Yeah, he had many regrets.
But... The thoughts in his head spun harder, faster.
Reagan didn’t want to shackle herself to a man she barely knew and didn’t love.
Well, she knew him. Love wasn’t an option. The only woman to own his heart had been taken from him. Now, he didn’t have one to give. Love... He’d been down that road before and it was pitted with heartbreak, pain and loss. But Reagan wouldn’t expect that from him. They had a friendship. And that was a solid foundation that a good many marriages lacked.
The idea—it was crazy. It bordered on rash. And his family would probably call it another one of his harebrained adventures.
None of them understood why he pursued those exploits. He’d been in control of precious little in his life. Not his parents’ untimely demise. Not where he and Luke landed afterward. Not Melissa’s death. And even though he enjoyed his job at Wingate Enterprises, that family loyalty, the debt he felt he owed Ava and Trent, had compelled him to enter into the family business.
And now he had to bear witness to the slow crumbling of that business.
He didn’t need a psychologist to explain to him why he had control issues. He got it.
When he climbed a mountain or dived from a plane, his safety and success were in his own hands. It all depended on his skill, his preparation and will. He determined his fate.
And while his chaotic and uncertain life was beyond his power, he could help Reagan wrest control of hers. As he remembered the girl who had stood with him during one of his loneliest and most desolate moments, it was the least he could do to repay her kindness.
Yes, it could work.
He just had to get Reagan to agree with him first.
Four
It’d been some years since Reagan had been to the Wingate estate.
Five to be exact.
The gorgeous rolling hills and the large mansion sitting on the highest point brought back so many memories of a happier, much less complicated time.
Though Reagan was a couple of years older, she’d been good friends with Harley Wingate when they’d been younger. Some would say the best of friends, who stayed in each other’s homes, wrote in diaries and then shared their secrets and gossiped about boys. Reagan smiled, wistful. Those had definitely been simpler times.
Before her miscarriage and Harley leaving the United States for Thailand. Reagan had never revealed her pregnancy to her friend, and then Harley had left with her own secrets—including who had fathered her own baby.
Sadness whispered through Reagan as she drove past the home where she’d spent so many hours. A mix of Southwestern and California ranch architectural style, it boasted cream stone and stucco with a clay tile roof and a wraparound porch that reached across the entire second story. Memory filled in the rest. Wide spacious rooms, a library and dining areas, an outdoor kitchen that was a throwback to the ranch it resembled. Several porches and patios stretched out from the main structure and a gorgeous pool that she and Harley used to while away hours beside. Expensive, tasteful and luxurious. That summed up the home and, in many ways, the family.
Reagan’s father had been proud his daughter was friends with a Wingate daughter.
She’d ruined that pride.
Not going there today. Not when she’d received a mysterious and, she freely admitted, enticing voice mail from Ezekiel Holloway asking her to meet him at the guesthouse on the estate. What could he possibly have to discuss with her? Why couldn’t they have met at his office in the Wingate Enterprises building just outside of Royal?
And why had her belly performed a triple-double that would’ve had Simone Biles envious just hearing that deep, silk-over-gravel voice?
She shook her head, as if the action could somehow mitigate the utter foolishness of any part of her flipping and tumbling over Ezekiel. If the other reasons why he was off-limits—playboy, friend-zoned, he’d seen her with braces and acne—didn’t exist, there remained the fact that he clearly still pined over his dead fiancée.
Eight years.
God, what must it be like to love someone like that? In her teenage folly, she’d believed she and Gavin had shared that kind of commitment and depth of feeling. Since he’d ghosted her right after the miscarriage, obviously not. And her heart had been broken, but she’d recovered. The scarred-over wound of losing her unborn child ached more than the one for Gavin.
Unlike Ezekiel.
It’d been a couple of days since she’d walked out of the cemetery leaving him behind, but she could still recall the solemn, grim slash of his full mouth. The darkness in his eyes. The stark lines of his face. No, he’d loved Melissa. And Reagan pitied the woman who would one day come along and try to compete for a heart that had been buried in a sun-dappled grave almost a decade ago.
Pulling up behind a sleek, black Jaguar XJ, Reagan shut off the engine and climbed from her own dark gray Lexus. Like a magnet, she glided toward the beautiful machine. Her fingers hovered above the gleaming aluminum and chrome, hesitant to touch and leave prints. Still those same fingertips itched to stroke and more. Grip the steering wheel and command the power under the hood.
“Am I going to need to get you and my car a room?”