‘It’s not Beth,’ the husky voice cut her off. ‘She’s heading to Philly.’
Ellie swung round.‘You?’she exclaimed, the fury roaring back to life.
He stood not two feet away, his backside propped against the counter, his hands sunk into his pockets. Relaxed, in control, as if he owned the place.
She threw down the cloth. ‘I’m not interested in you or your—’
‘Woah, Eleanor, I get it.’ He tugged his hands out of his pockets and lifted his palms. ‘You’re mad and you have every right to be. I behaved like a total jerk. But would you give me a chance to explain?’
She didn’t want to give him a chance to explain, because something about his presence in the bar was giving her goosebumps, and making the heat twist and swell in her abdomen. But the arrogance she remembered had disappeared, his expression convincingly contrite. Or as convincingly contrite as it was possible for a ridiculously hot, six-foot-four-inch billionaire to look.
She picked the cloth up to concentrate on scrubbing off the veneer again, determined to ignore the goosebumps. ‘Fine, but you’ll have to talk while I finish up,’ she said, wearily. Temper always took it out of her and she’d been working double shifts all week.
But as she bent over the counter, he reached around her, his chest flush against her back for a moment—which gave her a disturbing lungful of his delicious scent, bergamot cologne and citrus soap. Before she had a chance to protest though, he’d taken the cloth from her and stepped back.
‘How about you let me finish up, while you sit down, relax and listen to what I have to say?’
She scowled, not liking the pushy attitude, or the heat making her goosebumps prickle, but short of wrestling the cloth off him she didn’t have much of a choice. ‘Are you sure you know how?’ she asked, not attempting to hide her disdain.
‘Yeah,’ he replied as he shrugged off his jacket. ‘Bar work got me through MIT.’
‘You went to MIT? I can’t see you as a tech nerd,’ she said.
‘That’s because you haven’t seen me in my spectacles.’ He sent her a wry grin as he rolled up the sleeves of his expensive shirt to reveal powerful hair-dusted forearms.
‘You wear glasses?’ she said, trying hard not to imagine how sexy he would look.
‘Only when I’m trying to prove to women how hot tech nerds are,’ he shot back.
She choked down the unbidden laugh. And frowned. He was turning on the charm. But the hurt was still real.
She propped herself on a bar stool as he got to work, and forced herself to look away from the sight of his strong shoulders flexing under the tailored shirt.
As he wiped down each of the bar’s tables in fast economical strokes, she waited, refusing to prompt him, and determined not to give him an inch. He’d hurt her, more than she would ever let him know. Butsheknew.
He began to lift the chairs, swinging them upside down to stack on the tables before he finally broke the weighty silence.
‘When I spotted the segmental heterochromia in your eye, it brought back bad memories that had nothing to do with you,’ he said slowly, referring to the harmless genetic mutation he’d noticed that morning in his apartment. ‘Ten or so years ago, a lot of people came forward with their eleven-year-old daughters, claiming they could be Roman’s kid sister. But only one of them had the same mutation. It was one of the things he remembered about his kid sister because he has the same mutation.’ He paused to stretch his back before continuing to stack the chairs, his voice heavy with a mix of controlled anger and sadness. ‘He was convinced this kid was Eloise—didn’t even want to do a DNA test he was so damn sure, and so overjoyed. I think Roman’s always carried a ton of guilt about how she disappeared. He figured he should have saved her, stopped her from disappearing somehow. It killed him he couldn’t even remember what had happened because he’d been going in and out of consciousness.’
‘But that’s preposterous,’ Ellie remarked, absorbed in the story, her anger with Alex dying at the tense look on his face. It seemed Roman wasn’t the only one who felt guilty the search for his sister had been a dead end. ‘He was only ten years old, wasn’t he?’
He stopped stacking the chairs and stared at her. ‘So youdoknow the details?’
Her temper spiked at the slight edge in his tone. ‘Yes, I do. I looked up all the details on the Internet after you made me feel like dirt.’
‘Right,’ he said, and the suspicious look died.
Ellie relaxed into the seat, glad they’d finally got that straight. She knew how cynical Alex Costa was—but maybe it wasn’t that surprising. Alex and Roman had been best friends since their school days. It must have been hard watching his friend go through that.
Alex shrugged as he continued flipping and stacking the chairs with practised ease. ‘At that point we didn’t know the information about Eloise’s eye-colour mutation was being touted on the web. One of the detectives Roman hired leaked it.’ He let out a heavy breath. ‘Turned out the girl’s mom had a contact lens made, got her kid to wear it. I made Roman get a DNA test. When the results came back, he was devastated. But the way I see it he had a lucky escape.’ He scrubbed his hands down his face. ‘It caused kind of a rift between us for a while—because I finally agreed with everyone else that his kid sister must have died that night. He went off the rails, drinking and partying even harder. Took a while to get him over that hump.’
He finished stacking the chairs and turned towards her.
‘I guess it brought the whole sorry episode back, seeing the mutation in your iris. You’re about the age she would be, and Scottish. Plus I was already feeling bad about taking your virginity. So I put two and two together and got five hundred. I really am sorry. Do you believe me?’
‘Yes.’ Her throat closed.
She didn’t doubt his sincerity. But she had no real clue what to do with his apology. Or the uncomfortable tightness in her chest at the mention of her virginity.Again.Why had that freaked him out so much?