welding them together as they’d lain together in his bed. The intense emotion that had poured through her with every touch, every caress, along with a bone-deep certainty she had never experienced before and which had been the reason she had consented to sleep with him in the first place. The uncanny conviction that after years of disinterested dating, she had finally found The One.
With a jerky movement, she withdrew her hand.
Ben pushed away from the railing and dragged off his tie as if it was suddenly too tight. He draped it over the railing next to his jacket. His brooding gaze dropped to her mouth. “I didn’t call you because I didn’t think you were serious about wanting a real relationship.”
She frowned. He could only be referring to the fact that she was naturally wary and standoffish when it came to relationships and that it had taken her eighteen months to admit to him that she found him crazily attractive. “It’s not as if I’m in the habit of having one-night stands!”
He shrugged. “I was also not in a position to offer any kind of commitment.”
Sophie met Ben’s gaze squarely. She could barely concentrate on Ben’s struggle with his emotional past when she was coping with her own very present struggle and the startling revelation that he still wanted her. “You could have asked me what I wanted instead of talking to Nick. It’s not as if my brother is any kind of a love doctor.”
To put it succinctly, Nick had had a serious issue with commitment, which had been resolved only when the woman he had married, Elena, had taken a risk on him and he had ended up falling for her hook, line and sinker. It had just taken some time.
Suddenly all the breath seemed to be sucked out of Sophie’s lungs. Elena and Nick’s relationship had been a bumpy affair, but Elena had persevered and she had won out in the end. Sophie believed that Elena had won Nick because what they shared had been real and true in the first place. But the relationship could easily have failed if Elena hadn’t taken the initiative and risked herself by sleeping with Nick in unpromising circumstances. Twice.
Sophie took a deep breath and tried to stay calm, which was difficult because her mind was going a million miles an hour. Usually she was guarded, logical: smart. She did not let emotion carry her away. She did not try to win a man, especially not an alpha male like Ben, because alphas were dominant and predatory and they preferred to do the hunting.
But this was different. They were on a darkened terrace, with the perfumed night pressing in around them. Heated awareness pulsed through her as she grappled with the dangerous knowledge that Ben still wanted her.
It wasn’t love, not even close.
But it was a start.
If Elena had worked with Nick—who, let’s face it, had been an extremely unpromising boyfriend—Sophie could work with Ben. In that moment a world of possibilities opened up and a year of wallowing in victimhood was gone. She was back to her normal ultraorganized, controlling self with a project to manage, and that project was Ben Sabin.
She closed the distance between them. “Let’s not worry about the commitment issue right now,” she said smoothly, her palms gliding over his shoulders.
A jolt of pure sensual awareness hit Ben with all the force of a freight train. But, as Sophie wound her arms around his neck, he also couldn’t help noticing the odd expression on her face, as if she was assessing him for a position in one of her successful luxury fashion stores. As if he was an employee with hidden potential she was determined to unlock.
Keeping a tight leash on his control, he stared down into a face that had fascinated him from the moment he had first seen Sophie two-and-a-half years ago. He had just taken the job as construction manager with Nick. With liquid dark eyes, cheekbones to die for, a firm chin and a distractingly husky voice, Sophie Messena was drop-dead gorgeous in anyone’s language.
He was also aware that it was not just how Sophie looked that attracted him, because she had an identical twin who looked and sounded exactly the same. And he didn’t feel a thing for Francesca.
When he was near Sophie, something happened. It was like being plugged into an electrical outlet; every cell in his body tightened and all brain function stopped. She could have a bag over her head and he would still recognize her.
“I thought you didn’t want this,” he ground out, “that you weren’t a glass half-empty girl.”
And it was a fact that, with Sophie, half a glass was all he could afford to offer. As mesmerizingly attractive as she was, she was exactly the kind of pampered, spoiled rich girl on the hunt for a wealthy husband or a trophy affair he usually went out of his way to avoid.
Six years ago when he had established his first construction business, he had done the one thing he had promised himself he would never do, after being caught up in the messy breakup of his parents’ marriage: he had fallen for a rich man’s daughter. Even knowing the pitfalls, he had worked to attain her and to hold her. Then, when a financial crash had almost bankrupted him, Melissa had walked the same day. She had handed him back his engagement ring and smoothly told him that she could never marry someone poor. To rub salt in the wound, within the week she had moved in with an extremely wealthy and older business competitor.
Since then Ben had worked hard to rebuild his finances, climbing corporate ladders as he managed construction for other firms. In that time his experiences with women had done nothing to change his mind. He knew how it worked; money married money.
Sophie, who had been born with a diamond-encrusted spoon in her mouth, wouldn’t have looked at him twice if he hadn’t been successful. And the stakes had recently gotten a whole lot higher. When he had started working for Nick Messena, there had been an eighteen-month period during which Sophie had kept a cool distance despite the attraction that had sizzled between them.
A year ago, he had inherited a multibillion-dollar construction and real estate business and Sophie Messena had slept with him. He had to consider that her main focus wasn’t him, personally, but his inheritance.
It didn’t feel that way right now, though. She lifted up on her toes and fitted herself against him as if their last passionate encounter had been just hours ago and the past year of separation hadn’t happened. Close enough that there was no way she could miss exactly how much he still wanted her.
“I’ve changed my mind,” Sophie murmured, a husky catch to her voice.
Ben’s body tightened on a powerful surge of desire. Maybe he could have kept his perspective, he thought grimly, if he hadn’t seen her on Tobias Hunt’s arm. Something fierce and primal had risen up inside him. And it had only grown worse when he learned who Tobias was. Ben’s cool, controlled plan to seduce Sophie Messena in order to put to rest the fatal attraction he had so far failed to shake had crashed and burned.
If Hunt had been one of the normal run of men Sophie had been dating—soft, manicured men who took orders and drove desks—Ben could have maintained his aloofness. However, there was nothing ordinary or even remotely domesticated about Hunt despite the fact that he had spent several months working for Gabriel Messena, presumably to gain experience with playing the financial market. Aside from being the scion of an international manufacturing conglomerate, which, among other things specialized in high-tech military equipment, Hunt was ex-military.
Even though Ben
