by LETO, JULIE
Men! He’d been duped and drugged, and he probably suspected Charlie had something to do with that. She couldn’t blame him. Charlie was suspect number one in her eyes, too. But she was perfectly capable of torturing the truth out of Charlie on her own. Max had something more important to do.
“Max, you need to see Maddie. She could be crying her eyes out because the man she loves cheated on her the night before their wedding. She’s probably humiliated!”
At the stoplight, he twisted into his seat belt then motioned for Ariana to do the same. Cool and calm didn’t begin to describe the precision of his movements, the controlled expression on his face. So this was how a man made millions, Ariana decided. Little by little, Max had reined in his emotions, tucking them away so she could see nothing but concentration on his face.
“I’ll take care of Maddie. I promised to do that. I don’t break promises.”
Ariana sat back into the seat, silenced. He’d pledged last night to pleasure her beyond her wildest fantasies, to touch her precisely where she wanted to be touched and show her a few places she hadn’t known would lead her to complete ecstasy. A thrumming heat suffused her veins as each caress, each kiss, replayed in her mind. Their interlude had been about abandon, exploration, unhindered freedom. She hadn’t imagined or intended that they’d hurt anyone in the process.
She’d learned things about herself, about her body, about her needs, that she’d treasure forever. How many women would be so lucky? She knew then that if Max said he’d take care of Maddie, she would believe him.
Max Forrester was most definitely a man of his word.
6
“CHARLIE, OPEN THIS DAMN DOOR!”
Max pounded and jabbed the doorbell until he was certain that if anyone was inside Charlie and Sheri’s North Beach walk-up, they were either dead or scared shitless to answer. He growled, knowing his best friend, conniving son of a bitch that he was, would never cower or hide. He’d face the music, no matter how loud or how ugly. It was one of the reasons he loved Charlie, bastard that he was.
“I don’t think anyone’s home, Max.”
Ariana leaned on the front end of his Porsche, looking remarkably like one of those calendar models his mechanic had all over his shop. Except that her clothes covered nearly every inch of her skin, from her jaunty cap to her long-sleeved shirt, snug jeans and boots. He jabbed his fingers through his hair before he attacked the door again. To add to his frustration, he had very little trouble imagining her in nothing but those pink satin underthings she’d dangled from her fingers earlier. Too little trouble. He rightfully felt like a lying, cheating bastard, and women like Ariana Karas—and Maddie—deserved a hell of a lot better.
Giving up at the door, he jogged to the car, parked halfway on the curb and grabbed his Daytimer from the back seat. Ripping out a page, he carved a note with his felt-tip pen, then flashed it at Ariana so she could see he was serious.
Call me or you’re fired. Max.
“What? No death threat?” she asked.
“Charlie just got married a few months ago. Sheri has expensive tastes. Threatening his life won’t be nearly as effective as promising to cut off his income.”
“Funny,” Ari quipped. “I was planning on cutting off something else that Charlie’s wife values.”
Max raised an eyebrow, but Ariana didn’t crack a smile or give him any indication that she wasn’t dead serious.
Note to self: Don’t piss this woman off.
Max pinned the paper beneath the door knocker and then slid back into the car as Ari did the same. He started the engine and pulled onto Greenwich Street before he realized he didn’t know where to go next.
“If you can’t find Charlie, shouldn’t you call Madelyn?”
Ariana’s concern for Maddie made Max feel even worse, not that he didn’t care about Maddie himself. Nothing could be further from the truth. But he did know without a doubt that Maddie was not and never had been in love with him. No matter what happened to cause her to call off the wedding, Maddie wasn’t experiencing the level of betrayal Ariana undoubtedly imagined.
They were just friends working out a mutually beneficial deal. Weren’t they? All of a sudden, Max wasn’t so sure. He had, technically, cheated. The act alone, druginduced or not, denoted a lack of loyalty that tasted bitter in his mouth. Maddie didn’t deserve such treachery.
And Ariana? What could she possibly be thinking, knowing she’d been lied to and deceived? For the moment, she focused on Maddie’s feelings, but sooner or later she’d have her own to deal with, just as he’d have his. However, her apparent concern over his fiancée rather than herself only proved yet again that Ariana Karas was too good for the likes of him.
“It really bothers you that she might have gotten hurt, doesn’t it?”
“Might have gotten hurt? She called off her wedding, Max. She made up an elaborate story about you eloping. Why else would she do that unless she saw us together last night? We weren’t exactly practicing the depth of discretion.”
He remained silent, but made a choice. He’d find Maddie soon enough and explain everything until she understood and forgave him. He’d take care of her, just as he’d promised. But right now he couldn’t fight the urge to sustain whatever connection he’d formed with Ariana.
He’d dreamed about her for so long, cast her in countless forbidden fantasies. He couldn’t waste this chance to fix what had gone so horribly wrong. The reverberation in her voice told him she blamed herself for last night’s liaison.
If only she knew how he’d spent quite a few nights staring from his empty bed out to the view he’d paid way too much money for, wishing he could share the skyline with someone as intrinsically drawn to the hypnotic vista as he was.
He’d shown the view to Maddie once—and not from the vantage of the bed—but when she looked out onto any part of San Francisco, all she saw were the sights that needed to be changed. The beaches suffering corrosion. The neighborhoods overrun with liquor stores and strip clubs. The houses being renovated with no respect for the architect’s original intentions or the character of the building or street.
He loved Maddie, in the way good friends should, but she wasn’t the woman for him any more than he was the man for her. He’d never once fantasized about stripping her bare on a clear, cool night, then making love to her outside, with the stars and the city as witness to their passion.
But he’d imagined it with Ariana Karas, more times than he cared to count.
“I’ll take you home first and then I’ll call Maddie. I’m sure she’s fine.”
“Shouldn’t you go find Maddie?”
Max shook his head, then shrugged. Honestly, he didn’t know what to do. His anger subsided long enough for him to realize that his head was pounding like a bass drum. As much as he’d like to think he knew Maddie better than anyone, he couldn’t be certain about how she would react if she had somehow stumbled onto him and Ariana last night. They’d never pretended to love one another that way. They hadn’t even talked about how they’d handle sex during their marriage.
Up until last night, he hadn’t put much value or importance on sex. His priority had been achieving his business goals and establishing himself as an independent, successful powerbroker in the world of San Francisco real estate. And so far as he knew, Maddie felt the same way.
But judging by the stricken expression shadowing Ariana’s face, he needed to explain his arrangement with Maddie before she traded her tight turtleneck for a hair shirt.
“Look, Ari, I know you feel guilty about Madelyn. But we didn’t have that kind of relationship.”
Ariana glanced at him sideways and puckered her lips while she considered what he meant. Spending his adult years in San Francisco had taught him never to let uncertainties linger. There were too many deviations available in the city, too many possibilities for why he and Maddie’s marriage would have been purely platonic. And dammit, he didn’t want Ari thinking he swung the other way.
&nb
sp; “That didn’t sound right,” he said.
“No, it didn’t. If you’ve been thinking all these years that you were gay, I hate to be the one to break it to you…”
“I don’t think I’m gay,” he insisted.
She smacked her lips. “That makes two of us.”
Part of him was pleased. Part of him was frustrated beyond frustration that he had no memory of why she’d be so smugly certain.
“Good.”
“So…” she sang, obviously wanting—and deserving—more explanation than he’d given her.
“Maddie and I have been friends a long time, since college.”
“That’s sweet,” she injected, clear by her tone that she was only half sincere. “You marrying a woman you weren’t sleeping with and had no intention of sleeping with? That’s what you’re trying to tell me, right? Why?”
She was too damn smart for her own good. And for his. “We had a mutually beneficial arrangement planned.”
Boy, that sounded cold when he said it out loud.
“You were using each other,” she clarified.
“No! I mean, well, not exactly.”
“Using is using whether it’s friendly or spiteful. She wanted something from you, you wanted something from her, all the cards are laid out on the table and everyone’s happy. So why then did she call off the wedding and tell everyone the two of you eloped? Do you think she was seeing someone?”
“Maddie?”
Ariana’s expression told him she heard the fury in his outburst. His tone surprised him as well.
He turned north onto Grant Avenue, for no other reason than because he had wanted to feel as if he was going somewhere. Somewhere other than down the road where he learned he’d taken Maddie for granted.
“If Maddie had found someone, she would have told me. I’ve encouraged her for years to look for someone who would love her, but she wasn’t interested in having her heart broken.”
Ariana nodded silently, as if she commiserated with Maddie on a personal level he didn’t want to contemplate. He didn’t want to think about some man hurting Ariana any more than he wanted to think about hurting Maddie. The idea introduced a hint of rage more potentially harmful than the murderous intentions he planned to wreak on Charlie whenever he got his hands on him.
Of course, at the moment, the man who could potentially hurt Ariana most of all was him, unless he did something to avert the inevitable. Right here. Right now.
“If Maddie did see us together and did call off the wedding,” he said, hoping to ease Ariana’s persistent guilt, “I’m pretty sure she’d do it because she thought it would make me happy, not because she felt betrayed or angry.”
“Pretty sure isn’t the same as certain.”
“No, it’s not. But I’ll find out.” Without thinking, he reached across and laid his hand over hers. “Trust me.”
A grin bloomed, despite her apparent effort to tamp it down. “I’ve already done that.”
“Any regrets?”
She turned her hand over so her palm nestled with his.
“Just that you don’t remember.”
“There’s no way in hell you regret that more than I do.”
They sat silently at a traffic light, hand in hand, warmth to warmth. In the close quarters of his compact car, her scent, citrusy and fresh like a beach breeze, drifted in the air-conditioned space, teasing him, taunting him. Max shut his eyes against the bright sun, willing his brain to conjure a single clear image from the night before. Something wonderful. Something sweet. Something he could hold on to during the mess he was about to endure with Maddie, his parents, her parents and the entire social elite of San Francisco.
He got nothing but a dusky fog.
When he turned left at Bay Street, Ariana realized he was wandering and gave him directions to double back to her apartment in Chinatown. He released her hand to shift the gears and she busied herself with looking over the instrumentation of the car, asking him about the features as if she was honestly interested.
“Is this a car phone?” She pointed to the console.
“Yes. It’s hands-free, for safety. There’s a headset hidden in this panel if I need privacy.”
“What’s this blinking red light?”
Max glanced away from the road long enough to catch a ruby glimmer in the corner of his eye.
“A message.”
He turned at Mason Street, glad when a cable car stopped in front of him so he could take a closer look.
“But no one calls me on this number. No one except…” He jabbed the playback button and tensed as the mechanical voice announced he had one message—from Maddie.
“Do you want the headset?” Ariana asked.
Before he could reply, Madelyn’s cultured voice, soft and sad, echoed over the clanging of the cable car and the rumble of his engine. “Hi, Max. It’s Maddie. I feel like such a coward. I should be telling you goodbye in person, but I’ve got to get away while I can. I’m sorry if I’ve embarrassed you, if I’ve ruined everything. But I’ve got to do this. I’ll call you once I figure out where I’m going. Don’t worry. For once, I’m going to be okay on my own. You might want to lay low for a couple of days, pretend we really are in Hawaii. I love you.”
Max pulled over onto the first driveway he saw and worked the buttons until the message replayed. Ariana didn’t say a word, but stared at him with confused eyes.
“I don’t understand what she means,” he admitted. “Why is she apologizing to me?”
“Play it again.”
He did. The third time was not the charm. He still had no idea what Maddie was talking about, but he did catch the automatic announcement of when the call was received—just before midnight the evening before.
“What time did we leave the restaurant?” he asked.
“Just before one o’clock, clearly after she called.”
They both sighed in relief, but Ariana couldn’t shake the feeling that something more was wrong with Madelyn. She didn’t know the woman—she shouldn’t care. But she did.
“She may not have known anything about us when she made this call,” Ariana said, “but something is going on with her. How does she sound to you?”
Max replayed the message, this time listening for the emotions in Maddie’s voice. She was slightly nervous, but clear. A sound of intense determination deepened her tone, despite her apologetic words.
“She sounds like a woman with a plan, which for Maddie is somewhat normal.”
“She sounded a little scared to me,” Ariana added.
Max nodded. He did hear anxiety in Maddie’s tone, but nothing that got his hackles up or engaged his protective instincts. He and Maddie had known each other for so long, he felt confident he’d know when and if to be worried.
And he wasn’t worried. Maddie may have finally come to her senses and realized that their marriage would have been a huge mistake for her. He’d tried to tell her that she shouldn’t work so hard at living up to the expectations of others at the expense of her own wants and needs, but it was an empty argument coming from him. Wasn’t he guilty of the same crime? Maddie needed time and space and, like the clever minx she was, she’d probably cooked up the elopement ruse to cover her escape.
He couldn’t help but grin. When push came to shove, she’d always been the more courageous of the two of them. Looked as if he needed to take a lesson from his best bud once again.
“She sounds a little scared, but a whole lot more determined.” He shifted the car back onto the main road, nodding quietly as they progressed, proud of Madelyn for making a stand, even in this roundabout way. “I think Maddie has gone off to find herself and used the elopement as a smoke screen.”
Ariana sat back in the leather bucket seat and chewed her bottom lip as she processed all the information he’d given her, asking questions at intermittent moments between giving directions to her home, clarifying her understanding and filling in the gaps.
“So, Maddie was marryin
g you because…”
“She was tired of the pressure from her parents to get married. And the women she worked with in her building-restoration efforts were older, very conservative—they had an elemental distrust of a female over twenty-one who wasn’t properly wed to a man of power and prestige.”
“And now you think she ran away to get her priorities straight and told everyone the two of you eloped?”
He shrugged. “Well, either Maddie cooked that one up or her parents did when they realized she was AWOL. They wouldn’t stand for something so humiliating as a runaway daughter, even if she is nearly thirty years old.”
“And you don’t think you should go look for her? Make certain she’s okay?”
He shook his head. “Definitely not. Maddie knows exactly how to contact me if she needs to.”
Ariana accepted his claim with a nod. “Pull into that alley. You can park behind the shop. There aren’t any deliveries on Saturday.”
Max concentrated as he made the sharp right turn into a narrow alley between the blocks of Pacific and Powell. Driving in wasn’t so hard, but the thought of them opening the doors to get out caused the imaginary sound of metal scraping brick to echo in his head. Still, what was a little scratched paint when he had the chance to see where Ariana Karas lived?
“Is the car safe here?” he asked, eyeing the deserted alley with the skeptical glare of a man who rarely ventured into Chinatown except to take some out-of-town client for dim sum.
“Well, there’s always an off chance that Mr. Ping’s rooster will take a liking to your convertible top.”
“Mr. Ping’s rooster lives in the alley?”
“No, the rooster lives in his guest bathroom, but he comes out here for fresh air.”
“Are you teasing me?”
She winked before she flipped open the door with just enough speed to make him wince and enough alacrity not to scrape the door on the wall. “If you had any memory of last night, you’d know I’m not a tease.”
Grabbing her backpack from the tiny space behind her seat, she shut the door with due care and slipped around to his side.