The Man to Be Reckoned With(23)

“Thank you for being there for me tonight, for your kindness. No one’s ever done that for me. No one’s ever let it be about me. That’s what I meant earlier. I...I will always cherish tonight. And the...sex...”

He had a feeling she was forcing herself to sound breezy.

“...it was more than I would ever have known if left to my own devices. Would never have known how beautiful it could be.” Another laugh, self-deprecating this time. “So yeah, thanks for that too, I guess.”

He couldn’t say a word, couldn’t get his vocal cords to work, couldn’t manage anything but a stilted silence. He didn’t deserve a word she said; he didn’t deserve her.

“Good night, Nathan.”

She didn’t wait for him to speak before she hung up, probably realizing he wasn’t going to say anything.

Her face disappeared from his screen, and he clenched his teeth, a soft fury vibrating through him.

He threw his phone across the room, his chest incredibly tight. He sank to the bed and instantly the smell of her, the scent of sex, hit him hard, and he buried his face in his hands. Gulped in a greedy breath.

There was an ache in this throat, something he hadn’t felt since his mother told him about his condition.

It was self-pity, it was fear, it was how he felt when his emotions were out of control.

With a curse, he swallowed it back.

No.

She wasn’t allowed to do this to him.

No woman was allowed to send him back to being that boy. No woman was allowed to pry this much emotion from him.

With a ruthlessness he had learned to survive without fear, with the resolve that had turned him from a runaway to a millionaire, he put her out of his mind. Dressed himself and ordered some coffee. Called housekeeping to change the sheets.

He didn’t want any reminder of her, of what they had done together, of how he had felt with her beneath him, of how incredibly good the intimacy with her had been. Neither could he focus on how much he wanted to repeat the night, of how he wanted to find her at the estate and sink into her bed, of how much he wanted to hold her slender body in his arms and drift into sleep...

She made him think of Nate Keys, the boy who had been desperately afraid for himself, who wanted to love and live, who wanted to be invincible. But he couldn’t be.

He turned on his laptop and went back to being the man he had trained himself to be.

Nathaniel Ramirez—billionaire, survivor and loner.





             CHAPTER TEN

OVER THE NEXT couple of weeks, Riya threw herself into the wedding preparations with a rigor that left her with zero headspace. Between her increased responsibilities at Travelogue and the wedding preparations, not to mention the toll it was taking on her to avoid her own mother while living in the same house, it was a miracle she was managing as well as she was.

But she liked it like that. Her days were busy to the point of crammed and when she fell into her bed at night, she was so exhausted that she went right to sleep.

It was only when she was doing some mundane organizational task for the wedding that she found herself thinking of Nathan. She had tried to keep her thoughts free of him. But seeing him every day wasn’t conducive to purging him from her mind. After a while, she had just given up.

“Are you well?” he had asked her the following Monday at work, his gaze intent.

She hadn’t been able to stem the heat spreading up her neck. “I’m fine,” she had said, pleased that she had sounded so steady.

He had tucked her hair behind her ear, clasped her cheek for a moment.

Her heart had thundered in her chest, everything in her yearning to keep his hand there. Because that gesture hadn’t been about heat or attraction. It had been about affection, about comfort.

Before she had done anything, however, he had jerked back. He had nodded, looked at her some more and that had been that. And taking his cue, she had thrown herself into work.

Training her mind was still one thing. And absolutely another was her body.

Every time she saw him—either at work or the house, because of course, to her growing annoyance, Nathan apparently couldn’t stay away from the house and Robert, she remembered the night they had shared.

Their one night of pleasure. Her one night of freedom from herself. And it was in the most embarrassing and humiliating ways too.

Humiliating because he didn’t seem to be facing any such problem. He was back to being the intensely driven slave driver and perfectionist Nathaniel Ramirez. The man really had to have a rock for a heart.

Embarrassing because the memories of that night crept upon her all of a sudden.

The taste of his sweat and skin when she had licked his wrist intruded on her when he extended some papers to her in a meeting full of people. She had stared at his wrist for a full thirty seconds before she grabbed the papers from him.

The velvet hardness of him moving inside her, the stroke of his fingers at her core, the way his spine had arced and the way he had shuddered when he climaxed...she couldn’t look at him and not think of what she had let him do to her.

With her late entry into the realm of physical pleasures, she understood her fascination with him. Like how he caught his lower lip with his teeth when he was thinking hard. The way he sometimes placed his palm on his chest and rubbed when he frowned.

But what she missed the most was the man she had come to know. His irrepressible energy around her, his constant teasing of her...now one of them, or both, had erected a wall of politeness. They worked together perfectly, but now they were strangers.

Having finalized the menu once again on the caterer’s online website, Riya shut her computer down.

“Riya, I want to speak to you,” her mother’s voice came from behind her.

Shaking her head, Riya shot out of her chair and grabbed her laptop. “I have nothing to say to you.”

“Then why on earth are you doing so much for the wedding?”

“For Robert. I’ll do anything for him.” Which was why she hadn’t packed her stuff and left the estate as her initial impulse had been to do.

Jackie flinched and Riya felt a stab of regret and shock. The fact that anything she said or did could even affect her mom, except in the most superficial way, was a shock in itself. But however hard she tried, she couldn’t find it in her to forgive or even forget for a little while.

Her jaw clenching and unclenching, Jackie stopped in front of her, blocking her exit. “I knew it. I knew it from the moment he stepped on the estate that he was going to ruin it all.”

Despite every intention not to fall into the guilt trap her mom was so adept at laying, Riya still found herself getting sucked in. “What are you talking about?”

“Nathan. He’s doing all this. Robert can’t stop talking about him. He wants us to leave the estate without complaint, says we can’t have the wedding here anymore because Nathan doesn’t want it. And when I argued, he raised his voice to me. Nathan’s all he can think about—”

“Robert thought he would never see Nathan again. Can’t you be happy for him? For them?”

Because Riya was incredibly happy. For both of them. A little part of her was even envious. Of course, Robert had cared about her. And she was so thankful to him for everything. But the light that came into his eyes when he spoke of Nathan made her a little sad too.

“You’re so strong, Riya. Not everyone is so...self-sufficient. I made a bad decision. It doesn’t mean I don’t love you. You can’t give up the estate just because—”

“Are you kidding me, really?”

“I’m telling you the truth. That’s what you want these days, right? I love Robert. And yes, I begin to panic when he gets mad at me. Just as I panicked when I thought your father would take you away from me.”

Her insecurity was at the root of everything Jackie did. For the first time, instead of helplessness and then anger in the face of it, Riya felt pity for her mother.

“Just because Nathan’s back doesn’t mean Robert doesn’t love you anymore. I don’t think it works like that.”

“No? Look how he’s turned you against me. For years, we’ve been each other’s support, all we’ve had, Riya. And now, just weeks after he’s back, you won’t even look at me. All these years of—”

“You were never my support. I was yours. You leaned on me when you shouldn’t have. If I’ve had even a little bit of a carefree childhood, it’s because of Robert. And if I’ve known, even for only a few hours, what it means to live, it’s only because of Nathan. So excuse me if I don’t—”

“Few hours? What’re you talking about?”

At Riya’s silence, she became even tenser. “It’s none of your business.”

Her gaze filled with shock, Jackie shook her. “You slept with him, didn’t you? Riya. How stupid are you?”

As dramatic and distasteful as she was making it out to be, Riya refused to let Jackie ruin the most perfect time of her life. “That’s grand coming from the woman who fell in love with a married man,” she shouted, hating Jackie for reducing her to this.

“At least Robert still stuck with me all these years. Nathan will leave and never look back. He’s the wrong man for you.”

The fact that Nathan was going to leave was something Riya absolutely refused to think about. But she was aware of it, at the back of her mind, gaining momentum, beginning to rush at her from all sides.