But it did.
He gave her cheek the most casual brush with his fingertip and winked his greeting, the whole gesture taking no more than a millisecond, and yet it made her feel a little weak and giddy.
Come on, Kyra. Get a grip.
He held up a finger to say he’d be only a minute, then turned it to point her to the living room, all the while talking brusquely about an accrual swap, whatever the heck that was. On her way, she stole a look at a new style for James—khaki shorts, a loose-fitting white T-shirt, bare feet, and damp hair like he’d just gotten out of the shower.
She sucked in a breath trying not to react to that, and when he looked at her, she pretended it was just a response to the beautifully appointed living area and the expansive balcony beyond. She’d heard the Eden Roc was one of the best, if not the very best, boutique hotels in all of the Amalfi Coast, but she’d never been in one of the suites before.
She crossed cool, white marble, taking in the elegant rattan and linen furniture and original paintings on the walls. But the real beauty was the picture-perfect view beyond a wrought-iron and bougainvillea-trimmed balcony.
Walking through the open French doors, she let him have some privacy to finish his call and leaned on the railing to drink in a vista that never got boring.
“That’s not going to happen, Mr. Cheng,” James said, his harsh tone conflicting with the casual clothes and damp hair. He could have been sitting at the head of a conference table in a three-piece suit, barking orders.
She imagined him like that, and all the fiery chemistry disappeared. She could never care for a man who lived that life. She could never care for a man with a cold heart. She turned for a moment to look at him. Was his heart cold? She really didn’t know. Wherever they went today, it was her goal to find that out, too.
“I’ve promised my client enhanced indexing to amplify the returns of their entire portfolio,” he continued. “And if you don’t go along with that strategy, Brannigan Capital will take our business elsewhere and close your fund.”
That was cold.
She had no idea what he was talking about, but it didn’t take an MBA to hear the subtext of what he was saying: I’m in charge, you’ll do it my way, or we will squash you.
An old ache crept up her chest, and despite the view, she closed her eyes and drifted back through time and space, hearing that same tone in her mother’s voice on the phone with a client or her employer. Kyra loathed the iciness of business, which was why she’d lived her life in a way that avoided it and why Villa Pietro had sung a siren song when she arrived.
Warm people, warm sunshine, warm life. If a dollar was made, great. But if a person smiled or a couple kissed or a glass was filled with liquid joy, all the better.
Really, nothing explained her attraction to James, other than the way he looked. And laughed. And kissed. And—
“So sorry.” His arms wrapped around her waist from behind, pulling her into a hard, sizable chest. “Had to finish with Beijing.” He kissed the top of her head, and Kyra swore she was going to lose her balance and tumble right over the balcony, down, down, down to the Mediterranean Sea.
“It’s all right.” Her voice came out tight, so she cleared her throat and turned in his arms. He didn’t let go, letting their bodies slide against each other in a way that made things even more difficult. “Are you ready to go sightseeing?” she asked brightly when she looked up at him.
His smile faltered as he looked at her, really scrutinized her face, from eyes to mouth and back again. “I like the sights I’m seeing,” he said softly.
About a thousand butterflies took flight in her stomach, ignoring every protest from her brain. “But I promised you Capri or Ravello. You can’t do both in one day, but we should get going if we want to grab a tour boat and get on our way. We can go to the town of Amalfi and take the bus up to Ravello, or the funicular train in Capri—”
He put two fingers on her lips to quiet her. “I don’t do tour boats or buses or, holy hell, funicular trains. Can’t we stay here?”
“And…” Do what? “Hang out at the pool? Go to the beach? Walk into town again?” Her voice rose with each question, and surely he sensed her hesitation to just stay…in this room. Near his bed. In these arms that still held her just a little too tight.
“We can go sightseeing tomorrow,” he said. “This place is beautiful, and I’m perfectly happy not getting into any form of a vehicle, boat, train, or scooter.”
Tomorrow. She felt a little wave of relief that he wasn’t leaving just yet. “Well, Capri is a whole long day. In fact, it could take two to do it right.”
“Stay over?” he asked, a devilish brow lifting. “Now that idea has merit.”
She let out a soft laugh. “James,” she whispered. “What are you doing?”
“If you need to ask, I’m not doing it very well.” He brushed some hair off her face, the move intimate and sexy and touching. “I just want to be with you.”
“That’s not fun.”
He added a little pressure. “What is this ‘fun’ you speak of?” he joked.
“What kind of person doesn’t ‘do’ fun, anyway? And then admits it?”
“A person who…” He thought for a moment. “I was going to say a person who likes to maintain control, but blowing off a day to be with you, no matter what we do, isn’t very controlled.”
She studied him for a moment, lost in his dark eyes. “Why do you need to be in control?”
“Because I always am,” he said simply.
“Don’t you want to let go once in a while?”
“I’ve been letting go since I walked into this hotel, careened on a scooter up a mountain, drank a barrel of wine, and kissed my tour guide in the vault. This whole trip has been one big loss of control for me.”
A slow smile pulled at her lips. “So what’s one more ride up a mountain on the top of a double-decker bus with no roof?”
He laughed. “Besides insane?”
“Or we could take a boat under a rock and into a cave to see the Blue Grotto. The water is incandescent.”
“You are incandescent.”
A blush warmed her cheeks. “You are a flirt. And, by the way, you own the winery where I work. So I call that a conflict of interest.”
“Or a brilliant career move.”
She shook her head, still laughing. “I’m not going to win this.”
“It’s not a battle, lemondrop. It’s…what was that word you used? Oh, I remember. Fun.” He grinned at her, shifting his hands to cup her face. “This is fun.”
She sighed. “Yeah, it is.”
“Can we stay here, then?”
If she stayed in this hotel, she’d be a goner. In that bed before the end of the day. “Nope, we’re going sightseeing today. And tomorrow. And maybe the next day.”
He started to argue, then let his broad shoulders sag. “I’m all yours.”
If only he was, she thought.
Chapter Twelve
Time stopped melting. Now it froze. The days passed, but for James, time seemed to stand still. He’d never gone so many days—and nights—without working. He barely looked at his phone and hadn’t turned on his laptop. Just hours and hours of walking, boating, laughing, talking, taking pictures, and seeing so much beauty, it made him ache. And that was just looking at his tour guide.
At night, after long, late, delicious dinners, Kyra left his hotel, and he fell asleep, exhausted and happy.
Of course, he’d have been happier if she’d stayed. If their good-night kisses turned into overnight kisses, but something stopped them both. He wasn’t entirely sure what was stopping her, but as long as that Whitehouse Wineries offer was open and on the table, he couldn’t take her to bed. But that didn’t stop him from holding her close, from kissing her and sliding his hands up and down her body, and making out with her like they were teenagers, until they were panting and weak.
She always managed to slip away, with plans for the next day of trave
l, leaving him alone and feeling like the sucker who continued to agree to one more night with Scheherazade just to get to the end of the story.
Before going to bed, he’d stare long and hard at that Whitehouse offer on the desk, almost ready to text Hayward and kill the deal, but something stopped him from doing that, too.
He’d told his business manager he was looking things over and then let everything hang, while he was paralyzed in Positano. Not in control. Not making a profit. Not doing anything but, at the moment, sitting by the Eden Roc rooftop pool with the brightest, most charming, and sexiest woman he could imagine.
What the hell was he doing?
“So this must be what a vacation is,” he mused out loud.
On a chaise next to him, Kyra laughed. “Yes, James. This is what a vacation is.”
“But you’re taking one, too.”
“Oh, I’m working,” she assured him. “I’m here on behalf of Villa Pietro.” She grinned. “Guest liaison.”
“I’m not a guest,” he said, his voice slightly tight as the pressure of his decision—and the fact that he hadn’t even told her he had the decision to make—weighed more on his shoulders.
“But you are having fun.” Kyra turned her head on the chaise, shielding her eyes even though she wore sunglasses.
“Are you?” he asked.
“Of course, although I really wanted to take you to the Duomo di Sant’Andrea today.”
“I didn’t want to go to a church.”
She snorted. “It’s so not ‘a church,’ but this is okay. Especially when you do things the Brannigan way.”
He grinned at her, lifting his own sunglasses a bit because he didn’t like anything impeding his view of her body in that bathing suit. “I didn’t want anyone else around.”
“So you paid the hotel for the exclusive use of the pool for the entire day.”
He shrugged. “Private, isn’t it?”
“And you sent the concierge to town to buy me an overpriced bathing suit when I could have had someone from the winery drive one down to me.”
“Worth every penny.” He took a long, lazy look, not even trying to hide the fact that he was staring at luscious curves, tanned skin, long legs, and the cutest little pink-tipped toes he could ever remember seeing. “Yellow is definitely your color.”
She crossed her legs, fighting a smile as she trailed a finger over the lace trim of the bikini bottom. “I do like this suit. Thank you, again.”
“No need. The pleasure is all mine.” So much pleasure.
“I forgot how easy money makes things,” she said, picking up an icy glass of Pellegrino water and moving the straw over the bouncing lime slice. “It used to make me mad that my mother threw money at everything.”
He eyed her, hearing the sincerity and definite disgust in her voice. They’d talked a lot in the last few days, but both of them had managed to keep things from getting too personal. Lots of laughter, lots of tourist chatting, but he wanted more of her. Not just her body, but her background, too.
“Just an armchair psychologist’s guess here,” he said. “But I’m thinking it wasn’t the money-throwing that made you mad.”
She sighed. “You’re right. It was just…her.”
“Where was your father?” he asked.
“Is,” she corrected. “He’s alive and well and living in Marietta, Georgia, with his wife, three kids—who are now grown and reproducing at an alarming rate—plus two dogs and a turtle named Gomer, who somehow makes it on the Christmas card picture every year.”
She tried to hide the bitterness in her voice with a healthy sip of water, but James heard it. “Because Gomer is on the Christmas card and not you?” he surmised.
“I’m on the Christmas card list, so there is that.” She put the water down. “My parents divorced when I was three, and my dad remarried when I was still little, and his new family became his entire life. I went to visit a few weeks in the summer or Christmas now and again, but…” She shook her head. “No hard feelings. Just no feelings. My dad’s life is in another world and with another family. I was always so jealous of them, but I never fit in there.”
She dropped back, the hurt clear in her voice. “Oh how I wanted that family to be mine, James. But I was the outsider, not unwelcome, but not part of it, either. So it was just me, my mom, and a host of help who changed with every new town we moved to.”
The bitterness left her voice, replaced by a hint of sadness that both touched and intrigued him. “Must have been hard to make friends if you moved a lot.”
She grinned at him. “What are these friends you speak of?”
He laughed at the echo of his own joke. “If that’s true, then you do realize that I don’t have fun and you don’t have friends, so that makes us a pretty pathetic pair.”
“I have friends now,” she assured him.
“Your best friend is an eighty-one-year-old woman who stands about four feet tall.”
“Four foot nine inches of opinion and fire. Couldn’t imagine a better friend,” she said. “But I’m also close to Sofia and Filippa. All of them, really. I’ve made friends in my own travels, all over the globe.”
“Fifty countries,” he said, remembering her story.
“But none like here.”
“I’d think after all that moving around as a kid, you’d want to settle in one place.”
“I have,” she said. “But it took traveling to fifty countries to find this.”
“I suppose you talk to your mother a lot, though,” he said, a little surprised at how much he wanted to know the details of her life.
“Not really,” she said, shifting a little as if the conversation made her uncomfortable. “She doesn’t do ‘close,’ as you would say. Ever meet a person who has sort of a plexiglass wall around them? You can see them, but you can’t quite touch them? That’s my mother, which, I suppose, was her defense mechanism for her horrible job of having to fire people and close companies.”
He knew exactly how horrible that job could be, which was why he hired closers himself when he needed to have that done.
“Have you ever known anyone like that?” she asked.
“My dad,” he replied, knowing he had to give personal information if he was expecting to get it. “He wasn’t always that way, but after my mother died, yeah. Plexiglass wall. Perfect description. I was able to get behind it more often than my brothers, probably because I was the oldest, and when I became an adult, I followed a similar business path, so we had more in common.”
She pushed her sunglasses back on her head, listening intently, a question in her eyes.
“What?” he asked her.
“I’m just wondering…why.”
“Why we had so much in common?”
“Why he willed you this winery that he never came to after he bought it. I understand all of you got something, but I assume the gifting wasn’t random.”
He gave a dry smile. “So the woman is beautiful and smart.”
“Thanks, but am I right?”
He turned a little, ignoring the view for the pleasure of having someone to discuss the very question that had plagued him for so long. “One would assume that Colin knew what he was doing, but none of us has any clue what it was.”
“Even after they, what did you call it, dealt with their legacies?”
He sighed. “I don’t know, since they’ve all changed so much since he died.”
“How?” she asked.
“Well, for one thing, five of them either got engaged or married.”
“Really? Just in the past, what, eight or nine months?”
“My theory is that my father must have been holding them back from relationships, because they fell like dominoes after he died.” He shook his head, still in shock at what had transpired among the Brannigan men and the conversation he’d had with Max the other night. “Only Finn is left, but he’s recently left the Navy after some really tough tours in Afghanistan, and now he’s going to Alaska to figu
re out why Dad left him a small airline with three planes.”
“And you’re here, trying to figure out the same thing.” She blew out a breath that sounded a lot like relief. “Well, that’s good news.”
“Why?”
“Because if you’re just trying to learn that, then you’re not, you know, messing with the winery.”
He swallowed and hoped she didn’t notice his reaction to the statement. Messing with the winery? Like…selling it? Yeah, that would be messing. But something kept him from telling her his plans. Something, like he knew damn well she wouldn’t like it—or him—once he made that public.
There’d be no more fun with Kyra. The realization hit him like a punch in the gut. He was withholding the truth from her so he could be with her, which wasn’t cool. Not at all.
He wasn’t sleeping with her…yet.
“Do you have any theories on why he left it to you?” she asked.
“He knows I appreciate…” A good real estate deal and wise investments. “Wine.”
She snorted. “You don’t even drink it.”
“I do now, apparently.”
Reaching toward him, she put her fingers on his arm, the touch warm and intimate. “Maybe he left it to you because it’s the most beautiful place on earth and he loved you and wants you to have something that is precious and wonderful.”
“Precious and wonderful,” he echoed. “Not sure those things were high on my father’s list of values. He was more about money.”
She rolled her eyes. “Now, that I get.”
“So, I assume he thought I would want this winery for…” It was his turn to shift in his seat. “Profit,” he finished. “It makes a profit.”
Enough for him to sell it, anyway. He took a breath. He really should tell—
“James, I can help you!” she exclaimed, sitting up.
“Make a profit?”
She flicked her hand as if to rid the conversation of anything as ridiculous as a profit. “Anamaria spent so much time with your parents when they were here,” she said excitedly. “She might know the answer to why he sent you here.”