CHAPTER ONE
JAKE MCBRIDE was a man under siege.
A woman who’d spent the past couple of months on his arm and in his bed, couldn’t accept the fact that their relationship was over.
“You don’t love me,” she’d wept, just last night.
Well, no. Jake didn’t. He’d told her that days ago, reminded her that he’d never said he loved her, never even hinted that he might love her someday. He knew there were guys who said it in an attempt to score, but he wasn’t one of them. Jake was always honest about his intentions. He made it clear that love, marriage, the “something old, something new, something blue” thing just wasn’t on his agenda.
Besides, the immodest truth was that he didn’t have to.
He was a healthy, heterosexual, thirty-year-old American male. He was six foot three with broad shoulders, a deep chest and a hard, flat belly, thanks to his passion for tough, sweaty workouts at his gym. His hair was dark, thick and wavy; his eyes were what one besotted female had called the color of the Atlantic in midsummer, which even now made him smile because he hardly ever noticed his eyes—what man would?—except when he happened to see them in the mirror while he shaved. He had a square jaw and a firm mouth set beneath a nose that bore a small bump, a souvenir of the year he’d spent working a jackhammer in a Pennsylvania coal mine.
He found it amusing that women seemed to like the faintly misshapen nose. The same babe who’d said his eyes were like the sea had told him it made him look dangerous.
“Whatever turns you on,” Jake had said with a husky laugh, as he rolled her beneath him.
And he had money. Hell, why dance around the issue? He was rich, richer than he’d ever dreamed he could be, and he’d earned every dime himself, transforming a propensity for numbers, a talent for reading the market and a love for taking risks into a career in venture capitalism that was lightyears away from the life he’d been born to.
Wasn’t all that enough to make a woman happy? Yes. Yes, it was. He never had difficulty finding a woman.
The trouble was getting rid of them.
Jake winced.
It wasn’t a nice way to think about it but it was the truth.
What he was going through with Brandi wasn’t exactly new. It had happened to him before. A woman would agree, at the start of their affair, that she was no more interested in forever-after than he was. Then, for some unearthly reason, she’d change her mind a few weeks later and get that oh-how-happy-we-could-be gleam in her eye even though any fool could tell that marriage was not man’s natural state.
The whole turnaround was beyond his comprehension but yeah, it happened. And it was happening again, despite his best efforts.
The only person who could save him from disaster was his personal assistant, Emily.
Emily, Jake thought gratefully. What would he do without her? She was smart, efficient, always on her toes. Emily not only kept his office running smoothly, but she protected him from the predations of women like Brandi. It didn’t happen often, thankfully, but when necessary, Emily fielded unwanted calls, kept away unwanted visitors.
Jake wasn’t unkind. That was the reason he’d told Emily to show Brandi into his private office yesterday, even though he knew it was a bad idea. He was right. It had been a miserable idea. All Brandi had wanted to do was tell him that she loved him but he didn’t love her.
“You don’t,” she’d cried, “you don’t, Jake!”
Why would he deny it? “No,” he’d said, “I don’t.” He’d handed her his handkerchief. “But I like you,” he’d added earnestly. “A lot.”
Jake sighed, sat down at his desk, leaned his elbows on the gleaming oak surface and massaged his aching temples with his fingertips.
So much for being honest. Brandi had gone from weeping to sobbing while he stood there, feeling like an idiot for not having seen it coming but then, he really never did.
“Hell,” he muttered, and shot to his feet again.
He really did like her. Why else would he have spent the last, what, two months seeing her? Exclusively, of course. He wasn’t into sharing his women and besides, he was always faithful for as long as a relationship lasted. But he wasn’t ready to spend the rest of his life with one woman. Not now, not in the foreseeable future, maybe not ever.
Life had only just begun to open for him in the past few years. Jake had grown up poor, lost his father in a mining accident when he was ten, lost his mother to a stepfather who believed that sparing the rod spoiled the child when he was twelve. At seventeen, he’d quit school and gone to work in the same mine that had taken his father’s life. A year later, after almost dying under two tons of coal, Jake put down his hammer and scrubbed the black dust from his skin even though he’d known he’d never quite get it out of his blood. Then he’d headed east. It had taken a while but a quirky combination of luck, guts and a hard-won university degree had turned his life into a dream.