As soon as I walk into the hotel bar, I realize that I don’t know what Ethan Reid looks like.

Which is amazing, considering I’m supposed to be writing a profile about him. I know he’s in his late thirties, perpetually single, and very, very rich. He owns one of the largest lumber companies in the United States, and until recently, he was very involved in the day-to-day activities of that company.

And then two years ago, Ethan Reid disappeared.

Well, not exactly. He didn’t vanish. He still owns Reid Lumber, and he definitely still lives in Washington state somewhere. Nobody’s really sure where, including my boss, Murray Hunter. He’s an old friend of Ethan’s father, which is how we even got him to agree to do this profile. It’s strange, though, for a guy this obsessed with secrecy, you’d think he wouldn’t want anything written about him.

I chew on my lip and head over to the bar. I’m supposed to meet him here, although I’m a few minutes early. I order a drink to calm my nerves, a cranberry vodka, and I sip it as I look around the room.

Like most high-end New York hotels, this place is full of nondescript-looking business types. Suit, briefcase, fancy laptop, the whole thing. Some of them are drinking in groups, although there are a lot of guys drinking alone, and I realize that Ethan could be any one of them. I don’t know much about Ethan, except that he has something of a playboy reputation, or at least he used to, back before he disappeared. I did some research for this profile, like any good journalist would, but most of the information is dated.

There’s been nothing about him ever since he left the public eye. And weirdly enough, there aren’t any pictures of him from back before that. Normally that wouldn’t be so odd, but this guy is rich, although not exactly famous. Still, you’d think there’d be a single picture of him somewhere online, but no, I couldn’t find anything at all.

Which is annoying, since now I have to try and guess who he is. I sip my drink again, looking around, starting to get anxious. Ten minutes pass, and then another ten, and I’m slowly working up the nerve to approach one of the guys sitting alone by the windows when a new man walks into the room.

And instantly I know it’s him.

He scans the place and finally his eyes linger on me. I don’t look away from him and a small smile crosses his lips, just for a second, before vanishing. He walks over to me, head cocked.

“Mia Scott?” he asks.

I nod. “Ethan Reid.” I stand up and we shake hands. “Glad you could make it.”

“Anything for Murray,” he says, sounding a little bitter.

“Please,” I say, gesturing at the chair next to me. He sits down and orders a beer from the bartender.

I take a second to study him while he orders. I can see where the playboy reputation comes from: this guy is handsome as hell, by far the most attractive person in this bar, probably in this whole hotel. He’s easily over six foot, muscular but lean, with a close-cropped beard and piercing blue eyes. His lips are full and his hair is brushed back, though a little wild. He’s wearing jeans and a flannel shirt, the jeans faded and ripped, the flannel fraying along the edges and slightly dirty. He looks like he just came from working on a construction site, although I can tell his clothes were expensive once upon a time.

He looks at me, beer in hand, and he sighs. “Let’s get this over with.”

That surprises me, but it shouldn’t, not really. This is a young, reclusive billionaire, after all. He doesn’t exactly want to be doing this profile.

“Let’s start with the easy stuff, if that’s okay?”

He shrugs. “Go for it.”

“Where were you born?”

“Minnesota.”

“What did your parents do?”

“My mother was a physicist and my father was a writer.”

“Interesting,” I say. “How did you end up in the lumber business?”

“By accident.”

I watch him, hoping he’ll elaborate, but he just sips his beer.

“Can you tell me more?” I ask.

He sighs. “Can I be honest instead?”

“Sure,” I say, taken aback.

“I like Murray. He’s been around my family for as long as I can remember, and I’m only doing this as a favor to him. But really, I don’t want to talk about myself.”

I stare at him for a second before laughing a little uncomfortably. “I mean, I’m writing a profile about your life. So I kind of need you to talk about yourself.”

“Make it up,” he says. “Better yet, read the crap that’s already floating around the internet, and pretend I told it all to you.”

I gape at him. This guy can’t be serious? I’ve never had a person tell me just to make up the things they’ve said, especially when it comes to their life, and yet he’s staring at me with a perfectly serious expression.

What an ass.

“Why did you agree to meet me?” I ask him.

He winces. “Favor to Murray.”

“You said that already.” I purse my lips. “We could have done this over the phone.”

There’s a glimmer of something then, a little smile on his face, but it quickly vanishes. He turns to his drink and downs half of it. “Haven’t been in the city in a long time,” he admits finally. “Plus, I was curious about you.”

That surprises me again. “About me?”

“Sure.” He looks at me, eyebrow raised. “Your article on the orphan gangs in New Orleans was really good. And that one about the German master puppet makers living in Lancaster?” He grins and for a second, he looks genuinely excited. “Never thought I’d give a shit about puppets.”

“Thanks,” I say, totally taken aback. “I mean, I can’t believe you read that stuff.”

Those articles came out relatively early in my career, and were only published on smaller, niche websites. They didn’t exactly get much attention.

“I like to be thorough,” he says, meeting my gaze and smiling again. “Just like you.”

I can’t help but smile back. “So you came all the way out here to meet me?”

“Yes,” he says without a hint of irony.

I don’t respond right away. “Well, uh, if you don’t want to talk about yourself… what do you want to talk about?”

That gets another smile out of him. “Let’s talk about you. Where were you born?”

Over the next half hour, I tell him my life story before I even realize what I’m doing. He listens patiently, asks intelligent questions, and basically just keeps me talking. By the time I realize it, I’ve told him pretty much everything, and the time’s just melting past.

“So you really thought you’d be an accountant?” he asks me after I get done telling him my original college major.

“Yes,” I say. “But okay, that’s enough about me. I feel like I’ve been talking forever.”

He shrugs. The beer in front of him is empty, and he orders another. My drink’s mostly water at this point.

“I like listening,” he says. “I haven’t been able to do a lot of that.”

I sense my opening and take it. “Why not?”

“Not many people up near where I live.”

“Where do you live?”

He gives me a look. “On a mountain.”

“You live on a mountain?”

He nods. “In Washington.”

“Very specific.”

He laughs softly. “That’s about as specific as I’ll get.”

“Come on. You gotta give me more than that.”

He eyes me a second then sighs. “Okay, fine. I live near Remmel, up in the north. It’s a 4,000-foot peak, a big bastard, and it suits me just fine.”

I’m tempted to write this down, but I resist the urge. I know he’ll shut down as soon as I even so much as hint at recording him.

“You live alone?”

“Yes, well, except for Jones.”

“Who’s that?”

“My dog.” He grins again. “Big lazy black lab.”

I smile back at him, surprised for the hundredth time since meeting him. When he first sat down, I didn’t take him for the kind of guy to actually live on a mountain, alone, with nothing but a dog to keep him company. But the more I get to know him, the more I feel something in him… and the more I’m interested.

I figured this profile would be easy. A waste of my time, sure, but easy money. Clearly Ethan isn’t interested in making anything easy for me, but now I’m starting to think it may be more complicated after all.

I get him talking more about where he lives. He keeps things general, and likes to talk about Jones, but at least he’s talking. I can’t help but watch his lips move, and suddenly I’m imagining what it would be like to kiss those lips, to let him taste me and to taste him right back.

It’s an intrusive thought and I push it away, but it slowly comes creeping back as the night progresses. We make small talk, skirting around the job I’m here to do, and eventually I give up trying to get anything useful out of him. I resign myself to making up his quotes and writing the profile based on whatever I can scrounge up. It’ll be fine, but it’s going to lack some personal flair, and I bet Murray’s going to see right through it.

I wonder for the hundredth time why Murray wants this profile and why Ethan agreed to do it, but I don’t ask the question. I suspect that’ll shut him down quicker than anything else.

“You’re a city girl, aren’t you?” he asks me.

I smile a little. “You know I was born in the suburbs.”

“Sure,” he says, dismissing that. “But you live here now. How long’s it been?”

“Five years,” I say. “Actually, six.”

“See. City girl. You can’t even remember how long it’s been because it’s just so natural.”

“So what’s that make you, a mountain man?”

He laughs. “Not exactly. I’m not really roughing it out there, if I’m honest. But yeah, mountain man, that works for me.”

I bite my lip and glance at the clock on the wall. It’s getting late, already past eleven, which surprises me. I didn’t know we’d been talking for so long. The time just melted past, and although I didn’t get much of substance out of him, I’m starting to get a shape of this man.

Still, this is my only time with him. He’s supposed to leave the city tomorrow morning, so it’s tonight or it’s never, and I hate to leave a job half finished.

“You weren’t born into that, though,” I press. “Middle class parents. Nice suburban home. A lot like me.”

He grins. “Yeah, a lot like you. Except I don’t think that’s how people work.”

I raise an eyebrow. “How do they work?”

“Doesn’t matter where you’re born. People are born all over the place, but that doesn’t mean they belong there. You have to find the place where you belong, that’s the trick.”

“And you belong on your mountain?”

“That’s right,” he says, looking a little haunted.

“Why?” I ask him softly.

He glances at me and shakes his head. “I don’t want to go there.”

“Is it because of the accident?”

He goes dead still, eyes staring at me. I can see the pain there, just for a second, but he quickly gets control of himself. He downs the beer he has left in front of him and stands up.

“This was fun,” he says.

“Wait.” I stand up as he walks off toward the lobby. “Hold on, please, Ethan. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

He turns on me, all six-foot-something of him, all that muscle and intense stare and incredibly handsome face staring down at me.

“You didn’t insult me,” he says softly but seriously. “But I’m not in the mood to cross that line. Make up your fucking story. I don’t care what you write.”

He stalks off across the lobby again and I’m left standing there, shocked, staring after him. That question about the accident, clearly it’s a sore spot for him, but it’s so public. Everyone knows about it, or at least anyone that chooses to research him and his company.

It happened the year before he disappeared. Seven men died in an explosion in a new lumber mill he’d built. The cause of the explosion is something of a mystery, although there apparently was a police investigation. I don’t know much more than that, though, and soon after it happened, Ethan moved up onto his mountain.

Clearly that explosion did something to him. Seven dead men, weighing on his conscience.

I watch as he stops at the elevators. I can let him go now, go back to my little dingy apartment, and write up this story. Or I can follow my gut and see this story through.

“Fuck it,” I whisper to myself, and stride after him.

Ethan looks surprised when I slip into the elevator next to him. He doesn’t say a word as we travel up, along with three drunk businessmen talking about some conference they all attended. Ethan takes the elevator all the way to the top and gets out without glancing at me, and I follow him.

We walk down a short hallway and stop in front of the suite. He opens the door and holds it for me.

I step toward him, but he holds up a hand. “Wait,” he says.

I stop in my tracks.

He steps toward me, door leaning against his back. He steps close, very close, and I feel my heart hammering fast.

“Are you following for your story,” he asks me softly, “or are you following because you want to?”

I bite my lip and suddenly all my emotions are mixed up. I can smell this man practically, can already taste him and feel him. I want him badly in this moment, and it’s almost an intense, heady high. I don’t know how to answer his question, and I’m silent for a few seconds.

That’s when he pulls me by the waist against him and kisses me.

That makes up my mind. I kiss him back, and I know I’m not going to talk about the story anymore. Maybe I followed him up here to try and press him for details, or maybe I’m just lying to myself. This whole night I’ve been thinking about this, about kissing him, about having him. I was attracted to him the second we met, although I thought he was an asshole at first.

He may still be an asshole, but he’s not a simple one, at least.

He pulls me into his room, still kissing me, and lets the door shut behind us.

He presses me up against the wall, his lips against my neck, his hands on my body. My heart’s beating so fast I can barely breathe and his strong hands slowly move down my hips, cupping my ass.

“Are you ready to go too far?” he whispers in my ear.

“What do you mean?”

He pulls back, a smirk on his lips. “I dare you to fuck me, Mia.”

And so I break every rule. I’m supposed to keep my subjects at a distance. I’m not supposed to get emotionally or physically invested in them.

I’m definitely not supposed to let them take off my clothes, press me down on the bed, and tongue my pussy until I can’t stop moaning.

He’s incredible. I’ve never been with a man so aggressive and yet so gentle, like he knows when to push my body and when to stop. And when I get on my knees and pull his boxer briefs down, I’m not at all surprised to find that his cock matches his physique perfectly. He’s long, thick, and I can barely take him into my mouth as I suck his cock nice and hard, making him groan.

He fucks me rough from behind. He slaps my ass, pulls my hair, whispers in my ear. He gets me off, and gets me off again, and leaves me quivering on the bed as he comes on my full breasts.

I fall asleep not long later, with his lean, muscular body pressed against mine. I’ve never felt so satisfied or completed in my entire life, and although I don’t mean to stay over, I can’t seem to make myself get out of bed.

In the morning, the light streams in through the window, almost harsh. Ethan’s gone, with nothing but a note scribbled on hotel stationary on his pillow. I pick it up and read it.

Had fun last night. Stay as late as you want, the room’s paid until tomorrow. Make me look better than I am in your story. Ethan.

I smile to myself and collapse back against the pillows, wondering how I found myself here, dizzy with the memory of him.