“Suz, you’re here!” Rosa threw her arms around Suzanne mere seconds after she’d stepped inside the gallery.
Drake was right there beside her, and it wasn’t until he let Suzanne out of his own hug that she was able to ask, “How’s tonight going so far? Are you both doing okay?”
Suzanne knew how nervous Rosa had been about letting anyone know that Drake was painting her. Rosa had been convinced that she would taint him with the stain not only of her bad-girl reputation from the show, but also from the pictures that had been taken of her naked without her permission and leaked to the press earlier that year.
Drake pulled Rosa against him at the same moment that she tucked herself under his arm. Yet again, it struck Suzanne what a great fit they were. Having to deal with the nude-photo scandal had made Rosa draw deeply from an inner well of strength she hadn’t realized had been there all along. But Drake had immediately seen how amazing she was, and he’d been steadfast in his support.
“People can’t get enough of Drake and his paintings,” Rosa said with pride.
Suzanne knew the last thing in the world her brother cared about was impressing a bunch of art snobs. Love was all that mattered to him now, and seeing him so happy filled her heart with joy.
“Everyone is on their best behavior,” he told Suz. His expression was fiercely protective as he drew Rosa even closer. “They’d better be.”
Suzanne agreed. No one had better dare say a bad word about Rosa. All of the Sullivans had her back. Especially Suzanne, who was working on software for Rosa’s anti-cyberstalking foundation whenever she could find a spare moment.
Candace, Drake’s sharklike agent, materialized with air kisses. “Suzanne, you’re looking as gorgeous as ever. I’m sure you don’t mind if I steal Drake and his muse away to meet with an investor who is considering an enormous bid on all twelve paintings.”
Drake sent her a silent sorry over his shoulder as his agent steered them away. Grabbing a glass of champagne from a passing waiter, Suzanne enjoyed the sweet bubbles dancing on her tongue as she let herself relax for the first time in what felt like forever. She had only just begun to look around the room to see if she knew anyone else when her attention was grabbed by a man walking through the door.
Wow.
Now that was a man. Dark hair and eyes. Square jaw. Tanned skin. As a relatively tall woman, she was able to gauge a man’s height pretty accurately. Six foot four sounded right, and when you added in his broad shoulders in his dark, impeccably tailored suit, the whole package was seriously yummy.
Her mouth started to water as she watched him move through the crowd with the feral grace of a well-muscled lion. She ran the pad of her thumb over her lower lip to make sure she wasn’t actually drooling.
“Roman, over here.”
She recognized her older brother Alec’s voice. He was standing with her other brother, Harrison. They knew him?
Roman. Even his name was yummy.
As the three men did a half handshake, half hug, she was tempted to dash over to introduce herself. But past experience told her it would be better to gauge the situation first from a slight distance so that she could try to figure out Roman’s relationship to her brothers.
She’d never heard about him before, which to her way of thinking was a serious oversight on their part. Then again, her brothers had always been weird about her dating their friends. And by weird she meant that they’d forbidden their friends to so much as look at her as an available female from the time she’d started high school.
Unfortunately, nothing had changed in the past fifteen years. Alec, Harry, and Drake were more adamant than ever that no one was good enough for her, especially not the guys they hung with. For the most part, she couldn’t argue. Not when Alec had a reputation as one of the biggest bad boys in the city—so if he called someone else a player, it meant the guy was pretty darned awful.
Suzanne wasn’t at all averse to pleasure. But at thirty-one, she wasn’t particularly interested in one-night stands anymore either. She wanted what Drake and Rosa had found—a love that was deep, true, and strong.
Despite Roman’s good looks and the confident way he held himself, he didn’t strike Suzanne as a player. He seemed too watchful, too alert to everyone and everything around him, to be a guy out on the prowl.
She knew that feeling, having spent a great deal of her life on the outside of the crowd, watching. Kindergarten had been the first time she’d realized she wasn’t like the other girls. She’d been more interested in building and creating things than giggling on the playground or playing dress-up with dolls. Her outsider status had only intensified as she’d grown older. Where dreaming of boys had consumed the other girls, she’d fallen head over heels for electronics and coding. Her best friends had been the other kids in the computer club, and her first kiss had been with a fellow geek when she was a sophomore in high school—more of an experiment on both their parts than actual romantic interest. During college, she’d finally learned how to pretend to be “normal” with some major coaching from her female cousins, but it was always a huge relief to head back to her computers. She wasn’t a virgin by any means, but she’d never had a serious relationship either. She supposed the phrase married to her job wasn’t too far off the mark.