It was more than acceptable. The promise of touch struck sparks in her bloodstream, slipping through her veins and arteries to pool deep between her hip bones. Every nerve in her body was on high alert, the ones that had been breathed into hypersensitivity by his nearness and the promise of his kisses humming with awareness. But this is what happened with men like Ryan. The direct threat was never the one that would actually break her. When told no, men like Ryan figured out another way to get what they wanted.
The heat of his body radiated through his jeans and shirt to press against hers, as tangible as his palm on her shoulder. When she didn’t answer, he tilted his head so his temple rested against his bicep, supporting his weight with forearms braced against the mirror. In her peripheral vision, she could see them reflected in the angled mirrors, the way he shifted his weight from one hand to the other, using that fraction to get closer to her without crossing the final line. It was intimate, possessive, beseeching, pleading for absolution she couldn’t give him. “Simone,” he whispered.
“Step back.”
His breath shuddered from him, and for a moment she thought he wouldn’t obey. But then he did, in stages, straightening his arms first, then letting them drop to his sides. Just like that they went from being a breath and a heartbeat apart to having a good twelve inches of distance between them. It might as well have been from here to the moon.
“Would you date me if I wasn’t Ryan Hamilton?”
“What do you mean?” she asked, reeling from arousal to bewilderment.
“If I wasn’t that,” he said, gesturing at the door leading to the showroom. “I-banker. Rich. Powerful.”
She thought about how to say what she needed to say. “I don’t know who Ryan Hamilton is. I’ve dated men like you present yourself,” she said obliquely, reluctant to bring up Stéphane, “but you remind me of moments of sweetness, my first boyfriend when I was fourteen, vacationing in Brittany. He was the son of our estate manager. He used to bring me daisies he’d picked by the river. I love daisies. They’re not pretending to be anything other than what they are.”
When he didn’t answer, she turned on her heel and pushed back through the door to the showroom. Lily was waiting at the counter, a pile of lingerie pinned under her elbows. Simone rang up each item in silence, carefully folding each piece into tissue paper secured with the shop’s trademark silver stickers. The final total made her blink. Ryan’s little excursion into the workroom was going to cost him a small fortune.
He emerged with his phone to his ear, as if he’d been taking a work call. Lily snatched the shopping bags and turned away, leaving Ryan to deal with the bill. He withdrew a fat envelope from his back pocket and set it on the counter. “For your trouble,” he said, knowing she couldn’t stop him without making a scene in front of two dozen curious eyes. Then he left.
***
The shit was about to hit the fan.
Ryan looked around the beach party in East Hampton, the big umbrellas set up in the sand, the steady flow of drinks and trays of food flowing from the enormous sleek house done in traditional gray and white, floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the private beach. This was what it meant to be a MacCarren: wealth, privacy, the best of everything, all built on money stolen from unsuspecting investors.
“Where are you staying?” Don asked companionably.
“In East Hampton, at a friend’s house,” Ryan said. Fuck, fuck, fuck! Logan hadn’t mentioned whether the recorder would survive sustained contact with saltwater, so Ryan couldn’t keep it in his swim trunks. The damn thing was five feet away, in the front pocket of a thin hoodie he’d been taking off and putting on all day, claiming that he burned easily. He sent up a silent prayer that Don wouldn’t choose a noisy, open environment like the beach to talk about the Ponzi scheme. His voice would get lost in the wind and waves, the children’s laughter, the music quietly playing from discreet speakers on the buffet table.
“Good. Good. Let’s enjoy the party. We’ll talk business later.”
Ryan heaved a sigh of relief. The rest of the day was surreal, the sunshine glinting like shards of glass off the waves, children running around, shrieking and splashing, begging adults to play games. Don let his grandkids bury him in the sand for a couple hours, while Charles’s sister, Arden, carefully chaperoned her mother and Lily out to the sailboat, where they tacked back and forth not far from shore, Arden at the helm, a young crew member handling the rigging. Lily preened under the attention from Arden and her mother, and chatted sunnily with Charles’s wife, Serena. As Ryan dried his face with a towel, he caught Don watching him, his eyes intense. Ryan jerked, badly startled by Don’s quiet approach.
“She’s a pretty girl,” Don commented while he watched Lily build a sand castle with Charles’s two younger daughters. “You thinking about settling down?”
“Yeah,” Ryan said. At this point he would have said he was planning to marry a goat to end this, and a guy vested in community and family, with appearances to maintain, fit right into that secret society at MacCarren.