One
As weddings go, it was a nice enough one. Sawyer Steele hadn’t been to many, but knowing his parents, it was probably an extravagant and expensive affair. Perhaps the greatest wedding ever held in Charleston. He wouldn’t know the difference. It wasn’t exactly Sawyer’s thing. But his baby sister, Morgan, was celebrating her big day, so of course he was there to smile for pictures and eat cake. Not everyone could get shipped off to work a deal in China and miss it like Finn did.
It was probably strategy on Trevor Steele’s part to have his most troublesome son out of the country for the event. Sawyer’s twin was the one most likely to cause the bulk of their father’s headaches. He could count on Sawyer and Tom, the oldest son, to attend and behave. As such, Sawyer had had his tuxedo dry-cleaned, his dark blond curls cut short and found a suitable date to bring with him. That was all that was really required of him tonight. Behave. Don’t make a scene. Make sure Morgan is happy. Easy enough.
Now the event was starting to wind down. They’d eaten, said a million toasts, had all the requisite dances and cut into the towering ivory-and-gold confection his sister had chosen for her cake. A few more dances and they should be waving sparklers and seeing his sister and her new husband off to start their lives together. He was good with that. The bow tie he was wearing felt like it was getting tighter around his throat with each passing hour.
Glancing over, he noticed his date, Serena—a woman he’d met a few weeks earlier at a conference—eyeballing the people on the dance floor. He decided it was time to take her for a spin at last. Sawyer wasn’t a dancer by any stretch, but he could manage a simple waltz for formal occasions. All the Steele children had been forced through junior cotillion to pick up some basic skills like that. They lived in the South, after all, and etiquette was paramount in the social circles he was forced into as one of the Steeles.
“Would you like to dance?” he asked Serena. The buxom blonde had chosen a low-cut, pale blue sheath dress that gave off some Cinderella vibes with her golden hair pulled up into a bun. She looked very pretty. At the same time, he just couldn’t muster up much enthusiasm for her. She didn’t have a very memorable personality. She actually reminded him of one of his mother’s beautiful, priceless antiques. Lovely to look at, but mostly decorative.
His brother Finn preferred a sports car type girlfriend. Sexy, high performance and exciting to drive, so to speak. Those women were as high maintenance as the cars and likely to get Finn in trouble before too long.
Sawyer’s ex, Mira, had been a Ferrari if ever he saw one. After that, he’d decided that maybe a roomy, luxury SUV was more his speed. Beautiful, adventurous, flexible, and if you took good care of it, it would reward your efforts for years to come.
But Serena looked so much like Mira that he instinctively wanted to call her by his ex’s name, and had to stop himself each time. They looked so similar that his feelings about how things had ended with Mira may have been souring how he felt about Serena. Or maybe Serena just wasn’t as much fun on the road as she appeared in the dealership.
“Sure, I’d love to dance,” she said with a smile.
Oh well. There was nothing he would or could do about it tonight. He took her hand and led her to the illuminated dance floor, where at least twenty other couples were gliding along to a romantic old Sinatra song. He wrapped his arm around her waist and they started to sway slowly to the music.
It was then, with her pressed close against him, that he realized taking a woman to a wedding on a third date was way too soon. He had to bring a plus one, but it made things feel more serious than they were. They’d had drinks and dinner so far, and if this wedding hadn’t come up, they might’ve gone to a movie. Maybe not even that, so he certainly didn’t need her getting overly romantic notions when he didn’t plan on a fourth date.
His gaze fell on a woman entering the ballroom. Even from this distance, she instantly captured his attention with fair skin that stood out against her black cocktail dress and bright auburn hair. She looked around the room, searching for someone. And then their eyes met. In an instant, it was like Sawyer had been hit directly in the gut. He’d never felt anything like that before. It was powerful. It made him forget all about the woman in his arms. At least for a moment.
Then he noticed the angry look on the newcomer’s face and wondered if it wasn’t attraction he was feeling so much as a woman’s fury.
She moved quickly through the crowd toward him. Sawyer was frozen in place on the dance floor—unable to pull away from the hold the redhead had on him even though his brain was telling him to escape.
Then, at last, she arrived. “You skeevy little prick!”
The angry shout cut through the sounds in the ballroom like a knife. The dancers paused, and even the orchestra was startled into an awkward silence. Everyone turned to see the stunning redhead standing at the edge of the dance floor. Now she was only a few feet away from Sawyer, with her eyes still focused directly on him.
He’d thought for a moment that maybe he was in someone else’s line of fire. He looked over his shoulder, but no one was there. Was she really talking to him? Shouting at him? That wasn’t possible.
“Who is that woman, Sawyer?” his date asked.
That was a really good question. He’d never seen her before in his life. He certainly would’ve remembered a woman with hair like waves of fire and skin as flawless and pale as a porcelain doll. Even as angry as she was, he wanted to know more about her. Sawyer shook his head. “I have no idea. Can I help you, miss?”
“Can you help me?” she repeated bitterly. “Yes. You can hold still.” The angry woman walked up to him and slapped him hard across the face.
He was too stunned to respond for a moment. He’d never been slapped before. Somehow, being hit by a stranger made it that much worse. She hadn’t hurt him, not really. It just stung, but he could feel the emotion behind the slap. She’d wanted to hurt him, and for good reason. He just didn’t know what that was.
There was a collective gasp as the whole ballroom seemed equally aghast, then a murmur as everyone started discussing what was going on. Out of the corner of his eye, Sawyer could see a couple brawny security guards his father had hired for the party making their way across the room to deal with the situation. Given that the last two events at the house had ended in a kidnapping and a bombing, respectively, it was a good move to have a little extra help in that regard.
“I’m going to have to ask you to come with us, ma’am,” one of the guards, wearing a black suit and an earpiece, said.
The redhead hesitated for only a moment before she spun on her heel and marched out of the ballroom with the two guards right behind her. She’d done what she’d come here to do, apparently.
Although he knew he shouldn’t abandon his date to chase down the stranger, he had to go after the woman and figure out what was going on. “I’ll be right back.”
Serena nodded, and he jogged out of the ballroom and into the entry hall to see if he could find where security had taken the woman. Sawyer glanced around, catching a blur of movement out of the corner of his eye as the men escorted the woman out the front door.
He chased her across the marble entry and pushed past the guards as they came back inside without her. At the top of the front stairs, he looked down and saw the woman waiting for a parking attendant to bring her car.
“I told you to keep it close!” she shouted at one of the men his parents had hired to manage all the cars at the wedding. “This wasn’t going to take long. Especially with those goons seeing me out after less than a minute.” She nervously glanced over her shoulder, and that was when she spied Sawyer standing at the top of the stairs.
“Do you normally wear black to weddings?” he asked. Asking why she’d slapped him seemed like jumping ahead in a conversation he wasn’t ready to wrap up so quickly. “Isn’t that against the rules or something?”
She sighed and crossed her hands over her chest. “It was the only nice dress I had that still fit. No offense to your sister. Anyway, don’t mind me,” she said. “Security has made it clear I’m not welcome, so I’m leaving. Go on back to your hot blonde. You’ve obviously moved on.”
Sawyer took a few steps down the stairs to get closer, but out of arm’s reach of the woman. He wasn’t getting hit twice in one night. “I’m sorry, there’s been some kind of mistake, I think. Do I know you?” The stinging welt on his cheek suggested that he did, but he was certain he’d never laid eyes on her before. She was stunning, even in the plain strapless black dress and simple makeup she was wearing. Her red hair shimmered in the moonlight, and fat curls cascaded over her bare shoulders.