Chapter 17
“What have I done?” Lucy leaned against the front door. She needed to go upstairs and change out of her wet dress. A puddle pooled at her feet. That wasn’t good for the hardwood floors. Nicole would be mad. Their landlord would be horrified.
She thumped her head against the door. The floors could wait. She wasn’t ready to release the door handle. Not yet.
I had sex with Jared Mitchell. And then I watched him drive away.
“I should have gone with him. I should have insisted,” she said. “I’m so stupid.”
“Never say that.” Emma peeked her head through the double doorway leading to their office. “No matter what happened tonight, you’re not stupid. It’s just another disaster date.”
“It was perfect.” Lucy held tight to the doorknob. Part of her wanted to run into the street and chase him down. She wanted to go with him and wait while he talked to Finn. “He told me I had to accept that fact that he’d lied to get my attention, and then a thunderstorm came rolling in, but otherwise, amazing.”
Nicole stepped out from behind Emma and into the hallway. Her arms were crossed in front of her chest, and her lips were pursed. “This is what the end of your perfect dates look like?”
“Yes.” She stared at her friends as her cold, wet body started to tremble. Laughter bubbled up. “This is what the aftermath of a perfect date looks like.”
“Wait right here.” Nicole marched down the hall and disappeared into the powder room. She returned carrying one of the bath towels they reserved for guests. Nicole walked over and carefully wrapped the bath sheet around Lucy’s shoulders. “I’m assuming you decided to forgive him for lying to you?”
“He was very convincing.” Lucy drew the towel closer. “Very.”
Emma stepped in front of her, beaming like a fool. “That must have been some sex on the beach.”
“It was,” she said wistfully. “It was perfect.”
“Stop saying perfect,” Nicole said.
“Don’t be jealous,” Emma chided.
“Sex on the beach is never perfect.” Nicole crossed her arms in front of her chest. “There is too much sand. It always ends up in your underwear or suit, in the wrong places.”
“I left my underwear at the beach,” Lucy said.
Emma laughed. “That’s one way to solve that problem. You can give us all the details after you warm up. Go upstairs and take a hot shower.”
Nicole’s frown deepened. “If it was so ‘perfect,’ why are you back so soon? Why did your ‘amazing’ date send you home soaking wet?”
“Finn texted about an emergency,” Lucy explained.
“So Jared ditched you for work.” Nicole raised an eyebrow. “I know he’s a billionaire and all, but Luc—”
“Not work,” Lucy said quickly. “Finn needed him. And Jared couldn’t exactly show up with me. Then we’d have to tell Finn about us. It’s too soon for that. I don’t want Finn to explode because I had sex with his best friend.”
“Who says Finn will be mad?” Emma asked.
“If your brother has a problem with you and Jared dating,” Nicole jumped in. “I’ll talk to him.”
I’m not sure that will help, Lucy thought.
“I don’t think Finn will have a problem with us dating,” Lucy said slowly. “But sex on the beach isn’t exactly a relationship. I think we should wait and tell him after we’ve been on a few dates. And I should be the one to tell him.”
“An excellent plan,” Emma said.
“But until then,” Lucy looked at Nicole. “No one says a word to my brother about who I’m dating.”
“My lips are sealed,” Emma promised.
“Mine too,” Nicole said.
And mine, Lucy thought.
But what if she needed more than a few dates to make sure her unicorn was real? He could disappear back to New York at any time. Or fly away to North Dakota to talk about buffalo. He might forget to call tomorrow.
She clutched the towel. She refused to go back to sitting on the sidelines of her own relationship, waiting and hoping for a connection that wasn’t there. She wanted a partner who was fully present in her life. A loyal soul mate.
She pictured the last shot she’d seen of Jared with a model-of-the-week on his arm in New York. She pressed her lips together. Oh yes, she would need more than a few dates to make sure her unicorn could deliver her Happy Ever After.
Jared drove through the storm, heading south along the Intracoastal Waterway. He took the southern bridge back to the island and followed Ocean Boulevard’s winding road beside the violent sea. Mansions lined the driver’s side, separated by the narrow, two-lane road. He’d driven by these same homes as a teenager. He’d raced Finn, first on road bikes and later on motorcycles past these multimillion-dollar estates. He’d joked about the day when he’d own one. He’d never believed it would happen. Not in high school. Or even in college.
It was like expecting to find a unicorn on the fucking beach.
But he’d made it happen.
His cell vibrated, signaling another text. Probably from Finn. But Lucy’s brother and his emergency could wait another five minutes. With rain pummeling his back, Jared climbed out of the car and headed for the wooden stairs leading down to the sand. The waves rushed in, each one moving closer and closer to the seawall.
High tide.
He ran to the abandoned blanket. The water rushed up to it, but it hadn’t pulled the remnants of their picnic out to sea. If he’d waited until morning, Lucy’s panties would have disappeared.
There’s nothing heroic about rescuing her underwear.
Still, he gathered the sopping bedspread and heaved it over his shoulder. Then he turned and headed to the stairs with the rain at his back. When he reached his car, he placed the wet mess in the trunk.
Five minutes later, he pulled into his red brick-lined driveway and found his garage open. The man who would make his life a living hell if Jared hurt Lucy stood beside his Ducati Scrambler. Finn had traded his suit for jeans and t-shirt. Both were soaked. Slowing to a stop, Jared put the car in park and climbed out.
Jared headed away from the detached garage. The side door to his 1920s oceanfront mansion stood twenty paces away. “You could have let yourself in,” he called over his shoulder as Finn raced to catch up with him.
“Thought about it,” Finn admitted. “I wanted to check the garage first. See if you were home.”
They stepped under the overhang. Jared keyed in the security combination and then unlocked the pair of ornate wooden doors. He pushed through the old, heavy door and stepped into the tiled foyer. The hand-painted tile floor was one of the details he’d kept when renovating the old-world home. All of the original tiles, fireplaces, and hardwood floors remained. But he’d added a state-of-the-art, white marble kitchen and modern bathrooms.
“Is there a reason you interrupted my date with a nine one one text and then drove your new bike through a storm?” Jared asked. He kicked off his wet, sandy dress shoes. Then he stripped off the white-button down shirt that felt like a second skin and tossed it to the tile floor.
“Dry off. I’ll meet you in the kitchen. I need a drink first. Then I’ll give you the full story.” Finn turned and headed for the one room guaranteed to provide beer.
Jared verged right toward the master suite. The home felt like a Mediterranean villa. From the stone pillars by the pool to the European tiles decorating the floors and walls, Jared’s Florida mansion bore a stronger resemblance to a museum than a home.
After he’d pulled on dry running shorts and a Marlins t-shirt, Jared found Finn perched on a wooden bar stool. His friend sat with his back to the glass doors, which opened onto the front lawn and offered a view of the rough ocean. Both of Finn’s hands were wrapped around a bottle of local Florida brew. Tension rippled up his forearms.
“Where’s Lucy?” Finn asked.
Jared headed to the stainless steel fridge. “I returned her to the princess lair.”
He opened the fridge and reached for a beer. As a rule, his housekeeper stocked this house with beer, a few bottle of high-priced vino for guests, milk, fresh fruit, and eggs. Today, she’d added a few to-go containers from the Italian hotspot on Worth Ave with instructions for reheating the meals, listed on orange post-its. Beer in one hand, he withdrew a box marked “ravioli” and headed for the microwave.
He glanced across the kitchen island at Finn. “Did you come over here to find her? Is that the big emergency?”
“No.” Finn took a long drink from his beer. “How’d it go? Your talk with Luc?”
Stop fucking stalling, Finn.
But Jared played along as he scanned the post-it and hit the necessary buttons. “She understood about the Philip Ryder profile, and we moved on. We left the beach before the lightning. I’ll call her tomorrow. You have my word. Take her to dinner. A real date.”
Finn raised an eyebrow. “What was tonight?”
Sex on the beach.
“A step in the right direction.” Jared bent over and withdrew the ravioli from the microwave nestled in the island. “I would be taking another right about now if you hadn’t sent out a series of distress texts. Ready to talk about it, or do we need to keep making small talk?”
Finn looked him straight in the eye. “I blew any chance of closing the sugar deal.”
“Tell me what happened.” Jared stabbed the ravioli with his fork. “Walk me through what went wrong, and we’ll fix it.”
“Not this time.”
Jared raised his eyebrows. “You’re going to tell me I’m not Superman again?”
“No. But this is a major screw up. My screw up.” Finn didn’t look away. “I slept with Devilla’s daughter.”
Ah, hell.
Jared glanced down and focused on his pasta. Tempting as it was to question his friend’s sanity—he couldn’t. With Lucy’s panties still on his makeshift beach blanket, he couldn’t ask what the hell Finn was thinking.
“Before we made an offer to buy the business?” Jared asked. “You’d met her before? Or tonight?”
Finn shook his head. “Both. Marie DeVilla agreed to meet for dinner and a drink. We set it up through our assistants. But as soon as I saw her waiting for me at the entrance to the pizza place, I recognized her. We hooked up at a charity function last year.”
“One time,” Jared said, the picture becoming clear in his mind.
“Never even left the gala. Just found a closed-off room at the venue.” Finn leaned back in his chair and ran his hands through his hair. “Marie is gorgeous. At the time, that’s all I knew about her. First name. Her family moved here when she was sixteen, but she went to boarding school. And she fucks like a dream.”
“Did she give you her number last year?” Jared asked.
Finn nodded. “I lost it. Got distracted by work and never called. But she wasn’t pissed when she showed up tonight. She seemed genuinely happy to see me. So we sat down to pizza and talked about the deal.”
“Did she tell you what it would take to make our offer more appealing?” he asked.
“She claims that her dad wants to take the highest offer. He wants all the money up front. He’s not interested in payouts over time. He plans to invest in his kids, she said.”
“How the hell did you end up in bed with her again?” Jared reached for his beer.
“She offered.” Finn shrugged. “I had the information we needed. My apartment is a short walk away. So we headed there for a nightcap. Clothes started coming off. Everything was good until it went south. So far south Key West looks like the fucking North Pole.”
“Don’t tell me we’re losing this deal over bad sex,” Jared said.
Finn looked him straight in the eye and laughed. “I delivered. And man, it was wild. That’s the problem. She filmed it on her phone. I didn’t realize until it was too late. She filmed the entire thing.” His laughter and smiled faded. “When she shows her father a video of me bending her over the table in my entry—do you think he’s going to play nice and negotiate?”
“He’ll take Peak’s offer.”
“Yeah,” Finn said bitterly. “And give his daughter the cash she needs to launch her new clothing line. She told me afterward. She talked her dad into selling. She doesn’t want to inherit a sugar company. She wants to design clothes, but she needs capital to start the business. She’s already drained her trust fund. So she decided to hit us up for the money. By way of her dad.”
“This wasn’t your fault,” Jared said. “You didn’t know.”
“I read the situation wrong. Not the sex.” Finn waved one hand through the air. “I’m not apologizing for having mind-blowing, consensual sex—”
“I’m not asking you to,” Jared said.
“Although you better believe I’m going to be more careful from here on out. This town is too damn small,” Finn continued. He leaned forward and rested his forearms on the marble. “Putting the deal together, that’s what I do. You run the companies, but I make the deals happen. I had this one and I blew it. Do you think her father is going to sell the company he built from nothing to us now?”
“I’ll talk to DeVilla tomorrow.” Jared set aside the now empty ravioli container. “I’ll make it right.”
“Don’t offer them a cent more. Our initial offer was solid. Plus, we’re keeping their team in place.”
“Let me handle it,” Jared said firmly.
Finn opened his mouth to protest and then closed it again. He gave a curt nod and then reached for his drink. “So you left Lucy with the princesses. You know she’s going to dissect your date.”
“You’re the one who sent the nine one one texts because you accidentally made a sex tape that could cost us millions,” Jared pointed out.
His friend’s face fell. Finn didn’t apologize. Hell, he rarely screwed up. And when he did, he missed a morning staff meeting or forgot to let Coulter know he had plans to golf with a client. But this—screwing DeVilla’s daughter on camera—was a new level of fucking up. Finn wasn’t going to shake this off. Not tonight. Probably not anytime soon.
“I’m not worried about Lucy,” Jared added. “I have her underwear.”
Finn cocked his head. “That’s supposed to make me feel better?”
Jared nodded.
“Underwear, huh?” Finn let out a laugh. “Not exactly a glass slipper. But it’s a start.”