try the other, too.” Then she turned on her heel and headed for the next group.
“Perhaps I will,” Riley said, watching her sashay through the crowd.
Finn rolled his eyes. Keeping Riley focused on the subject at hand sometimes required superhuman abilities. “Do you ever think about anything other than women?”
“Do you ever think about anything other than business?” Riley countered.
“I’m the owner, Riley. I don’t have a choice but to keep my eye on the ball and my focus on the company.” He’d had a time where he’d focused on a relationship—and that had cost him dearly. Never again.
“There’s always a choice, Finn.” Riley grinned. “I prefer the ones that end with a woman like that in my bed, and a smile on my face.” He arched a brow in the direction of the waitress, who shot him a flirtatious smile back. “A woman like that one.”
“You’re a dog.”
Riley shrugged off the teasing. His playboy tendencies had been well documented by the Boston media. As the youngest McKenna, getting away with murder had been his middle name almost since birth. Funny how stereotypical the three boys had turned out. Finn, the eldest, the responsible one, working since he was thirteen. Brody, the middle brother, the peacemaker, who worked a respectable, steady job as a family physician. And then Riley, the youngest, and thus overindulged by their mother, and later, by their grandmother, who still doted on the “baby” of the family. Riley had turned being a wild child into a sport…and managed to live a life almost entirely devoid of responsibility.
Finn sometimes felt like he’d been responsible from the day he took his first steps. He’d started out as a one-man shop right out of college, and built McKenna Designs into a multioffice corporation designing projects all over the world. His rapid growth, coupled with a recession that fell like an axe on the building industry, and one mistake he wished he could go back in time and undo, had damaged his bottom line. Nearly taken him to bankruptcy.
“Carpe diem, Finn,” Riley said. “You should try it sometime. Get out of the office and live a little.”
“I do.”
Riley laughed. Out loud. “Right.”
“Running a company is a demanding job,” Finn said. Across the room, the woman he wanted to talk to was still making small talk with the other partygoers. To Finn, the room seemed like an endless sea of blue and black, neckties and polished loafers. Only two people stood out in the dark ocean before him—
Riley, who had bucked the trend by wearing a collarless white shirt under a sportscoat trimmed to fit his physique.
And Eleanor Winston, who’d opted for a deep cranberry dress that wrapped around her slender frame, emphasizing her small waist, and hourglass shape. She was the only woman in a colorful dress, the only one who looked like she was truly at a cocktail party, not a funeral, as Riley would say. She had on high heels in a light neutral color, making her legs seem impossibly long. They curved in tight calf muscles, leading up to creamy thighs and—
Concentrate.
He had a job to do and getting distracted would only cost him in the end.
“You seem to make it harder than most, though. For Pete’s sake, you have a sofa bed in your office.” Riley chuckled and shook his head. “If that doesn’t scream lonely bachelor with no life, I don’t know what does. Unless Miss Marstein is keeping you warm at night.”
Finn choked on the sip of beer in his mouth. His assistant was an efficient, persnickety woman in her early sixties who ran his office and schedule with an iron fist. “Miss Marstein is old enough to be my grandmother.”
“And you’re celibate enough to be a monk. Get away from the blueprints, Hawk, and live a little.”
Finn let out a sigh. Riley didn’t get it. He’d always been the younger, irresponsible one, content to live off the inheritance from their parents’ death, rather than carry the worries of a job. Riley didn’t understand the precarious position McKenna Designs was in right now. How one mistake could cost him all the ground he’d regained, one painful step at a time. People were depending on Finn to succeed. His employees had families, mortgages, car payments. He couldn’t let them down. It was about far greater things than Finn’s reputation or bottom line.
Finn bristled. “I work long days and yes, sometimes nights. It’s more efficient to have a sofa bed—”
“Efficient? Try depressing.” Riley tipped his beer toward the woman across from them. “If you were smart, you’d think about getting wild with her on that sofa bed. Sleep’s overrated. While sex, on the other hand…” He grinned. “Can’t rate it highly enough.”
“I do not have time for something like that. The company has been damaged by this roller-coaster economy and…” He shook his head. Regret weighed down his shoulders. “I never should have trusted her.”
Riley placed a hand on Finn’s shoulder. “Stop beating yourself up. Everyone makes mistakes.”
“Still, I never should have trusted her,” he said again. How many times had he said that to himself? A hundred times? Two hundred? He could say it a thousand and it wouldn’t undo the mistake.
“You were in love. All men act like idiots when they’re in love.” Riley grinned. “Take it from the expert.”
“You’ve been in love? Real, honest-to-goodness love?”
Riley shrugged. “It felt real at the time.”
“Well, I won’t make that mistake again.” Finn took a deep gulp of beer.
“You’re hopeless. One bad relationship is no reason to become a hermit.”
One bad relationship? Finn had fallen for a woman who had stolen his top clients, smeared his reputation and broken his heart. That wasn’t a bad relationship, it was the sinking of the Titanic. He’d watched his parents struggle through a terrible marriage, both of them unhappily mismatched, and didn’t want to make the same mistake.
“I’m not having this conversation right now.” Finn’s gaze went to Ellie Winston again. She had moved on to another group of colleagues. She greeted nearly everyone she saw, with a smile, a few words, a light touch. And they responded in kind. She had socializing down to an art. The North Carolina transplant had made friends quickly. Only a few weeks in the city and she was winning over the crowd of their peers with one hand tied behind her back. Yes, she’d be an asset to his company and his plan. A good one. “I’m focused on work.”
“Seems to me you’re focused on her.” Riley grinned.
“She’s a means to an end, nothing more.”
“Yeah, well, the only ending I see for you, Finn, is one where you’re old and gray, surrounded by paperwork and sleeping alone in that sofa bed.”
“You’re wrong.”
For a while, Finn had thought he could have both the life and the job. He’d even bought the ring, put a downpayment on a house in the suburbs. He’d lost his head for a while, a naive young man who believed love could conquer everything. Until that love had stabbed him in the back.
Apparently
