Truly (New York Trilogy #1)

by Ruthie Knox

  Roman blinked. Frowned.

  He looked toward her toes and shook his head slightly, as if to clear it.

  “So,” he said. “You have my attention. Was there something you needed to tell me?”

  She had planned to make a speech. To tell him what Sunnyvale meant to her—all the time she’d spent here with her grandmother, the people they’d met and the friends they’d made. Their crew of regular renters who came back year after year, Mitzi and Esther, Stanley and Michael, Prachi and Arvind …

  Her family. Her home.

  She tried to think of a way to put into words why she’d come back to live here every winter, even after she left at eighteen. How it wasn’t just a bunch of apartments plunked down on one of the cheaper Keys—wasn’t simply inexpensive weekly or monthly lodging for old folks down for the season and vacationers too strapped to afford Key West prices.

  It was magic. The kind of magic made up of canasta tournaments by the swimming pool and long, laughter-filled evenings sitting on the dock surrounded by tiki torches and old friends. The magic of belonging somewhere. Having something.

  That’s what she’d wanted to tell Roman Díaz. But he had his arms crossed, and his flat, expressionless eyes made her uncomfortable, reminding her too vividly of how she must look to him. Young and dumb and barefoot. Full of reckless, useless passion.

  What did a man like him care about canasta?

  “It’s just … this is too great a place to throw away,” she said. “It needs fixing up, I know, but if you put the right person in charge … I would do the work. I would work hard. You could turn a profit. Why knock it down when it has so many good years left?”

  His eyebrows gathered themselves together. He had abundant eyebrows—the kind of eyebrows with the potential to take over his whole face if he didn’t keep them carefully trimmed. Which obviously he did, but still. Somewhere, there was a sophomore-year-of-high-school photograph of this guy with giant caterpillar eyebrows.

  The thought made her a little smug, and she cherished the feeling for a moment, imagining Roman in thirty years with eyebrows so bushy and uncontrolled that they crawled right off his face.

  “That’s your whole pitch?” he asked.

  Oh, no. I have a much better pitch. I just thought I’d start with one that sucked, in case I didn’t need to waste the ringer.

  Ashley kept her smart mouth firmly zipped. She believed in kindness over snark. And anyway, what was the point of arguing? He’d already made up his mind. There was nothing she could do to save Sunnyvale. Not alone. She was—as ever—inadequate to the situation.

  It had been a mistake to chain herself to the tree. She should have called for reinforcements. All those people who came back to Sunnyvale every year, who loved it as much as she did—surely they would help if they knew. They had more experience, better connections, and she always did best as part of a crew.

  That was where her talents lay: bringing people together, motivating them, smoothing out any little wrinkles to help a group pull together toward a common goal. She was a team player, not an oddball loner of the sort who could launch a successful solo protest.

  Too bad this hadn’t occurred to her yesterday when Gus was still around. She might have told him that she was not remotely the sort of person who could live in a redwood for four years. A village of redwoods? Yes. Totally. She would be the one who started the Redwood Village Softball League.

  But alone in a tree?

  Fuck no. She’d never last.

  “Yeah, that was more or less my whole pitch,” she admitted.

  “You should have saved yourself the effort.”

  A pickup truck pulled into the lot. Ashley recognized it even before Noah the contractor got out and hailed Roman with a lazy wave. Another car arrived, followed by a Jeep.

  The crew. They were showing up to begin their day’s work of tearing her heart out of her body and driving over it with the scarred metal treads of their diesel-fueled implements of destruction.

  Ashley’s shoulders sent a howling pain-memo to her central nervous system, and it took her a second to realize it was because she’d sat up, straightened her spine, and tossed her hair behind her shoulders. She’d done it without planning, without thinking. Her defiance was visceral, a full-body NO that seemed to have little to do with logic.

  You should have saved yourself the effort.

  Such a perfect line, delivered with such perfect blankness. She ought to feel defeated. Obviously, she was defeated. This man would roll right over her.

  But her posture seemed to be insisting that the only reasonable answer to a line like that was Screw you, buddy.

  She wouldn’t let him take the only place she had from her. Not ever, if she could help it, but definitely not today.

  Lifting her chin, Ashley met Roman Díaz’s scary brown eyes. “The thing is, though, I don’t need a pitch. I’m in your way, and I’m not moving until you agree to send the machines home and call off the demolition.”

  Roman rubbed one hand over his clean-shaven jaw.

  He walked away.

  “Hey!” she called. “Where are you going?”

  He turned around to walk backward, casual as could be. “I’m going to talk to my crew. Then I’m going to send somebody over to give you a drink of water. And then, once I’ve made sure you’re in no danger of dying on me, I’m going to ignore you until you beg me to cut you loose.”

  Ashley watched him turn without breaking stride, graceful and dangerous as a swordsman. He strolled toward the parking lot, briefcase swinging gently in his grip. When he was within verbal range, Noah said something, and Roman broke into a huge, easy smile.

  A devastating smile.

  She’d known it would be devastating, and it totally, completely, absolutely was. Just as bad as she’d figured. Worse.

  Damn it all to hell.

  Ashley took a deep breath, but then she couldn’t figure out what to do with the air. Or her face. The only sound she could make was a sort of stupefied huff.

  This evil Latino Canadian land developer was an opponent ten times more formidable than she’d imagined.

  Read on for an excerpt from

  Flirting with Disaster

  by Ruthie Knox

  Available from Loveswept

  Chapter One

  “Yes,” Katie said, gripping the steering wheel harder. “Uh-huh, yes, I get it.” She glanced in the rearview mirror, signaled left, and changed lanes. The traffic was getting thicker as they approached Louisville.

  Her brother kept talking, his voice robbed of its customary power by the cheap speakers of her cell phone, which sat in a cup-holder mount and broadcast Caleb’s warnings upward at her head. “If you have the slightest indication that there’s danger attached to this threat, you’re going to call me, and—”

  “Yesssssss,” she droned.

  The drama was wasted on Caleb, who was going to give her this lecture for the seventeenth time whether she wanted to hear it or not.

  It was wasted on Katie’s traveling companion, too. Sean didn’t react to anything she did. Ever.

  Katie glanced at the man in the passenger seat of her Jetta, just to be sure. His expression as he stared out the windshield matched the bleak, featureless expanse of southbound I-71. He was like a human wall of granite, completely impervious to everything about her.

  A stern, gorgeous cliff face.

  Suppressing a sigh, she tuned back in to Caleb’s speech. “—you to be in charge of anything along those lines, Sean. This is a trial run for Katie. I’m only letting her go because Judah insists she’s the one he wants to work with. You got that, Katie? It’s Sean’s show. I need you to play nice and stay out of his way.”

  “Yes,” she confirmed. “I know the deal. I agreed to the deal. I am on board with the deal. Now can we stop talking about it, please?”

  She flinched at the way her voice came out, sharper than she’d meant to sound. It was only because she was nervous about this trip. Her pal
ms had gone clammy and slimed the leather wheel cover, so uncomfortable did it make her to venture into an unknown city to do an unfamiliar job with a man who didn’t like her.

  She had a tendency to bristle when nervous.

  One more bad habit she needed to make an effort to tame. Better to be professional. What Katie really needed to figure out was how to act cool and icy like some kind of Bond Girl assassin, slinking around and poisoning people by slipping strychnine into their drinks.

  Except without the poisoning. Her goal was to win herself a promotion from office manager to agent for Caleb’s security company, not to become an assassin. Not unless her ex-husband strolled into town needing assassinating.

  “We’ll stop talking about it when I’m positive you’re going to cooperate,” Caleb said. “Right now, you sound like you’re blowing smoke up my ass.”

  “I’m not,” she replied levelly. “I promise. I understand that this is your company and Sean’s assignment, and I’m just a companion on this trip. I promise I’ll be quiet and helpful and learn things, okay?”

  “I need you to be safe.”

  She made a face, then immediately regretted it. Wrinkling her nose and pursing her lips in response to Caleb’s babying only proved she deserved to be babied. Not the way she wanted Sean to see her.

  She flicked another glance in his direction. If he saw her at all, he gave no sign.

  “I’m safe,” she said.

  “I care about you, Katelet.”

  “I know you do,” she replied. “I care about you, too.”

  “And it’s only because I care about you that I’m going to say this again …”

  Katie tapped her fingertips against the steering wheel and stopped listening.

  She understood his worry. Ever since she’d confessed that she was married and needed to locate her spouse so she could get divorced, Caleb had become all concerned and brotherly. She kept waiting for him to go back to the way he’d been before, but so far, no luck.

  Five years older than her, her brother was a born nice guy who had spent most of his adulthood in the Military Police before moving home a year ago to help take care of their parents after their dad had a stroke. Katie had been living in his house rent-free at the time, working as a bartender nights and spending her days in elastic-waist pants, moping and watching daytime TV. Her husband, Levi, had cleaned her out and dropped her like a bad habit, and she’d returned from the life they’d built in Alaska in defeat. She’d practically regressed to adolescence by the time Caleb pulled her out of her self-pity slump.

  He gave her a job running the office of his new company, Camelot Security, and after the first month or so, Katie had started to feel useful again. Competent. She’d discovered she had some get-up-and-go left in her after all. That she actually wanted to do something with herself.

  Caleb was also the one who’d encouraged her to enroll in a couple of online classes. He’d even appointed himself her personal trainer, helping her whip her body into its best shape in years.

  He was a great brother, but Katie was done with the coddling. She’d turned over a new leaf. He needed to get with the program.

  “Sean, are you hearing all this?” he asked.

  Sean nodded. He was invisible to Caleb, but the two of them apparently had a man-telepathy thing going, because Caleb said, “Great. Give me a call after you’ve talked to Pratt. I want to hear the details of these threats he’s supposedly getting. And if you can, find out why he’s brought this case to us instead of giving it to his security team from Palmerston, because—”

  “Caleb,” Katie interrupted.

  “What?”

  “Give it a rest.”

  “I just—”

  “We’ve been over this and over this. Sean gets it. I get it. We’ll call you. Now let us do the job.”

  Her brother exhaled explosively, which made Katie smile a little. “Aren’t you supposed to be taking today off?” she asked. “Go home and help Ellen with wedding arrangements or something.”

  Caleb and Ellen had met on a job and gotten engaged about six minutes later. He pretty much lived over at her place now, and he’d become more of a father to her son, Henry, than the two-year-old’s real father ever had.

  “God, no. She won’t let me near any of the wedding stuff. But I did tell Henry I’d take him to the hardware store.”

  “So why aren’t you doing that?”

  Katie spotted an exit and swerved toward it, weaving nimbly through three lanes of traffic. The gas tank was getting low.

  “I’ve got payroll to figure out first.”

  She caught herself right before the words left her mouth. I can do that when I get back.

  It was the kind of thing a self-sacrificing doormat would say, not a slick professional. A decade of specializing in being a doormat had left her rumpled and ground down, with boot prints on her forehead.

  Time to stop jumping to the rescue.

  “You should hire somebody else to do payroll, now that I have a new job,” she said instead.

  At the end of the off ramp she turned—a little too fast, perhaps, because she got distracted by the fact that Sean was looking directly at her. Somehow he made looking look like not-looking. As though he could see her, but he couldn’t be bothered to see her.

  How was she supposed to concentrate on Caleb talking about payroll when Sean was not-looking at her that way?

  She didn’t know what the guy’s deal was. It seemed as if he didn’t approve of her—though what it was about her he disliked, she had no idea. Her personality, her being on the job, her existence?

  Sean had been working for her brother since the summer, and in that time he and Caleb had grown thick as thieves. He spent hours every week in Caleb’s office, a solid panel of pine muffling the mingled sound of their voices as they bent their heads over some obscure security challenge and Katie tried to get her work done at the reception desk a few feet away.

  Then he would come out, fix her with that blue stare, nod like a robot, and leave.

  She’d tried being nice to him, reminding him they’d gone to high school together and sat by each other in Algebra II and Trig. She’d tried ignoring him. She’d tried glaring at him and even, one embarrassing day, flirting with him. Nothing made a difference.

  He didn’t speak to her. Not at all, not ever, not under any circumstances. It was extremely weird, and it drove her nuts.

  Caleb was way too casual about it.

  Don’t send me to Louisville with him, she’d begged. He hates me.

  No, he doesn’t, Caleb had said. I’m positive he doesn’t hate you. You two just need to work it out between you.

  She didn’t know how to work it out, but she refused to let Sean get to her. This job was the big chance she’d been waiting for—her opportunity to get out of Camelot and see new places, rub elbows with interesting people, become somebody independent of Levi and Caleb. Her own somebody.

  Judah Pratt saw her potential. The singer-songwriter had asked for her specifically. And okay, yes, maybe Judah’s interest in her was largely carnal, but an opportunity was an opportunity. She’d only been in his Chicago apartment for half an hour when it arrived: he’d announced that he would hire Camelot Security, but only if he could have Katie.

  He’d said it just like that, too. Only if I can have Katie. A week later, the memory retained the power to send shivers skittering up her spine.

  Or it usually did. It was a little hard to get swept up in her Judah fantasies with Sean sitting next to her, emanating stony disapproval of … something. Her being assigned to work with him. The way she breathed. Her boots. Who knew?

  “Katie?” Caleb interrupted her reverie.

  “What?”

  “Are you even listening to me?”

  “Sure.” She rewound her brain, hoping to locate some phantom memory of what he’d said when she wasn’t paying attention. Nada. “What did you say?”

  “When did you stop listening?”

  �
��Uh, payroll?”

  “Never mind. The upshot is, you’ve still got your old job when you come back.”

  “Yeah, but after I completely blow your socks off, you’ll need someone else to do my old job.”

  “Please don’t try to blow my socks off. Be safe.”

  “Right, right.” She turned into the gas station. “I’ve got to go.”

  “One last thing.”

  “What?”

  “I want you to keep your distance from Pratt.”

  “Caleb—”

  “No, I’m serious. Sean, I need your help here. Keep the guy away from my sister. I don’t trust him not to take advantage.”

  Katie pulled to a stop beside a pump, her blood boiling. There was overprotective, and then there was stifling. She loved Caleb and all, but she wasn’t about to let him smother her to death.

  Sean had turned to look at her. He had the most astonishing eyes. Dark, dark blue, with thunderstorms in them.

  She lifted her chin. “That isn’t necessary,” she told Caleb.

  “I think it is.”

  “No, it isn’t. If Judah wants to take advantage of me, I’m all for it.”

  Sean blinked.

  “Katie,” Caleb said, a note of warning in his voice.

  “Stop. You don’t want to have this conversation any more than I do, so just drop it, okay?”

  Sean got out of the car. Katie watched him go, uneasy but resolved. It was hard enough to defeat her own internal censor. She didn’t need two men dog-piling on to judge her ability to make decisions about her own freaking sex life.

  Not that she had a sex life.

  “Believe me, I would love to drop it,” Caleb said. “But I don’t think I can.”

  “Try. I’m a grown woman. I have condoms. I think I’ve got this under control.”

  Sean tapped on the passenger-side window and pointed toward the gas tank. Katie popped the fuel door for him, and he swept one open palm in the direction of the gasoline options. “The cheap stuff,” she said, loud enough for him to hear her through the window. He nodded and turned his back on her.