“If you weren’t my friend, I’d be burying your body out back right now.” Victor Raphael carefully put a hand on the cloth-covered table in front of him, the other hand balanced on his thigh as he listened to the auctioneer call out to the eager bidders.
“Three thousand, five hundred dollars!” the tuxedoed man shouted, his teeth a blinding white in his tanned face. “Do I hear four thousand?”
His best friend, Kingsley Diallo, didn’t look worried. “Auctioning yourself off for charity will make you feel good,” he said with a vague smile, looking around the large ballroom of one of their acquaintance’s latest mansion renovation projects gone wrong. Naked cherubs everywhere. “And it’ll make you look like less of an ass.”
Kingsley, perpetually Miami casual in a lavender V-neck shirt and celebrity-endorsed jeans, eventually settled back in his chair across from Victor, apparently satisfied that he had checked out the entire room and seen what there was to see. Victor, however, was quietly furious. Kingsley had put the services of his company up for bid without him knowing. Victor was a landscape architect, not some bored socialite’s puppet. He opened his mouth to say as much, but the auctioneer announced Raphael Design Group, effectively shutting him up. Victor snapped his eyes back to the small raised stage in the center of the room.
They were doing things the old-fashioned way, raising paddles to signal their interest in the bids. Despite the open ballroom, brightly lit by the afternoon sun, the French doors were open to let in the crisp February breeze. Or at least as crisp as February ever got in Miami. Every event like this Victor had ever seen on TV took place in shadowed rooms or unironically old European auction houses with the look of old blood money staining the silk-papered walls. But this was Miami. Why wouldn’t things be different? He’d half expected a stripper parading around in a white thong and moaning the name of each item up for bid. But maybe that spoke to his lack of class.
Despite the fact that it was his services on the line, Victor tuned out the proceedings. It didn’t matter who won. Kingsley had decided that Victor should get out of his comfort zone and had damn near pushed him out of it, so here he was, obligated to perform. For free.
His fingers flexed on top of his thighs, the muscles tense and strained. Just like the rest of him. Polite applause rippled through the room. Someone had won the auction. His fingers tightened even more.
“Nice one.” Kingsley reached over the small table to clap him on the shoulder.
Would it really be that bad to shovel dirt over his best friend’s face and leave him for dead? Maybe someone would find his traitorous body after an hour or two.
Ice cubes rattled in a glass, and he looked down to see a tumbler of ginger beer in front of him, along with a slice of German chocolate cake. He gave Kingsley a grim look but picked up the glass. The liquid was cool and stroked his tongue and throat with its effervescence as it went down.
“One day, I will kill you,” he said.
“Not today, my friend.” Kingsley drank from his own glass: whiskey neat. “Today, you’ll thank me.”
“I doubt that.”
Kingsley laughed as if he knew a secret. He dug into his own slice of chocolate cake, a dessert that was a favorite for them both. His friend was relying on bribery to soothe his temper. The cake was good, he’d grant Kingsley that.
The auction was the last event of the fund-raiser, an afternoon garden party to raise money to help local low-income kids pay for college. Victor breathed a sigh of relief that it was almost over. Soon he would get in his car and drive back to his house in the upper east side of the city, maybe even pick something up from Whole Foods to cook for dinner.
“All right!” Kingsley’s fork rattled against the now-empty dessert plate. “Let’s go meet the winner.” He picked up his whiskey.
“No. I’m done with this.” Being social wasn’t Victor’s forte.
His sister had even called him a standoffish hermit, which he’d told her was a bit redundant. He’d already donated money to the scholarship fund and even wished the high schoolers good luck, although he winced in sympathy, for them, being paraded in front of these rich idiots just so they could feel sorry for the kids and see that their money wasn’t going to waste. Or something equally stupid.
“Come on, man. You have to see who won.” Kingsley nudged him to his feet. “Not to mention you need to make arrangements to start the work.”
“That’s what phones are for.” But he allowed himself to be led across the room toward the table where the winning bidders gathered with the auctioneer and his half dozen or so assistants.
“The winning number is 191,” Kingsley hissed as they stepped into the sea of designer casual wear and perfumes.
Before Victor left his house to come to the auction, the day hadn’t been especially good. He was thinking about his sister Violet as he always did on her birthday, his already dour mood plummeting with the thought that she would have been thirty this year.
Kingsley apparently knew him too well and called to drag him out of the house and into the light of social interaction. Too bad he had no idea before he left the house of the knife Kingsley was gleefully waiting to plunge into his back. The bastard.
At a far table, he spotted a black-and-white paddle with the number Kingsley told him. Better get this over with sooner rather than later, he thought. He pushed through the crowd toward the older man who held the paddle upside down in the crook of his crossed arms.
Kingsley grabbed him. “Where are you going?”
He jerked his head toward the man holding the number of the winning bid.
But Kingsley shook his head. “Wrong number.” He squeezed Victor’s arm and pointed toward another paddle, this one held in a slender feminine hand: 191. As he watched, the woman slowly began to fan her face with the paddle. Victor swallowed.
The sight of her punched the breath from his lungs. She was damn stunning. Hair in tight and gorgeous coils around her face, skin the warm brown of the inside of a seashell. The perfect handful everywhere. And so very unlike any woman he’d ever seen that he nearly stumbled on his way to her.
It was only Kingsley’s amused presence at his side that kept Victor from tripping over his own feet. Even from across the room, there was something about the way she made him feel that beat a hard and familiar drum deep inside him. It was like fear and exhilaration all at once.
She fanned her face, and the small breeze from the auction paddle stirred the cottony hair resting around her cheeks. That hair was big, springy and wild, framing narrow and laughing eyes. One of the two women around her laughed, too, then leaned in to slap playfully at her shoulder. Her friends, Victor assumed. Two women who were pretty enough in their tight outfits, with their laughing faces and sophisticated clothes.
Next to them, the woman looked like their little sister, almost innocent in her white blazer, pale floral slacks that tapered down to her narrow calves and high-heeled pink shoes. A big necklace in the shape of a sunflower rested at her throat. She was springtime personified. From the first glance, there was nothing sensual about her, only joy in the way she stood, a radiant presence in the crowd. Then
