She spared him a quick nervous glance. Maybe they just thought it odd to see their boss smiling down at a woman. “Yes.”
“Excellent.” His cool nod, combined with that same lingering, totally unexpected curl of his lips, made her return his smile. “There’s apparently much speculation about you around here, Bethany,” he idly commented.
She nodded, already having surmised as much. But now something else troubled her mind. “Where are we going, Landon?”
The elevator doors rolled open, and he guided her inside. “My place.”
“Your place,” she repeated.
“My home. Where you’ll be living with me.”
They stepped off the elevator and crossed the marbled lobby, and Beth was struck with curiosity about what the next couple of months living with him would be like. “It’s a good idea for you to start getting settled in before the wedding. This will make our relationship more plausible.”
Beth could only nod at his logic.
They rode quietly in the back of the Navigator and, twenty minutes later, arrived at the entrance to a gated community. Then passing a sprawling emerald-green golf course and sweeping estates, the car halted at another gated entry.
Beyond the forged iron gates, a two-story, gothic-inspired, gray stone-brick house loomed in view. The lawns surrounding it were perfectly manicured, lush and green.
“Wow. This is it?”
“Yes,” Landon said absently, then seemed to come around from whatever he’d been reading on his phone and met her questioning blue gaze. “You expected different?”
She shrugged. “An apartment, maybe.”
“You forget.” He opened his hand; a beautiful, long-fingered, tanned hand that for some reason made her skin pebble. “I used to have a family.”
A family, yes.
He’d had a family he could not recover no matter what he did.
Her chest gained a thousand pounds at the sad thought. No matter how hopeless her situation had seemed lately, Bethany couldn’t begin to imagine the pain of losing a loved one so abruptly.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly.
She followed him from the car and up the steps to the arched entrance.
They’d died in an accident—his wife and child. One rainy night.
One rainy night when Hector Halifax had been leaving Bethany with her newborn in her arms to meet with Landon’s wife.
Eyeing his stoic, sculpture-like appearance through the corner of her eye, Beth wondered what else Landon knew. What he didn’t know.
As they entered the spacious limestone-floored house, Beth noticed two huge mastiffs near the darkened fireplace. They rose up on their wide black paws when spotting Landon, tails starting to wag as they padded over.
“Mask and Brindle,” Landon crisply said. She supposed the fawn-colored, two-hundred-pound beast with the black face was Mask, and the striped, black-and-brown, two-hundred-pound beast was Brindle.
She took a step back as they approached to sniff her, swallowing back a gasp when she bumped into Landon’s solid chest behind her.
Dogs!
And she thought this would be easy?
Landon steadied her, his hands on her upper arms, his voice in her ear. “They don’t bite.”
A shiver that had nothing to do with fear skittered up her spine. “Oh.”
“Sit.”