Tonight, she had had enough. She stilled as a tall, commanding figure came into her focus.
Clio blinked, the impact of those jade green eyes and generous but scornful mouth instantaneous.
Stefan Bianco.
Her first instinct was to head for the elevator before he could see her, leave the party. Even her parents, with their disapprovingly stifling silence, would have been welcome. She didn’t want the man she had known a long time ago, one of her oldest friends, to see her tonight.
Stefan, Christian, Rocco and Zayed made up the Columbia Four—the four young men she had known when they had all been at university together, who had turned into supersuccessful, ultrawealthy, sought-after bachelors for whom the world was a playground and its most beautiful women were playthings.
But before they had all become successful in their own right, she had known them, had seen them every day for four years, and had shared her deepest fears and hopes with them.
And the fact that she wanted to run away from one of the few people who had genuinely known her, had understood her, left a bitter taste in her mouth.
Was she that much of a failure, then? Was she running away from Stefan or was she running away from what she had become?
* * *
Stefan Bianco looked around at the glittering cityscape of Manhattan and gritted his jaw tight.
The vibrant pulse of it, the memories from almost a decade ago everywhere he looked, his own sheer naïveté when he had studied at Columbia with his other three friends—the memories rose up around him like a specter that wouldn’t let him breathe easy even for a few minutes.
And yet, as the head of a multimillion luxury real estate company, New York was unavoidable even though he tried to reduce the number of times he came here.
But this time, he had a reason for being at this exact party, on top of the Empire State Building.
It was high time he found a way to stop Jackson Smith.
The memory of his executive assistant Marco’s whitened face as he lay against the hospital bed after his suicide attempt, Marco’s five-year-old daughter’s chubby face wreathed in confusion as she asked Stefan about what had happened to her papa…
The powerlessness he had felt was like acid in his stomach.
Jackson had swindled Marco out of his savings, pushed him to bankruptcy, until his assistant had lost everything, had seen no way out…
The eviscerating self-doubt, the sense of being an utter failure, of letting down everyone that had counted on him—looking into Marco’s eyes had been like looking at his own reflection of a few years ago.
Guilt corroded his insides. If only he had found a way to stop Jackson years ago when he had swindled Stefan himself…
It had been the worst time of his life—Serena’s betrayal, his guilt driving him to not return to his parents in Sicily and the around-the-clock hours he had worked to secure a deal…
He had lost the little he had made because of Jackson’s treachery. He would have been in Marco’s place if it hadn’t been for his friends Rocco, Christian and Zayed anchoring him, if he hadn’t already been woken up to the reality of life by Serena, the woman who had professed to love him.
This time Jackson needed to be stopped, whatever it took.
As though Stefan thinking Jackson’s name invoked the very devil himself, the American laughed in a group not two feet from where Stefan stood.
A short blonde, dressed in jeans and a tight T-shirt, dragged Jackson away, interrupting the conversation. His craggy face tight with tension, Jackson leaned toward another woman in the group, a tall redhead, and whispered something.
An apology, Stefan assumed. That didn’t quite work, given the way the woman flinched and turned her head away. More curious than ever, Stefan looked on as the woman’s bare shoulders stiffened, bones jutting out of her shoulders.
Everything about her posture screamed tension and something more. Jackson let himself be dragged away even as the tall woman stood ramrod straight, her head held high and so perfectly still that Stefan wondered if she would break if someone blew a wisp of breath her way.
Her face wreathed in shadows, there was a quiet dignity to her. And then he noticed her hair. Even tucked away from that angular face and scrunched tight into an elaborate knot, that red hair was as unmistakable as the narrow, upturned nose and stubborn tilt of the chin.
That face would be perfectly oval and her eyes green, like glittering emeralds. When she smiled, one corner of her mouth turned upward in a crooked slant.
Clio Norwood, the one woman he had never tamed.
Every cell inside him went on high alert, as if he had been infused with a charge of live current. What the hell was Clio doing with Jackson Smith?
There had been intimacy in the way Jackson had bent closer to her and whispered something, in the way his open palm had caressed her bare arm.
Yet Stefan could feel the tension in her as the silence of the group reverberated against her. Saw the speculative and intrusively hungry glances cast her way. Noted the way she retreated into herself as an older woman inquired something.
And knowing Jackson and his perfidious ways, a thousand kinds of thoughts swarmed in on Stefan.
Anything even remotely connected to Jackson, Stefan didn’t touch with a pole. Yet, he found himself moving toward her, his gaze savoring the sight of her. Inch by glorious inch, light bathed that long neck and her face.
He stilled, supremely aware of the insistent beat of his own pulse, of the heightened charge of his own breath.
Clio was just as utterly gorgeous as she had always been, if a little too thin.
His mind cast back to over a decade ago, to his university days with Rocco, Christian and Zayed—who’d become more brothers than friends—to the unparalleled enthusiasm of learning the world and knowing that it could be at their feet, to the glory of discovering women and the pull they held for them, and to Clio Norwood—the woman who had known the Columbia Four as well as they had known each other.
Every inch an aristocrat she no longer wanted to be and used to privileged playboys just like them, she had often laughed at their exploits, seeing their escapades with other women with a decidedly amused resignation and distance. She’d rejected his come-ons that first year, as easily as she had shrugged away the elaborate wealth and standing she had been born into.
Of all the men on the planet, the last man he would have envisioned Clio to be with was Jackson Smith.
In no mood to get into a sparring match with Jackson again, especially when his patience was already dangerously low, Stefan waited. Minutes piled on top of each other. With a graceful tilt of her head, Clio excused herself from the group.