One Night With the Billionaire (Men of the Zodiac) (3 page)

Chapter Four

Z
oe had seldom been rendered speechless, but in that moment, she couldn’t have spit out a word if her life depended on it.

Ryder retreated, but only far enough to meet her eyes. He was still impossibly close. Horribly, wonderfully, brutally close. “Is the feeling mutual, princess?”

She blinked, but he didn’t go anywhere. “Is this the part where I confess that I spent my teenage years staring wistfully at the backseat of your car, wishing I could take a turn?”

“Now would be the ideal time to reciprocate, yes. Although I already knew you had a thing for staring. I just hoped you were staring at me, not my car.”

She had stared at him. Plenty. But to admit that out loud? Not in this lifetime. “Am I supposed to be flattered? Or maybe just giving up my entire life to hang out here on your island servicing your desires?”

The sarcasm flopped.

His smug expression faltered, his eyes darkening briefly before focusing on her. “No,” he said. “I don’t do relationships. Nor do I do long term arrangements, so any
servicing
you might anticipate will be temporary, at best.”

Jerk
. She stood silent, speechless, because his asshat words shot a thrill through her that made her want to kick him. Finally, she sputtered, “Get over yourself, if that’s even possible with that ego.”

He grinned, somehow having managed to return to a place so close to her that the slant of his lips nearly touched hers.

Her breath quickened. If she didn’t take a deep hit of oxygen at some point, she was going to have to start breathing into a paper bag. What the hell had happened to her life? Three weeks ago, she’d been planning a pretentious, over-the-top wedding with an incumbent Senator her father had hand-picked as the perfect son-in-law. Now here she was, on a private tropical island with a man who had once been every father’s worst nightmare, only now he’d become the stuff of which dreams were made. She didn’t even care that he was rich…it was the sex oozing from his every masculine pore that had her turned inside out. It was the fact that her denial hadn’t deterred him.

It was that she didn’t want to be deterred.

Get it together.
Opposing counsel had never made her quake like this.

“You wanted me?” Her words came out with the shrill grace of a chew toy. So much for getting it together.

The smirk she expected didn’t come. Instead, those beautiful, clear-blue eyes of his were honest. “Yes.”

And now?
The ache between her thighs spread to her heart. She didn’t know why, really. Ryder was at best a missed opportunity—nothing had been broken between them. There never had been anything there to break, but in the aftermath of the tabloid fodder her life had become, she couldn’t help wondering what might have been. As if getting involved with a confirmed playboy could possibly have ended better than her fiasco of a relationship with the esteemed Senator, ten years her senior and nowhere near as photogenic as he thought himself.

Ryder was still looking at her, his gaze resting lazily, though intently, on her. Her attention fell unwittingly to follow the trail past his waistband.
He
was probably photogenic as hell. But considering he was young, hotter than the noonday sun, and a self-made billionaire, he was likely the world’s most eligible bachelor. There would be no shortage of paparazzi surrounding him in the real world, and she’d had enough to last a lifetime.

She cleared her throat. “That was a long time ago.”

“That could easily be
my
point. I haven’t forgotten, Zoe. Feels like yesterday I stood there on the wrong side of the tracks wanting all the wrong things.”

“And now?”

“Money can’t buy everything, sweetheart.”

His heated gaze and its lazy appraisal of her suggested sex, but she had little doubt he could get that for free. Just not from her.

The ache between her thighs protested the unspoken denial, and the involuntary clench she hoped would silence them accomplished the opposite. She summoned all her nopes. All other reservations aside, there was no way she’d fall into bed with him, especially now that he was rich. It didn’t matter how much she’d crushed on him when they were teens…she hadn’t acted then, and acting now made her no better than the interns who had ridden her ex-fiancé reverse-cowgirl-style into infamy.

She swallowed a dry bundle of nerves and met his aqua stare. “No, it can’t.”

He looked at her for a long moment before he spoke. “Why are you here, Zoe?”

“My fiancé made himself an ex in a very public manner.” She blurted the words, surprised when the usual shame didn’t follow. Surprised when Ryder didn’t immediately adopt the same look of pity that had become a permanent mask among her co-workers.

“So why isn’t he the one in exile?”

“To be honest, I don’t care enough to know. I just wanted out of the three-ring DC circus that popped up when he…when the scandal broke.”

Ryder’s brow lifted.

Great. She should have kept her mouth shut. The list of people who weren’t privy to the details of her ex’s privates was woefully short, and while she doubted Ryder wanted a VIP seat, she could really go for the anonymity. Actually, that was precisely why she had left the city. And while she certainly wouldn’t count him among her allies, it was nice to have a conversation with someone who didn’t look at her with sympathy.

He looked at her instead with hunger.

The dark lashes framing those impossibly light eyes only highlighted their intensity. Her body responded even when she knew she couldn’t—at least not in the way she wanted.

“I don’t think it’s something we should talk about in light of our arrangement.”

The easy-going smile disappeared. He blinked, clearly taken aback. “By all means. I apologize for the intrusion.”

He may have sounded coolly detached, but the undercurrent in his tone was an emotional riptide. After the turmoil her life had become, Ryder felt safe. He felt like home. He brought back a time when she’d felt in control—a time before she’d let her big-shot attorney father crow so persistently about the man that became her fiancé so that she, too, began to believe theirs was a sufficient match. Before scandal and tabloids took over and pushed her out of her own life—a life she, ironically, no longer recognized as her own. There was no going back from that kind of thing. She’d accepted as much, and yet here she was, face to face with the road she hadn’t taken. A road that suddenly felt wide open and free.

And terrifying.

“It’s just…I came here looking for an escape from scandal and a broken engagement. I don’t think jumping into bed with another man is really the answer. If it’s a problem, perhaps I can seek other arrangements.”

His eyes darkened, but not in the heated way they had before. “Can the formality, Zoe. If I’m making you uncomfortable, say so.”

Oh, he was, all right. But not like he must have thought. She wanted him, but admitting it could only lead to disaster. Her life had been so carefully constructed, every move a step toward gaining her father’s approval. Toward earning his trust to take over his prestigious law firm—one of
the
most prestigious in a district teeming with power players. Hers had been a regimented, well-organized path down which she’d planned to walk for as long as she could remember. And Ryder represented the antithesis of that—a departure from which she might never recover. She thought of the heat she’d seen in his eyes and the repercussions of adding fuel to that fire. Explosive. The thought of those rough hands covering her bare flesh made her want to beg.

And Zoe Davenport didn’t beg. What she was going to do was enjoy the sunshine and the ocean, get a grip on herself, and go back to DC and the high-powered career path that awaited her sensible-shoe-clad feet to step on it once more. She opened her mouth to tell him just that…

But she didn’t have a chance.

His phone rang, freeing her from her from a confession that could have only ended in disaster.

He pulled the device from his pocket without taking his eyes off her, only glancing quickly at the display before meeting her gaze again. “I’m going to take this outside.”

R
yder ended the phone call but didn’t rush back to Zoe. He’d be better off avoiding her altogether, not that it was possible. The thought of her standing there, nipples tight and thighs clenched, just a few feet from his king-size bed, put him in dangerous territory. He could already see her spread eagle, tied to the corner posts, and at his complete mercy. Hungry. The vision made him want to forget all about that damned contract he’d signed, but that wouldn’t happen. The best opportunity he’d ever been given had just come back to bite him in the ass. Big time.

He scrubbed a hand down his face, wondering what the hell had possessed him when he’d started talking to her about sex and sin and all the possibilities therein. He couldn’t sleep with Zoe Davenport—not once, not twice, not daily for the entire two weeks she would be sharing a suite with him. Because doing so would ruin him.

Ten years ago, on graduation day, Zoe’s father had approached Ryder with a fat check, a notary public, and an offer: stay away from Zoe until the end of time, and the money was his, free and clear. The old man had clearly noticed Ryder’s eye on his daughter—and hers on him—but Ryder was no fool. He thought Zoe was hot, but women were a dime a dozen, and tickets out of that hellhole generally didn’t exist. He hadn’t cared then that the penalty for breaking the deal was his entire net worth or ten times the face value of the check, whichever was greater. He’d signed, he’d gotten the hell out of dodge, and he hadn’t looked back.

Not until now.

Now, he wondered if such a ridiculous penalty could be upheld. But what did it matter? The damage breaking the contract would do to his reputation—to his resort—would ruin him even if the document itself did not. His was a niche market, and its patrons weren’t those to flock to scandal or disgrace. Associations like that could be brutal. To be ground zero, professionally speaking, would be the end. Even as he wrestled with whether he should produce the contract for his team of lawyers, he knew Zoe Davenport wasn’t a chance he could take.

Not even if it fucking killed him.

He ignored the nagging voice that insisted he could screw her silly on his own private beach, and her father would never be the wiser. He’d grown up enough in the past decade to know a woman deserved better, but his hormones hadn’t gotten the memo. He’d never been much for relationships, which was just as well, because once he’d started working personal security, he couldn’t focus on his clients’ safety if he was preoccupied with a woman sitting alone at home waiting for him. He’d seen other men misstep and nearly get themselves or their clients killed, and that was enough to ensure he never got involved. He’d settled for the kind of one-night fling where neither names nor phone numbers were exchanged, but the novelty had long worn off.

He wanted more.

He wanted
Zoe
.

She represented everything he’d never had. The white picket fence, the two kids, and the family mutt, dutifully adopted from the local animal shelter. Big holiday meals and laughter that rang through open doors, falling flat at the property line that had once divided their lives. That Ryder could grow up next door to her had been a fluke at best. His house had once been the servants’ quarters to her family’s much larger home. The parcel had been sold off at one point when they were kids, and just like that, fate put him in the venerable shadow of perfection. That feeling was so deeply ingrained in him that money hadn’t changed a thing. Seeing her again took him right back to that place, where she was the princess next door, and he the piece of crap under her shoe. And the fact that his money hadn’t won her over now made him want her all the more.

Damn it all.

Maybe he’d misread her attraction. She had to have been shocked to find the tables turned as they were, she on the run from her life and he living in the lap of good fortune.

Motion through the expansive glass caught his attention. She had changed into a dress that flirted with her thighs and showed off bombshell curves that had been lost to her stuffy pants suit. For the briefest moment, he pondered a change of scenery for the duration of her visit. A ski resort would be nice. Somewhere with year-round snow—somewhere he didn’t have to worry about his former neighbor baring mile-long legs and a body built for sin.

Sighing, he jammed his phone in his back pocket and strode back into the cabana. The air conditioning hit him with force, but it wasn’t enough to eradicate the heat between them. His flirting had backfired in a big way. He’d riled her up, no doubt, but he’d gotten way too close, putting himself in a corner wanting what he couldn’t have. He didn’t believe for a minute she didn’t want him, but he wasn’t going to risk everything for a woman who found him so damned resistible.

Or maybe not. She averted her eyes, pegging her attention in the vicinity of his chest, though that changed quickly, as he cleared his throat and reached for the shirt he’d left slung over the back of the leather sofa. He tugged the garment over his head.

“If you’re ready,” he said, “we’ll get to work.”

“Work?” She stared at him in confusion.

“Yeah, that thing you’ll do while you’re here.”

“I thought that was just…I thought you were aware I’m not actually a designer.”

“You are now.” He almost laughed. She looked positively bewildered. He didn’t see much need in her going through the motions—the Latitude 13 skeleton crew was tight, and he trusted them, so she could, too—but he enjoyed having her all out of sorts.

He’d love having her that way in his bed. He ached with the thought, but he wasn’t entirely sure it was the right kind of ache. Sex? Hell yes. But the consequences of going there were staggering. The risk wasn’t worth it.

She was still looking at him. Still wore that expression. He wondered what would happen if he kissed her. Would she be pissed?

Or would she be his?

Only for a night, and it would be the costliest of his life.