take him back to her place for the ‘coffee’ he’d stupidly passed up on the night they’d first met.
Then his oldest brother, Dante, had walked into the empty room and completely obliterated the moment.
‘Sam, we’re leav—Uh...sorry, junior, am I interrupting something?’ he’d said smoothly.
Considering Sam had been a breath away from finding out if Ruby still tasted as delicious as he remembered, of course his brother had been interrupting, and the big idiot had known it!
Ruby’s eyes had gone from glazed to mortified in the space of a heartbeat and she’d pushed out of his arms just as her date had arrived to find out what had delayed her.
Extreme sexual attraction, Sam had wanted to tell the other man.
Ruby had mumbled something about her jacket, quickly grabbed it from the back of her chair and hadn’t looked back as she’d walked away. She’d been cool to him the whole day, he remembered now, and he often wondered why that was.
He also wondered what it was about her that made his libido override his iron-clad self-control where she was concerned, but he knew he’d work it out one day. And, given their shared profession, and personal connections, it would probably be soon.
His heart pounded slow and heavy inside his chest just at the thought of seeing her again. He’d deliberately not asked Valentino about her over the past couple of years. Why give his loved-up brother any indication that he had a thing for the beautiful lawyer? He’d only make more out of it than there was and the last thing Sam wanted was to raise Miller’s awareness of how attractive he found her best friend.
But their paths would surely cross and he was curious as to how he would feel about her when it happened. Who knew, perhaps the incendiary attraction that sent his system into overdrive whenever she was in the room would have finally worn off? He’d lost interest in plenty of other women before. Surely Ruby wouldn’t be any different in the end.
He swirled the Scotch in his glass. Did Ruby still remember the night they’d met? Did she still think about it? And did she still work for Clayton Smythe or had she moved on to new pastures? He’d left the firm himself shortly after that night to start his own practice in LA and had ruthlessly suppressed all interest in her, so he had no idea what she was up to now. Some sixth sense warned him that, for all her bold confidence, Ruby was a soft touch deep down and therefore not to be trifled with. Not that he planned to trifle with her on any level. It would be pointless in the end and Sam had stopped chasing pointless passions after watching his world-famous father chase his motor-racing dreams to the exclusion of all else.
Theirs had never been a close relationship, his father dying in a tragic racing accident before Sam had been able to gain his attention or his approval—though God knew he’d wasted enough time trying to win both. He still remembered the time he’d trailed his father around the racetrack on his ninth birthday. It had been a disaster waiting to happen. He’d sat there all day, waiting to spend time with his father, only to have his old man drive off at the end of the day without him. As usual his father had been so preoccupied with work he’d completely forgotten Sam was even there. Fortunately one of the office girls had eventually noticed him sitting on a sofa, swinging his legs, and called his father on the phone. Sam had then been stuck in a taxi and delivered home alone.
His mother had been furious with his father but Sam had brushed it off. That had been the last time his father had kicked his pride to the kerb, Sam had made sure of it. Not that it mattered now. He’d learned a valuable lesson that day and he’d never hung himself out to dry like that again. Never made anything so important that he couldn’t walk away from it at the end of the day.
‘A good thing,’ he muttered into the ensuing silence, pulling out his phone and switching his mind from the past, where it didn’t belong, to the present, where it did.
He was due to arrive in Sydney around noon and head straight into meetings with his new business partner before changing into some fancy-dress costume for a party he’d promised to attend.
A few months back he’d won a huge copyright case for Gregor Herzog and his wife—Australia’s darling couple of the theatre world—when someone had tried to pass the couple’s costume designs off as their own. Over the course of the case the Herzogs had become firm friends and they had invited him to their annual masquerade ball—a huge charity extravaganza that just happened to coincide with Gregor’s fiftieth birthday celebration this year.
‘Please come, Sam, my good friend. It would be an honour to raise a toast to you on my birthday.’
Sam already regretted his somewhat rash agreement to attend but a promise was a promise and Sam’s word was his law.
Fortunately, he rarely suffered jet lag, but still, he hoped that Gregor and Marion wouldn’t mind if he only made a fly-in and fly-out appearance. What with family obligations to fulfil the rest of the weekend, and a new company to take control of on Monday morning, he didn’t have a lot of time for frivolities like masquerade balls. Or thinking about gorgeous blondes with long legs, he mused, that strange, restless feeling returning as Ruby Clarkson once again jumped into his head.
He shook her image loose, unfolded his large frame from the chair and fetched his laptop from where his co-pilot had stowed it prior to take-off. The fact that the woman could turn him on from twelve thousand miles away should be mildly disconcerting—and it was! It made him realise that at some point he was going to have to figure out how to get the troublesome blonde out of his head. Something he hoped to put off for as long as possible.
THE THEME ON the gold-leaf invitation for Sydney’s most renowned masquerade ball this year had been ‘daring, romantic, seductive...’
Tick, tick and tick, Ruby thought, stifling a yawn and giving a smile she hoped conveyed Having a great time and not I wish I was sipping this glass of Riesling at home on my sofa in front of the latest instalment of Law & Order.
And wearing comfy pyjamas, Ruby mused longingly as she took in the packed ornate ballroom.
A lavish ball was the last place she wanted to be after a gruelling eighty-hour working week that had gone from bad to worse and still required more hours to be put in, but she was here in support of her sister, so leaving wasn’t an option just yet.
And she supposed it was an interesting interlude from her everyday life sitting in her poky little law office, fighting the good fight. When else would she get the chance to join the who’s who of the theatre world in a multimillion-dollar Point Piper mansion with unrivalled harbour views beyond the infinity pool?
Everywhere Ruby looked there was a dazzling display of elaborately costumed guests milling about and talking in a profusion of excitement and colour. It was like stepping back in time with women in wigs and masks and men with feather-plumed hats drinking impossibly elegant flutes of champagne that sparkled like liquid gold beneath the light of a thousand chandeliers. Frescoes of cherubs and deer stared down from the ceiling and the iconic gunmetal-grey Sydney Harbour Bridge glowed through the open French doors, reminding everyone that they were in fact in Sydney and not visiting some Venetian mansion on the banks of the Grand Canal during Carnevale.
Ruby surreptitiously adjusted the neckline of her fitted gown, which kept slipping to reveal a little too much cleavage for her liking. She was supposed to be
