Ben pushed back the cuff of his jacket and checked his watch. “The one I’d have to be brain-dead to date?”
Hannah gave him what passed for an apologetic glance, although it was so brief he almost missed it. “Sorry about that. I should have waited until we were out of the taxi before I made that comment.”
Because the taxi driver had clearly taken the quote straight to the press, no doubt for a healthy cash payment.
“You shouldn’t have said it, period. I haven’t seen Sophie for a year.”
Though the very last time he had seen her was still indelibly imprinted on his mind. Her ridiculously long lashes curled against delicately molded cheekbones. Dark hair trailing down the sleek, elegant curve of her naked back. The one slim arm flung across his pillow as she slept.
Sophie Messena had in no way looked like the A-list party girl she was purported to be, and that was what had fooled him. There was a cool directness to her glance, a clear intelligence and a habit of command that should have annoyed him but which he had found more than a little fascinating…
Hannah stopped and pinned him with her brown gaze. “You want my opinion? You should have picked another time to sign this contract. One when Sophie wasn’t around. The fact that you chose a time when she would be around says something. You’re supposed to be getting into bed with The Messena Group, not Sophie Messena.”
Ben repressed the urge to pinch his nose. He remembered a time, pre–Sophie Messena, when the conversations he’d had with business colleagues were about managing risk, contractual obligations, closing out deals and headhunting the right people. Now everyone seemed to have an opinion about his dysfunctional love life. “There’s a new deal to be signed, and this resort is the last project I managed for Nick before I left Messena Construction. I need to be here.”
Hannah made a rude sound. “And that’s another thing. If you get tangled up with Sophie Messena again, Nick is going to react. Big-time. You can kiss any future deals goodbye.”
She trundled past the receptionist’s desk and started toward an open door at the end of a broad corridor. As Ben strolled toward Nick’s office, he noted the lineup of Medinian oil paintings that decorated light-washed walls. The paintings, all from the Mediterranean island of Medinos, were old, priceless and very familiar, because Ben had seen them on a daily basis when they had adorned the office of Nick’s Dolphin Bay Resort in New Zealand.
Despite the Messena family leaving Medinos and most of them settling in New Zealand, their connection to Medinos was still strong. The abiding theme of battle-scarred warrior ancestors was hard to miss, the message clear: don’t mess with Nick Messena or his baby sisters.
Hannah was right, he thought grimly. Nick had overlooked his sleeping with Sophie a year ago because, like everyone else, he thought Sophie had ditched him, and that it was over. Ben was pretty sure Nick had actually felt sorry for him. But if Ben got involved with Sophie again, the gloves would be off. He would have to either cut ties with The Messena Group or marry Sophie Messena.
Given that it would be a cold day in hell before he would make his father’s mistake—a mistake that had led to suicide—and marry a woman as calculating and career-obsessed as Sophie Messena, he would be crazy to take the risk.
Ben stepped into Nick’s swanky office and lifted a hand to Nick and John Atraeus, who was some kind of a distant relative and, now, Nick’s new business partner. As he joined them out on the terrace, he took in the tropical heat, the balmy air and impressive view of Miami as it flowed around the coastline, glittering softly in the night. Broodingly, he conceded that he could have picked another time to meet. Like tomorrow morning, for example, when John and Nick, who were both here for the launch party, would still be around.
But the truth was that, a year on, he was no nearer to forgetting about Sophie than he had been when he had walked out of his hotel suite in Dolphin Bay, leaving her asleep in his bed.
He still wanted her, and the frustration and restless dissatisfaction that had followed that one night had somehow managed to nix his love life completely.
Just to admit that annoyed Ben. It meant he was still affected by the kind of obsessive, addictive desire he had decided would never rule him again.
The problem was, he had tried abstinence. That hadn’t worked, so he had tried dating, specifically women who did not look Sophie. That hadn’t worked, either, because none of the pretty blondes he had dated had truly interested him.
Which left one other strategy to get Sophie out of his system. A crazy, risk-taking option that was the military equivalent of picking up an unstable, unexploded bomb.
Getting gorgeous, fascinating Sophie Messena, back in his bed…just one more time.
Hell would freeze over before Sophie would allow Ben Sabin close to her again.
Sophie Messena took the elevator of her brother’s newest resort down to the ground floor. The only reason she was here tonight was for the express purpose of confronting Ben for his horrible behavior in sleeping with her a year ago, then ditching her without so much as a word.
Sophie tensed at the thought of seeing Ben again.
He was six feet two inches of broad, sleek, muscular male, his dark hair cut short, his jaw tough, with the kind of cool blue gaze that regularly made women go weak at the knees.
But not her. Not anymore.
Tonight she was determined to exorcise the last dregs of the fatal attraction to Ben that had dominated her life for two-and-a-half years. Finally she would be able to move on.
It would be over.
Forcing herself to relax, she exited the elevator and strolled into the foyer with barely a hitch to her stride and with a smoothness it had taken weeks of physiotherapy and repetitive exercises to achieve. A faint stiffness was still discernible in her lower back, courtesy of the dislocation injury she had sustained when her SUV swerved off one of Dolphin Bay’s narrow country roads eleven months ago.
That was three weeks after Ben had left her bed following their one tumultuous night together. She had thrown away his brief note thanking her for a “nice” time.
Nice.
As if leading up to that night, there hadn’t been eighteen months of a sultry, electrifying attraction that had made it difficult for her to think about anyone but Ben Sabin. Not to mention the frustrating encounters that had fizzled into nothing, before she had finally made the desperate decision, on Ben’s last night in Dolphin Bay, to go out on a limb and seduce him.
She stopped opposite the reception desk near an alcove decorated with palms at which she had arranged to meet her date for the night. She checked her watch. He was late, which was annoying because it was imperative that she not be seen alone tonight.
For an unsettling moment, she had trouble remembering her date’s name. It wasn’t until she spotted him walking toward her that it came back to her. Since she had met Tobias, a broker who worked for her banker brother, Gabriel, only a couple of times, and both of those times only in passing, when he had been out on a date with her twin, Francesca, maybe that wasn’t surprising.
As
