The Ultimate Playboy(3)
Hell no!
She closed it and sat back, fighting the rising nausea.
Desperate was fast becoming her middle name but Ruby refused to accept that the answers to her woeful financial predicament would be found in a skin den.
Biting her inside lip, she exhaled and typed again: Where’s Narciso Valentino tonight?
Her breath caught as the search engine fired back a quick response. The first linked the domain of a popular tabloid newspaper—one she’d become rudely acquainted with when she’d received her first laptop at ten, logged on and seen her parents splashed over the home page. In the fourteen years since then, she’d avoided the tabloid, just as she avoided her parents nowadays.
Ignoring the ache in her chest, she clicked on the next link that connected to a location app.
For several seconds, she couldn’t believe how easily she’d found him. She read the extensive list of celebrities who’d announced their whereabouts freely, including one attending a movie premiere right now in Times Square.
Grabbing the remote, she flipped the TV channel to the entertainment news station, and, sure enough, the movie star was flashing a million-dollar smile at his adoring fans.
She glanced back at the location next to Narciso Valentino’s name.
Riga—a Cuban-Mexican nightclub in the Flatiron District in Manhattan.
Glancing at the clock above the TV, she made a quick calculation. If she hurried, she could be there in under an hour. Her heart hammered as she contemplated what she was about to do.
She despised confrontation almost as much as her parents thrived on it. But after weeks of trying to find a solution, she’d reached the end of her tether.
She’d won the NMC reality TV show and scraped together every last cent to come up with her half of the hundred-thousand-dollar capital needed to get her restaurant—Dolce Italia—up and running.
Any help she could’ve expected from Simon Whittaker, her ex-business partner and owner of twenty-five per cent of Dolce Italia, was now a thing of the past.
She clenched her fist as she recalled their last confrontation.
Finding out that the man she’d developed feelings for was married with a baby on the way had been shock enough. Simon trying to talk her into sleeping with him despite his marital status had killed any emotion she’d ever had for him.
He’d sneered at her wounded reaction to his intended infidelity. But having witnessed it up close with gut-wrenching frequency in her parents’ marriage, she was well versed in its consequences.
Cutting Simon out of her life once she’d seen his true colours had been a painful but necessary decision.
Of course, without his business acumen she’d had to take full financial responsibility of Dolce Italia. Hence her search for Narciso Valentino. She needed him to stand by his company’s promise. A contract was a contract....
* * *
A gleaming black limo was pulling up as she rounded the corner of the block that housed the nightclub. The journey had taken an extra half-hour because of a late-running train. Wincing at the pinch of her high heels on the uneven pavestones, she hurried towards Riga’s red-bricked façade.
She was navigating her way around puddles left by the recent April shower, when deep male laughter snagged her attention.