Mayfield,” someone called. “Welcome home.”
She glanced over to see Dolan, her father’s driver, standing near the gate. Her gaze veered momentarily past his lanky, black-clad frame, but she recognized no one else. She chided herself for thinking her parents might have ventured to the airport to welcome her home. Sumner and Marianna Mayfield hadn’t wanted her to go on the bike trek in the first place, regardless of its role in raising funds for charity.
Unseemly, her mother had called it. Just as she had found Claire’s more sculpted physique unfeminine. Apparently it was better to be wisp thin and sickly all the time like herself.
During the months leading up to the trip, her father had appeared impressed by her dedication to the grueling training regimen she’d put together. Ultimately, though, he’d considered the entire endeavor unnecessary.
“Write a check, kitten,” he’d suggested.
Checks took care of all sorts of things—even idealistic young men who were not deemed suitable hus-bands for the debutante daughter of a wealthy Chicago businessman.
Mayfields were good at writing checks. And Claire had been good at taking her parents’ advice rather than risking her father’s wrath or upsetting her mother, who was always suffering from some malady or another. This time, though, she’d held her ground. This time she’d been determined to do more than donate money, which God knew she had in abundance thanks to her trust fund. Instead, she’d decided to put herself to the test. She’d had something to prove—to the people who believed she would never have to earn her way, and to herself.
So far, she was happy with the results.
“I trust your trip was uneventful,” Dolan inquired politely, taking the bag from her hands. The courtesy was second nature and one he was paid to perform. Even so, it startled Claire, who nearly snatched it back. In a matter of weeks, she had come to rely on herself.
“Not exactly.”
She recalled the bruises, scrapes and blisters, many of which had not yet healed. Nothing about the trip had been easy, but even as she sighed, she was smiling. She hadn’t felt this rejuvenated, this motivated, this damned purposeful in a very long time.
Dolan smiled in return, mistaking the meaning of her sigh. “Don’t worry. I’ll have you at your condo in short order. Traffic should be light this time of day. I’ll have you sitting poolside, sipping an apple martini well before dinner.”
Claire shook her head, though, and retrieved from her purse the folded classified section of the previous day’s Chicago Sun-Times. She’d picked it up during her layover in Los Angeles and had already made the necessary calls to set up appointments with Realtors. Handing it to the driver, she said, “Actually, I need to make a couple of stops first.”
Dolan’s graying eyebrows rose as he studied the circled addresses. “Apartments, miss?” And she knew he was good and flummoxed when he overstepped his bounds by asking, “Why do you need to look at apartments?”
“I’ve decided to find a place in the city.”
“In the city?” he repeated blankly.
Claire nodded. “I’m moving.”
And this time that would involve more than having the staff tote her belongings to a condominium her parents owned not far from their sprawling suburban Chicago estate. She’d done that after the marriage fiasco. Looking back, she realized what a pitiful attempt at independence it had been. No wonder her parents hadn’t tried to talk her out of it. This time they would.
Dolan’s startled reaction was mild compared to what she suspected her parents’ would be. Her father was going to erupt. After all, how could he continue to run her life if she was living an hour away in the city? Her mother would probably suffer one of her debilitating migraines brought on by emotional stress.
Claire wasn’t looking forward to the coming confrontation any more than she was eager to contact Ethan. To hear his deep voice again. To lose herself in the vivid green of his eyes—eyes that no doubt would brim with condemnation.
“I can do it,” she murmured.
“Pardon me, miss?”
She lifted her shoulders in a shrug. “Sometimes you just have to trust yourself, take your hand off the brake and let momentum carry you all the way down the hill.”
She’d done that on the descent into Tiger Leaping Gorge, heart jammed in her throat and blocking her scream as the bike’s narrow tires had raced over bumpy and winding cobblestone roads that hugged the mountain on one side and dropped away into the gorge on the other.
Safely at the bottom, she’d pumped her fists in the air and whooped in triumph. Of course, once the adrenaline rush had abated, she’d heaved the contents of her stomach on to the tops of her shoes.
Dolan eyed her curiously, but merely nodded. “Of course, miss.”
He didn’t have a clue what she was talking about. For that matter, Claire herself had only just begun to understand all of the lessons she’d learned.
She just hoped to God that when she found Ethan it would be far less painful and humiliating than when she’d hit that rock on the second day of their trip and wound up flying headfirst over the handlebars.
CHAPTER ONE
DID THE MANhave to be so good-looking?
That was Claire’s first thought as she stared at the color photograph of Ethan Seaver.
It wasn’t fair. He’d been approaching Greek god status a decade ago, with his deep-set green eyes, sexy mouth and well-defined cheekbones. He’d only improved with age.
The picture on the Web site was a head and shoulders shot, a professional portrait of a professional man. She could just make out the knot of a tie and the collar of a snowy-white shirt. She tried to concentrate on these innocuous details rather than the leanness of his cheeks or the sculpted line of his jaw. Even so, as she unscrewed the cap from a bottle of spring water and took a swig, she was wishing for something with a little more kick.
Locating her ex had proved remarkably simple. She hadn’t even required the services of a private investigator. All she’d had to do was type Ethan’s name into the search field on her laptop computer and hit Enter. Within seconds the search engine had spat back several screenfuls of possible matches to her rather broad inquiry.
The first couple of hits had provided links to newspaper stories, one from The Detroit Free Press and another from a respected national business journal. She had dismissed both at first, assuming it was a different Ethan Seaver who had been named as one of the thirty American entrepreneurs under forty to watch. But then her gaze had caught on the third entry down: Seaver Security Solutions, Ethan J. Seaver, president. Her heart had thumped and the blood had pounded noisily in her ears. Yet Claire swore she could hear his voice.
I plan to own my own company, Claire. A security firm protecting the assets of the Fortune 500. Some day even the likes of your father will be seeking my advice.
He’d told her that not long after proposing, as if wanting to assure her that his ambitions reached well beyond remaining a second-shift worker who punched a clock for somebody else.
