair, who is the only reason I’m in San Francisco right now.
Since I purchased the Gold Dust hotel, built by their father, Evans has been going around accusing me and my business of any baseless offenses he can dream up in his imagination. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t be worried. I didn’t get to my position without a few loudmouthed detractors. However, consistent negative publicity is not good for any business, even mine.
“I don’t care how he’s taking it,” I reply. Ava sighs and flicks glossy black hair over her shoulder. Her worried frown somehow manages not to create any lines on her flawless face. She is a friend, an ex-girlfriend, and has at times been my confidant. My regard for her does not extend to her spoiled, irresponsible brother. I don’t bother to hide my impatience. “He was running the hotel into the ground.”
“Yes, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t love it or want to hold on to it.”
I stare at her across the breakfast table. Her beauty is like classic art, nurtured by years of exquisite and expensive attention. Of course, like with me, the beauty masks decades of pain. In her case, an absent, uncaring father, a mother whose only expectation was for her to be beautiful, a family that never considered that she might be more suited to run the family business than her little brother.
Despite all that, she loves Evans, fiercely, perhaps more than anything else in the world.
“You wanted me to buy the hotel,” I remind her.
She shrugs. “I assumed Evans would take the money and go back to living his frat boy life. The hotel bored him. I thought…” She sighs. “He can’t get over the fact that it’s you, you know. He’s always hated you.”
I’d never paid much attention to the sullen, resentful teenager who followed Ava around when we first dated, and I couldn’t care less how he feels about me now.
“If after this, he keeps trying to spread unfounded rumors about me or my company, we will sue, and he won’t like how it turns out.”
She grimaces. “He’s my brother, Landon. That should mean something. Be gentle with him—for my sake.”
I don’t reply, and she reaches for my hand across the table. Her palm is soft, and in her eyes, there’s a plea, and something else, an invitation to shared intimacy.
There was a time in my early twenties when I was attracted to her, when it seemed like we could join our scars and somehow become whole.
That didn’t last long. The Swanson Court hotels were too important to me, and without the constant attention she needed from me, Ava spent the next few years in high-profile relationships, marriages, and divorces from South America to Europe.
We sometimes got back together between her relationships, but it’s been years since there’s been anything remotely romantic between us.
I pull my hand from hers, and she considers me for a moment, one eyebrow raised.
“Let’s have dinner at my place after your meeting,” she suggests.
I shake my head. “I’m leaving for New York this afternoon.”
“Oh.” She looks surprised. “Work?”
An image of red-gold hair flashes in front of my eyes. It’s been three days since that night at my apartment. Rachel. Even thinking her name transports me back to that unbelievable night. I still don’t know what to think about the money she abandoned on the nightstand, or the number she didn’t bother to leave.
Rachel.
I can’t stop thinking about her.
“Not particularly.” I ignore Ava’s curious expression and rise from the table. She follows me and I kiss her on her soft, perfumed cheek. “It was great to see you.”
“It’s always great to see you, Landon.” She smiles. “Take care.”
A few hours later, I’m sitting across a table from her brother in his lawyer’s office. Evans Sinclair is no longer the sullen boy he used to be, but the Sinclair family looks can’t mask the petulant sulk on his face.
He signs the papers which restrict him from making any public allusions to the circumstances surrounding the sale of the Gold Dust. As soon as he’s out of here, he’ll go back to his life of exotic cars, fast women, and the never-ending party that is his life. He’s spent the years since his father died paying lip service to his position as the president of the management board of the Gold Dust Hotel, but as soon as the other board members forced him to sell rather than watch the hotel die a painful death, I became the villain, at least to him.
“Mr. Court.” His lawyer rises and extends a hand to me as soon as the signatures are on paper.
I rise from my seat, leaving my lawyer, Alex Haven, to retrieve the papers. I shake Sinclair’s lawyer’s hand. “Thank you,” I tell him, then turn to Evans.
He stands and takes my hand in a soft, indecisive grip. “Fuck you, Landon,” he says resentfully.
I shrug and redo the button on my jacket, turning away from the table. Before I get to the glass doors, I spy the Gold Dust, soon to be Gold Dust, A Swanson Court Hotel, through the windows. The retention of the old name was the condition of the board members, all members of the extended Sinclair family. I was to take total control but keep the original name of the hotel. I agreed. Before Evans, the Gold Dust name was one to be reckoned with.