Reclaimed with a Ring
Author
Louise Fuller
Reads
15.5K
Chapters
10
The billionaire is back — from the dead! — to make her his bride. This convenient engagement romance from Louise Fuller is brimming with drama! Breaking News: Trip Winslow is engaged! He just needs to tell the bride… Lily Dempsey's fiery connection to tycoon Trip was undeniable, if inexplicable. Usually guarded and controlled, she was powerless against their passion. Then a thrill-seeking expedition leaves Trip missing, presumed dead… Weeks later, Trip stuns everyone with his return — and an engagement announcement! To stabilize his position as CEO, he urgently requires a wife. He's confident he can persuade Lily his proposal is mutually beneficial, especially as time apart has only stoked their hunger. But when Lily reluctantly agrees, Trip can't ignore how real their ring ruse feels…
CHAPTER ONE
DESPITE THE HEAT and the humidity there was a crowd of maybe fifty or sixty photographers waiting.
But not for him.
Trip Winslow tilted his face towards the tinted window of the limousine.
Nobody knew that he was coming. Incredibly, and despite the plethora of communication platforms available in the modern world, he had managed to stay incognito. All thanks to a phone call to Lazlo, the manager of the Diamond Club. It was Lazlo who had arranged the hot bath, wet shave, private jet, car and driver and security detail swiftly, quietly and with the same unshakeable calm that he did everything. It was what made him invaluable to the ten richest people in the world who made up the small, elite membership of the club.
But Trip’s disappearance was still the story of the hour, the year, maybe even the decade. After all, how many times did one of the wealthiest people on the planet just vanish into thin air?
So he’d anticipated that the paparazzi and news teams would be here in New York. His blue gaze moved assessingly over the huddle of mostly men prowling the steps up to the iconic gleaming glass and steel Winslow Building.
And yet it still felt like an ambush.
A ripple of panic skimmed over his skin, and for a moment he was back in the jungle, his heart pounding as he watched different men inch towards where he was pressed against a tree, their eyes narrowed, guns high against their chests like in the video games he had played incessantly as a teenager.
Only these gunmen were real. So were their bullets.
‘Do you want me to go round the back, Mr Winslow? Or I can call Security. Get an extra team out to block off the road.’
For a fraction of a second, he didn’t respond to the driver’s question, not least because even now, ten months after his father’s death, he was still struggling to remember that he was ‘that’ Mr Winslow. For him, the title would always belong to his father, Henry Winslow II. Of course, Trip’s older brother, Charlie, wouldn’t have given it a second thought.
His shoulders stiffened. In many ways, he’d felt as though he hardly knew his brother. And now he never would because Charlie was dead. Killed three years ago in a plane crash along with their mother.
Which left Trip.
The spare. The runner-up who had won by default.
Not that he hadn’t proven himself worthy of being CEO. But Charlie had always been destined to take over the business. Partly because he was twelve years older, but also because their father had raised him from birth to be his heir so that he looked and acted the part. Most important of all, Charlie was the type to defer to their father.
Unlike Trip.
He had been at odds with Henry Winslow II as far back as he could remember. Which probably explained why he had ended up being called Trip. That way, at least, his father could distance himself from the stubborn son who shared his name but rarely his opinions.
He glanced up, his gaze moving past the driver’s inquiring eyes to meet his own in the rear-view mirror. They were the exact same blue as his father’s. The only thing they had in common.
Like Charlie, his father was academically consistent, focused, disciplined, whereas he had oscillated between boredom and brilliance.
He had got into Harvard, like his father and Charlie, but had dropped out to set up a business that had failed in its first year. He’d learned from his mistakes though and his second venture was widely touted as a unicorn by the business media, reaching a billion-dollar valuation in its first year.
He had kept his stake and would probably have set up another business if his success hadn’t caught the eye of his father. To his astonishment, Henry had reached out to him, invited him to take over the Far East division in Hong Kong.
His father hadn’t gambled, had been notoriously risk averse, so Trip had known that he was being tested and that knowledge had given him a sense of purpose. He had effortlessly arrowed in on the failing areas of the business and each of those sectors had then outperformed themselves under his leadership.
His father had grudgingly admitted that he had done well, and, shortly before Charlie’s death, Trip had been allowed to go to London to head up the European division. There, his strokes of creative genius had attracted the attention of the business press and given Winslow Inc its most profitable year on record. But it had never been enough as far as his father was concerned.
Because mistakes, failures, missteps had been unacceptable to Henry Winslow II. A decorated naval officer who had taken over his father’s modest construction firm and turned it into the multinational conglomerate it was today. A private, committed family man whose one act of impulsiveness had led to a forty-two-year-long marriage that had ended only by his wife’s tragic death.
Trip gritted his teeth. Except it turned out his father hadn’t been that committed after all.
His spine tensed as he replayed the moment when he’d found the letters among his father’s things. Letters from a woman named Kerry. Letters filled with unfiltered declarations of need and passion.
I am blind without you...being with you will restore my sight, my love...
The shock had sent Trip spinning off course to Ecuador, to the churning white waters of the Rio Upano, and from there into the rainforest and imprisonment at the hands of a passing drugs cartel.
He stared through the window, his gaze snagging on a couple weaving between the stationary cars. The tall grey-haired man was holding the hand of the woman beside him. His wife? Before Ecuador he would have made this assumption unthinkingly. Now, though, he could see only other possibilities.
His fingers clutched the upholstered armrest. Behind closed doors there had always been a distance between his parents so in some ways his father’s infidelity should not have been that much of a surprise. But Henry Winslow II had led a note-perfect life, famously intolerant and unforgiving of failure in others, particularly in his youngest son. And yet, all along, he had been breaking the rules, lying, cheating, deceiving...
Was it any surprise Trip’s world had tilted on its axis when he’d found out the truth?
‘Mr Winslow?’
The driver’s voice bumped into his thoughts and he dragged his gaze back to the photographers. Like all paparazzi, they looked hungry and determined. ‘Let’s go in the front.’ He gestured to the car gliding to a halt in front of them. ‘Security can handle them.’
It was the opposite of what his father would have done. Or maybe it wasn’t. Having read those letters from his father’s mistress, he wasn’t sure he even knew who Henry Winslow II was any more.
As the driver opened the door, the heat hit him like a wall but he barely had time to register it before the photographers turned and saw him.
Their mouths collectively dropped open and there was a tiny suspension of air and noise as if the whole city were taken aback by his sudden appearance.
But then, it wasn’t often someone came back from the dead.
‘It’s him,’ he heard someone shout. ‘It’s Trip!’
And then, like fire ants sensing a juicy meal, they began swarming towards the car.
‘Mr Winslow, is it true you were shot?’
‘Did you lose your memory, Trip?’
‘Were you hiding or lost?’
‘Over here, over here, Mr Winslow—’
He was used to press attention, had grown up playing hide and seek with the paparazzi, but as the voice recorders and cameras rose like a wave he felt his heartbeat accelerate.
But the security detail was good and they held back the heaving, baying pack so he could make his way up the flight of steps into the office.
It was part of his father’s world-conquering ethos that nature didn’t intrude on the day-to-day running of his business. It didn’t matter if New York was melting or buried under three feet of snow, the building was always the same unobtrusive, ambient temperature. And yet today the gleaming marble and wood panelled foyer felt somehow different. Cooler, familiar and yet altered in a way he couldn’t quite put his finger on.
He felt different too. Which was no doubt why everyone was looking at him as if they’d seen a ghost. But then in a way they had.
‘Mr Winslow.’ The receptionist—Carole? Was that her name?—got to her feet, her eyes wide and stunned. Her colleague simply stared at him, slack-jawed.
‘You’re back. You’re here—’ Carole was blinking at him as if she had malfunctioned.
‘Yes, I am.’ He gave her a quick, dazzling smile that snapped off as he jerked his head towards the ceiling. ‘Are they in?’
By ‘they’, he meant the C-suite and it was a rhetorical question. They were paid to be here, to manage the ship while he was away, so where else would they be?
‘Yes, Mr Mason is holding an extraordinary meeting of the board this morning.’
‘Good. Then let me go make sure it really is extraordinary.’
He felt rather than saw her reach for the phone as he walked towards the lifts. But that was okay. It would give them time to roll out the red carpet. Hail, the conquering hero, he thought, stepping into the elevator.
As it rose upwards, he shivered. Was it him, or was the air in the building growing colder the higher they went? But that question stayed unanswered as the lift doors opened and Mason Cooper, Winslow’s CFO and Trip’s godfather, strode towards him, arms outstretched.
‘Trip—’
He grunted as the older man pulled him into a bear hug. Mason was a firm believer in tough love and over the years he had often taken an unwilling Trip aside for pep talks. Trip felt a sudden urge to lean into the older man.
‘I don’t understand.’ Mason was patting his shoulders and arms as if to prove to himself that Trip was not a figment of his imagination. ‘How did you get here? How are you? What happened? Where have you been?’
‘I can fill you in another time.’ He clapped Mason on the back to stop the spate of questions that he had no intention of answering. ‘It’s a long and convoluted story and right now I just want things to get back to normal.’ The trouble was he no longer knew what that was, Trip thought, his gaze snagging on his father’s portrait as they walked past the boardroom.
‘Of course you do.’ Mason nodded. ‘Let’s go to your office.’
‘It’s okay, I know the way,’ he said irritably as his CFO put a hand on his shoulder to guide him. ‘I wasn’t away that long.’
Mason lifted an eyebrow. ‘I’d say five weeks alone in an Ecuadorian jungle is quite long enough.’
It had felt like five years, Trip thought. In places, the canopy of leaves had been so dense that night and day had often felt interchangeable, never-ending and he would have to stop moving or risk tripping over the treacherous, twisting branches and invisible dips in the forest floor. And always there had been that pattering sound of water, dripping against the vegetation.
But that had been only a part of it. Some of the time, he would probably never know exactly how long for certain, there had been simply the absolute darkness of the blindfold and the ropes biting into his wrists.
He had never felt so alone, so helpless, not even when he was a child, and it started to become obvious to him that he experienced the world in a different way from the rest of his family.
But it was not in his nature to show weakness or reveal vulnerability, particularly here. Here, he was the boss, the man in charge. He was not just Mr Winslow, he was the Mr Winslow, and, now that he was back, he was going to make sure that that name was associated with him for ever, and not with his grandfather or father.
As he dropped down into the seat behind his desk, there was a knock at the door and Conrad Stiles, the chief operating officer, and Ron Maidman, the head of marketing, walked into the office, their feet faltering, faces freezing into masks of shock and disbelief as they saw him. He wasn’t as close to them as he was Mason but they both shook his hand and clapped him on the shoulder.
‘I can’t believe you’re really here.’ Maidman was shaking his head. ‘I thought I was hallucinating. What happened out there? Are you okay? Are you hurt?’
‘Another time, Ron. Like I said to Mason, I just want to get back behind the wheel, so why don’t you take a seat and talk me through what’s been happening?’
Was it his imagination or did all their faces stiffen?
Mason nodded. ‘Of course, of course. Obviously, in your absence, we had to make some decisions.’
Trip stared across the desk at the three men sitting opposite him. ‘I’m sure you took care of everything,’ he said softly. He couldn’t quite keep the edge of bitterness out of his voice. His father might have formally named him his successor, but he’d made it clear that he expected his son to draw on the experience and expertise of his C-suite.
He’d been grateful for their advice and support in the immediate aftermath of his father’s death, but things were different now. Okay, he’d been a little off his game at the start, but he’d been running the business for ten months without a hiccup.
‘Now I’m back, and, in light of recent events, I want to make a few changes. You see, I had a lot of time to think in the jungle and I have a few ideas that I want to set in motion.’
Mason nodded. ‘And obviously we will be more than happy to discuss that but right now you should be at home, resting. You’ve had a traumatic experience—’
‘The doctor said I was fine, and I am,’ he said impatiently. There was a bluebottle crashing against the glass, buzzing around the edges of the window frame as it tried to find an opening, and for a moment he stared at it, body tensing as he remembered his own equally frantic attempts to push through the towering vegetation.
‘I don’t want to rest. What I need is to get back to work.’
Conrad cleared his throat. ‘And you will, but, as you pointed out, we need to bring you up to speed first. Clarify a few things. In light of recent events,’ he added, his eyes meeting Trip’s.
‘Meaning?’ Trip lounged back in his chair, trying to slow his heartbeat. The script he’d prepared in his head in the car was already starting to unravel.
‘Trip—you’ve been missing for weeks. We didn’t know where you were, if you were even alive—’
‘You make it sound as though I planned for that to happen.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘I can promise you I didn’t. I certainly didn’t expect to cross paths with a cartel. Or be taken prisoner.’
‘Is that what happened?’ Mason looked shocked. ‘My God, Trip, I don’t know what to say—’
Trip gazed past him at the heat-soaked city skyline. That was just the start of it. But he didn’t want to think about what followed. Not here, not now, not in front of these men. His breath caught in his chest. Not when he didn’t know how he would react.
‘Did they hurt you?’
‘I’m fine.’
He stretched out his legs and pressed his spine against the leather upholstery. It wasn’t a complete lie. He had been seen by a doctor in Ecuador shortly after he’d stumbled out of the jungle and, aside from a couple of nasty cuts and a mild case of dehydration, he was physically fine.
But he was sleeping badly, waking in darkness and sweat, cold with a fear that he could only shift by opening his eyes and getting out of bed so that he could feel the carpet beneath his feet. Because that was the only way he could convince himself that he had been dreaming.
‘I’m glad to hear it.’ Ron hesitated. ‘We all are, obviously—’ he gave Trip a nervous smile ‘—and we did everything we could to help find you from this end, but part of the problem was that we didn’t know where you were.’
Trip frowned. ‘I don’t need permission to take a vacation, Ron. I’m the CEO.’
His head of marketing flushed and there was a small pause as the three older men glanced furtively at one another. ‘Not permission, no, but it would have been helpful to know where you were,’ Mason said after a moment.
Conrad frowned. ‘We thought you were dead.’
Trip stared at him steadily, a ghost of a smile playing around his hard mouth. ‘Sorry to disappoint.’
Mason shook his head. ‘That’s not fair, Trip—’
‘No, what’s not fair is you guys giving me a hard time for something that was out of my control. But it’s in the past now and I’m here, so no harm, no foul.’
He was done explaining himself.
‘No harm.’ Mason was staring at him as if he’d grown an extra head. ‘You were a prisoner of a drug cartel!’
‘And I got away. Without a scratch.’ That was true...ish but any detail would only serve to undermine his argument.
‘And we’re pleased to hear that.’ Ron frowned. ‘Unfortunately the business wasn’t so lucky. The share prices plummeted—’
‘I heard,’ he cut across the older man. ‘And now they’ve gone back up. Gone higher, in fact.’
Mason was shaking his head. ‘That’s not how your father did business. It’s not how we do business.’
‘There is no we,’ he said coldly. ‘This is my business. I’m the CEO.’
‘But that can only stay true if you are the best person for the job,’ Mason said, his eyes finding Trip’s. ‘The position of CEO is not allocated simply on the basis of surname or bloodline.’
‘Is that right?’ Trip said softly.
There was a long, pulsing silence. Finally, Mason cleared his throat. ‘Look, Trip. Your father wanted you to take over the business, but he also gave us the option to intervene at our discretion.’
Yes, because he had never truly considered his youngest son as anything other than a spare, Trip thought, letting his gaze move across the distant skyline. He was too impulsive, too headstrong ever to see eye to eye with his father, but after Charlie’s death Henry had had no alternative but to leave him the company.
Suddenly and fiercely, Trip wanted all three of them out of his office.
‘You can’t fire me.’
Mason gave him a small, stiff smile. ‘You’re not being fired, Trip. But we answer to the shareholders. As do you.’
Pushing back from his desk, Trip stood. ‘Exactly, and in case you’ve forgotten I’m not just the CEO, I’m the majority shareholder.’
‘Yes, you are.’ The older man nodded. ‘But as was explained to you when you took over, some of those shares are held in a trust of which we are the trustees. We have the power to use those shares to remove any CEO temporarily or permanently whose actions are damaging to the interests of the shareholders. And what happened in Ecuador...what could have happened...has raised issues. Shareholders like stability.’
Trip held his gaze. ‘I do things my way. If they don’t like it—’
‘They don’t, Trip. That’s the point. They want to see that you are serious about running the business and, I’m afraid, currently your behaviour is not speaking to that.’
‘My behaviour—?’
He felt a rush of fury. What about his father’s behaviour? Had anyone held him to account for having a long-term mistress? As his eyes flicked across the other men’s faces, he felt a slithering panic weave through his chest. Had his father confided in them? Did they know who Kerry was? But he couldn’t bring himself to ask. To ask the question would give the relationship a validity it didn’t deserve.
‘They—we—need a CEO who is stable and mature and focused.’
‘I am all of those things—What?’ The three men were shaking their heads. He gritted his teeth.
Mason sighed. ‘You have the makings of a great business leader but you are impulsive, reckless even. Look at how you just went off to Ecuador on a whim—’
Not a whim, he thought, his chest clamping tight so that it was suddenly hard to breathe. It had been an imperative. He had felt as if he were suffocating in New York, smothered by the weight of his father’s hypocrisy.
‘And your private life is chaotic. Your friends make headlines for all the wrong reasons. Maybe if you had a steady girlfriend to anchor you...but according to the Internet you spend your free time running around the city bedding every woman you meet.’
His eyes narrowed. ‘I’m not running around the city bedding every woman I meet. As a matter of fact, I’m engaged.’
The words were out of his mouth before he’d even realised what he was about to say and a stunned, fascinated silence spread across the room, blanketing all other sound. The other men looked, if anything, more shocked than before. As if it was easier to believe he had come back from the dead than that he was engaged.
Ron Maidman recovered first. ‘Engaged! To whom?’
Trip blinked. Good question, he thought.
Marriage had always been one of those things he thought about in an abstract way. It felt inevitable, in that most people tried it once so he imagined he would too. But the path there was hazy and uncharted. And besides, he had no real understanding of what marriage meant. His parents were often held up as an example of a happy, devoted couple, but that was just the public facade. In private their relationship had been more two people coexisting than sharing lives.
He felt the tractor-beam force of the other men’s combined gaze and, setting his face back to blank, he reached for the name of the most stable, mature, focused woman he could think of. A name that would shut down his tormentors and give him back the upper hand.
‘To Lily. Lily Dempsey.’
Now the astonishment in the room rose to such almost comic levels that he would have laughed. Except he didn’t feel like laughing.
Lily Dempsey. With her Mona Lisa smile and cool, dismissive grey eyes.
She was the dictionary definition of stable, mature and focused. Pretty much an ‘anchor’ in human form.
Unfortunately, she also hated him.
To be fair, he wasn’t her biggest fan either. Not for any specific reason. They just always seemed to clash, although that only happened when she acknowledged his existence. Often she seemed to look straight through him. And that was such a unique and uniquely irritating experience that he had found himself deliberately crossing her path, only to regret it when she spoke to him in the cool, withering tone that made it clear she found his charms skin-deep.
Which made the fact that they had been secretly sleeping together in the two months before he had gone to Ecuador not just incomprehensible but a mystery that was unsolvable.
It was just sex, of course. He’d never planned on taking it any further than that one night, but then they had bumped into one another at another charity event and it had been just the same. And it had kept happening and suddenly it had been happening for a month, then another.
And he still didn’t understand why.
The phrase chalk and cheese could have been invented for them, but in bed they were like flames merging and curling around one another. His body tensed, groin hardening so that he had to blank his mind to the memory of her body wrapped around his.
‘You’re engaged to Lily Dempsey?’
He stared across the room at Mason’s frowning face.
No, he thought.
‘Yes,’ he lied. ‘We’ve been seeing each other for a couple of months, but she wanted to keep it on the down-low because of her father.’
That at least was true. Lily had been insistent that they keep the relationship quiet, presumably because she didn’t want to cause any distracting noise around her father’s career as a senator, and Trip hadn’t cared one way or the other. There were very few people whose opinion mattered to him. Nor did he feel the need to explain himself to anyone.
Which was lucky, because he couldn’t rationalise his attraction to Lily. It didn’t make sense. They didn’t make sense.
Which was why he’d ended things. Except that wasn’t true either. The reason he’d ended it was because of those damned letters.
Reading through, he’d felt conned, duped, betrayed, and he’d wanted to smash things. In that moment, there had been just too much overlap between the passion and secrecy of his father’s affair and his heated, clandestine encounters with Lily, and he’d been angry and she’d been there and something had snapped inside him.
Ron got to his feet. ‘Congratulations, Trip. That’s wonderful news.’
He held out his hand, and Trip shook it mechanically.
‘I’m so pleased for you,’ Mason said quietly. ‘Lily is a wonderful woman, and I know how much your father enjoyed working with her.’
‘Congratulations.’ Conrad joined the other two smiling men to take Trip’s hand. ‘But what are you doing here?’ His smile stiffened. ‘She does know you’re back?’
No, not yet, he thought. Nor did she know they were engaged, but that wouldn’t be a problem.
Would it?
He had a sudden, sharp flashback to their last meeting at her apartment. He hadn’t quite known how she would react but, true to form, she had confounded him. ‘It was just a fling,’ she’d said. She wouldn’t pine away if he never came back.
For some reason, ego probably, her words had stung more than they should, enough to echo inside his head during the weeks of his incarceration. Now he had to hope she would be so swept away by his sudden reappearance that she would be willing to agree to anything. After all, what woman wouldn’t want to marry one of the ten richest men on the planet?
‘Yes, of course. But she wanted me to come in, in person, to reassure you,’ he said quickly, lying again.
‘Which is why she’s such an excellent choice.’ Mason glanced over at the other two men, clearly pleased. ‘But you’ve been through so much, Trip. What you need is some time and space to process everything that’s happened and the best person to help you do that is Lily. You should be with her.’
He nodded slowly. ‘You’re right. I should. In fact, I might just head off there now.’
Not to process what had happened, he thought as he stalked past yet more astonished employees back towards the elevator. But because he needed to catch Lily and convince her to be his fiancée before she heard about their supposed engagement from a third party and blew the whole thing apart.
‘So are you thinking a Kingston or an Empire swag?’
Gazing at the swatches of fabric, Lily Jane Dempsey frowned. She had no idea what she was thinking. Her current curtains were perfectly fine. Perfect, in fact, she thought, glancing over at the draping folds of cream silk. So why was she bothering to change them? Why was she here, talking about swag options with her mother’s interior designer, Samantha?
Her hand moved to her throat, to the pulse beating against the smooth skin like a moth trapped in a jar, feeling, not her fingers, but his mouth.
Trip’s mouth.
The same mouth that had kissed her to the edge of reason as she’d arched beneath him in the bedroom upstairs, and then told her that he was going to Ecuador.
He was the reason she had decided to change her curtains.
Because she couldn’t change the past, couldn’t take back the last words she’d spoken to him, and she had needed something to take her mind off the fact that he was gone and that she was partly responsible because she had told him to get out of her sight, to go to Ecuador and not come back.
And he hadn’t. He had disappeared into the rainforest and, despite the various search teams that had been sent to look for him, he hadn’t been found, and after five weeks he was not just missing but presumed dead.
Only it wasn’t just guilt she felt. Part of her hated him for disappearing like that. Sometimes her fury made it impossible to sleep and then she would pace the apartment, imagining his return and feeling almost giddy with relief that he was alive.
Her hands clenched. But only because she would have a chance to kill him or at least slap his handsome face for being such a selfish, thoughtless idiot. Because that hurt—to think that she would never see those glittering blue eyes again. And when she thought about that, about a world where Trip didn’t exist, she had to distract herself with work or by helping her mother on her various committees. Or by changing her curtains.
But it was hard to distract herself, because she had known Trip her whole life. They had grown up in the same social circles. Their parents had been on first-name terms.
Their relationship had been a little more frosty.
Or it had been when he’d actually noticed that she was there. Which he hadn’t very often because he was all blue eyes and smooth golden skin and tawny-coloured hair falling across his forehead, and that smile, whereas she—
Her eyes moved to the mirror above the fireplace and she felt the familiar twinge of disappointment.
She’d often wondered why her parents had chosen to call her Lily first and Jane second. Lily conjured up flawless creamy petals and a seductive scent and she was neither flawless nor seductive. She was plain, like her middle name.
It wasn’t a humblebrag. It was just the facts. Her hair was mousey and frizzy—although she had learned how to tame it now—her eyes were grey and she had a small bump on her nose that was absent from both her patrician-faced parents. Body wise, she was slim and her legs were long. Too long. Long enough to earn the nickname ‘daddy-long-legs’.
She didn’t light up a room as Trip did. Mostly she was invisible.
Then suddenly three months ago, without warning, without understanding why, they had ended up in bed. And it had been intoxicating and terrifying in equal measure, not least because it was pure happenstance.
If his father, Henry, hadn’t set up the Alessandra Winslow Endowment for Music in memory of his wife, they might have simply remained as occasional sparring partners. But after Henry’s death, Trip had reluctantly taken his father’s place and suddenly he was there in her life, pulsing with heat and energy like a meteorite, lighting up the world, trailing a promise of something that she had never allowed herself to imagine because it didn’t happen to women who looked like her.
She had let down her guard.
And there was no excuse. Not after what had happened the last time with Cameron, when her neediness and longing to be liked had blinded her to what was hiding in plain sight and ultimately put her brother in harm’s way.
Then again, she was only human, and Trip Winslow was the most beautiful man she had ever known. In a crowded room and at a distance, the flawless symmetry of his features and blatant masculinity made him conspicuous. But up close his beauty was astonishing, mesmerising.
Nothing could have prepared her for how it felt to sit opposite him and just gaze and gaze. And every time his gaze had met hers, it had felt like a caress. And that had shocked her, scared her, angered her. How could you be so attracted to someone when you disliked them so much? It defied the laws of attraction.
Feeling Samantha’s gaze on her face, she realised that she had no idea how much time had passed since the woman had asked her about her curtains, or how to reply.
‘The Kingston,’ she said quickly.
‘I was hoping you’d say that.’ Samantha gave her an approving smile. ‘This room demands drama and a Kingston always adds that little va-va-voom. And what about the colour? Are you sure about switching from the blue to the green?’ she asked casually.
Lily gritted her teeth. Her mother loved neutrals, but Lily had wanted a change from creams and whites, and blue, the right, flattering, timeless shade of blue, was Laura’s compromise. But Lily liked the green and, for once, she was going to put her foot down.
‘Absolutely,’ she said firmly.
There was a quivering silence as Samantha held her gaze a moment too long and then the designer smiled stiffly and glanced down at her tablet. ‘Now, I know we haven’t discussed the bathroom blinds, but your mother did ask me to take a quick peek—’
It was another hour before Samantha left.
Flopping down on the sofa in a way that would have made her mother wince, Lily picked up one of the magazines from the coffee table and opened it at a random page, and then wished she hadn’t as she glanced down to find Trip’s out-of-this-world face staring up at her.
She felt a spasm of pain around her heart.
It had been weeks now since he’d gone missing. Five weeks and three days. There had been a lot of supposition about what had happened in Ecuador, but few facts had emerged from the rainforest. The one that had stuck in her mind was the discovery of the Jeep he’d been driving. Watching the news, she had stared at the bullet holes in the bonnet and doors, feeling devastated, then angry, then stricken with guilt.
The buzzer to her door sounded and she groaned softly. That would be her mother.
Laura Dempsey had been in charge of the original decor of the flat and Lily had fully expected her to be in charge of this revamp, but then her mother had called to say she had double-booked.
Lily had been slightly relieved, then felt guilty for feeling that way. Now she wondered why, because of course her mother would have ‘asked’ Samantha to call her the moment she left the apartment. No doubt the designer had let slip that Lily had chosen the green drapes, not the blue, and so here was Laura all ready to right the wrong—
Sighing, she made her way to the front door and jerked it open. ‘I know you’re better at all this than me, but I know what I w-want—’
She stuttered into silence. For a moment the apartment behind her seemed to fold in on itself as if some vast, invisible explosion had happened.
It wasn’t her mother. It was Trip. Lean, muscular and as shockingly beautiful as ever, he leaned against the door frame, one thick, dark eyebrow arched, his astonishing mouth curved into a shape that made her heart relocate to her throat.
‘Good to know,’ he said in that familiar, deep Transatlantic drawl. ‘Because so do I.’
