“That’s my girl.” Maybe he could do this without hurting her, if he kept taking her lead, borrowing her focus.
With two different itineraries running, it was unlikely they’d see each other until tonight’s formal engagement dinner, and he must’ve had the devil in his eyes, because Fin skipped around the bed, not getting close enough for him to grab. “If you kiss me again, I’m never going to get out of here, and you need sleep.”
She locked him in, and it made him smile. He set an alarm, and he did sleep, exhaustion beating out invigorating sexual tension. He only felt like he was eighteen again. He couldn’t go without sleep like back then. He made it to the golf course to tee off with the last group, about the time Fin would be attending a chick flick premier movie screening.
Eighteen torturous holes where Cal pitched Brainstorm, the scam that would replace Everlasting. The concept was brain fingerprinting, the idea that with special equipment you could read someone’s brainwaves to determine what they were thinking. It was bunkum based on good science, the kind of could-be-true story Sherwood specialized in. Cal was able to talk up military and corporate uses for the technology and ensure rumors got started. By the end of the weekend, he’d have interested investors.
Then it was lunch in the clubhouse. That’s where he caught up with Alex for the first time. He had a threat to deliver and an engagement gift to present. One shouldn’t balance out the other, but it likely would in Alex’s twisted brain.
He pulled the prospective groom aside, his blood running so hot he imagined it sizzling in his veins. “If you touch Fin, you fucking worm, if you look at her, or speak to her with anyth
ing but courtesy, I will bring such financial havoc to you not even your parents will be able to bail you out.” Ah hell, he’d do it anyway, slowly, painfully.
Alex couldn’t say he wasn’t warned. He tried a look of shock and incomprehension on for size. It wasn’t a good fit.
“Why would I—” He gave up and fell silent.
Cal pressed the key ring of a racing dune buggy he’d had delivered to the golf course lot into Alex’s hand. A suitably unexpected and extravagant gift he’d managed to have Alex unknowingly pay for himself. “Exactly. Why would you?”
After that, there was way too much informal dick measuring and ego pimping. He should’ve been more focused on who was saying what. He talked with his Everlasting whales, but his heart wasn’t in it. He’d extracted what he could from them for the moment. His focus was all the way back at the pool house on a sun lounge with Fin with the sunrise behind her and jewels in her eyes, her breath shorting and her taste intoxicating.
By the time he got back to their room, Fin was off having a massage. He was due in the home theater for a screening of the newest Bourne or Bond and planned to doze through it. They were all the same fantasy, anyway. Truth and justice won out. The hero always saved the world and got the girl, but he never kept her, never got a happy ending.
That was the part that distressed him because Cal was no one’s standard definition of a hero, and yet he ached for that triumph.
There was a note from Fin when he got back to the room after the movie. She’d meet him at the dinner. He took the quickest swim, showered, dressed in his tux. She would be wearing something sedately glamorous, and the sooner they got through dinner and he got her out of it, the happier he’d be, because what he felt now as he muffed it with his bowtie for the second time was anxiety.
He’d had trouble naming the feeling, it was so foreign. He’d called it boredom and frustration, but what he felt was nerves, not the reluctance he’d shown Fin in the car that he’d called stage fright, this was full-on, mood-altering, hesitant, uncomfortable apprehension.
Fin had a whole day to wonder, back away. Fuck. He could bank on a stranger’s intentions better than he trusted his luck would hold with her. He wasn’t eighteen again, but this was another way he felt it—rampant insecurity in a world that felt out of his control.
The notion that he had indigestion before he’d seen a plate of food followed him across the property to the main house where the lawn had been turned into an outdoor dining room with a raised wooden floor and chandeliers cleverly rigged to appear to float in space. He couldn’t find Fin, and he tried to avoid getting dragged into a conversation with anyone. He was still fretting on her appearance when he spotted her unexpectedly above him on the staircase from the house.
With the exception of the expression on her face, she was elegance personified. The gown was deceptively simple, no frills or straps or embellishments. The neckline was a heart shape, dipping between her breasts, held up God knows how, caressing her body all the way to her feet. It was a lush red, and she stood there with her hand on the stair rail, her eyes crossed, and her tongue poked out.
Her extravagant loveliness, her delicious playfulness sent him into full body shock.
Fin was the prize of his life in a game he wasn’t making the rules for. She came down the stairs to him and walked straight into his arms.
“You were nervous.” She laughed, and it was humbling. “I’ve never seen nervous Cal before.” She took a hold of his satin lapels. “Did you think I was going to skip out on you?”
He breathed her in: suggestively sexy perfume, jeweled pins holding her hair up, rubies glittering in her ears, and tried to form a coherent thought.
She put her hand to his face. “You weren’t sure, were you?” She brushed her lips on his cheek and said, “I did that to you,” with a tone of such amazement she cured his anxiety.
“You make me question everything I thought was fixed in stone.” He’d been in a state of flux since the night he’d watched her struggle with pain in Beacon, but he only saw that now.
“You don’t look happy about that.”
Indecision, vacillation, and timidity, unless played for effect, were lethal in his line of work. “Watch me get happy with it.” He took her hand and twirled her under his arm, then brought her close, swaying.
She tried to pull away with a self-conscious blush. “There’s no music.”
“Yeah, there is.” Bells in his head, harps in his heart, a whole soaring string orchestra in his gut, and piano riffs up and down his legs. “It started when I saw you on the stairs.”
She laughed. “How hard do you have to work tonight?”
“The only thing I’m hard at work on tonight is you.”