Luke returned the phone to its cradle and leaned back in his chair, steepling his fingers under his chin.
Ali was coming to New York, where he hoped she would see him in a whole new light amid the glittering wattage of his adopted city. He wanted her to be proud of him. More importantly, though, by the time she boarded his jet back to Trillium, he was determined to have earned her forgiveness and regained her trust. Perhaps then she would accept what he now knew as irrefutable fact: They were meant to be together.
Ali tried to send Audra in her place, but her twin was adamant in her refusal.
“You’re heading up the golf course project. You need to go.”
Dane offered to accompany her, but Audra put her foot down on that as well.
“I’m not minding the store while the two of you jet off to the Big Apple,” she said. “Besides, Luke asked Ali to come.” She winked then. “It’s business.”
“It better be,” Dane muttered.
So late Friday morning Ali drove her car to the island’s small airport, which could now accommodate a small jet on its runway thanks to a generous donation from Audra the summer before. Luke’s aircraft was already waiting, door opened to reveal the steps that led to the passenger cabin. Ali grabbed her small suitcase from the back seat of her car and wheeled it over.
Luke appeared in the doorway as she approached, and her heart seemed to turn over in her chest. She blamed the unsettling reaction on surprise. She certainly hadn’t expected him to be on board. Or to look quite so handsome. He was wearing a suit, although he had loosened his necktie and unfastened the first two buttons on his crisp white shirt.
“Hello,” he said as he took her luggage and then helped her up the steps.
“I didn’t realize you were coming with the jet.” A thought occurred to her then. “You’re not flying it, are you?”
“What would you do if I said yes?”
She didn’t hesitate before responding. “I’d grab my luggage and get off.”
He laughed. “Well, lucky for both of us then that I’m leaving the controls to another pilot today.”
“Does that mean you could fly this thing if you wanted to?” she asked.
He nodded. “I’m licensed.”
She had to admit, she was impressed.
“You always wanted to learn how to fly,” she mused, and she couldn’t help but be happy for him that he’d made so many of those seemingly unattainable dreams from his youth come true. Glancing past him, she whistled low. “This sure beats coach.”
The cabin boasted six generously proportioned leather chairs, a galley stocked with only the best food and beverages, and a lavatory that made the ones on commercial aircraft a pitiful joke. But it was the rear of the aircraft that really caught her attention. A bed was tucked behind a curtain. The mattress stretched across the rear of the cabin, covered in a satin duvet the same color as the sky. When her gaze connected with Luke’s, he raised one dark eyebrow.
“Interested in joining the mile-high club?” he asked.
Even though she was pretty sure he was just trying to get under her skin rather than under the neatly pressed khakis she’d paired with a no-nonsense button-down blouse, she still had to swallow hard before she could ask, “Is that why you have another pilot behind the controls?”
“The FAA frowns on hanky-panky in the cockpit.”
Luke grinned wickedly after saying it, and Ali didn’t know whether to slap him or laugh with him. In the end, she merely shook her head.
“You’re delusional, Banning. Highly delusional.”
“I prefer to think of myself as hopeful.” He winked. “Make yourself comfortable. I need to have a word with the captain before we get under way.”
Not long after he disappeared through the door that led to the cockpit, Ali heard the engines start. The noise crescendoed right along with her frayed nerves. God, she hated flying. Weak-kneed, she settled into the nearest leather seat and strapped herself in, pulling the belt as tight as was possible across her lap without causing internal injuries.
When Luke returned to the cabin, he took one look at Ali’s bloodless fingers gripping the upholstered armrests and frowned in concern.
He nodded toward her white knuckles. “I take it you don’t like to fly.”
“Hate it,” she confirmed. “I’d rather be standing helmetless on the seat of your Harley as it speeds down Palmer Hill.”
He whistled through his teeth. “That much, hmm? How about a drink to loosen your nerves?”
“It’s not even noon,” she protested.
“It is somewhere,” he said and crossed to the bar, where he poured her a couple fingers of whiskey.
He chose the seat opposite hers, smiling as he settled into it and handed her the beverage.
“I got that on my last trip to Ireland. I hear it’s some of the Emerald Isle’s best.”
She downed it in a single gulp, gritting her teeth afterward. Her tawny eyes watered briefly before she lowered her lids and settled back against the headrest.
“Are you planning to keep your eyes closed for the entire trip?”
“I might open them after takeoff, assuming we don’t die in a fiery crash that will make positive identification of our remains impossible.”
For someone so practical, her phobia surprised him. “Come on, Ali. Relax,” he cajoled, reaching over to pat her hand. It was as cold as ice. “Air travel is safe. In fact, more people—”
“Die in car accidents than aviation disasters,” she finished for him. “I know, I know. Just do me a favor and tell me when we’re in the air so that I can stop praying.”
“How many times have you flown?” he asked several minutes later when they finally leveled off at cruising altitude.
One eye squinted open. “About four times, most recently at Audra’s insistence. She has a private jet, too. Or, she did. It was one of the things she got rid of not long after returning to Trillium and simplifying her life.”
“I’m sorry, Ali. If I’d known—”
“Tell me about the golf course,” she interrupted, rallying valiantly, although she kept her eyes firmly closed. “That should help keep my mind off our impending deaths.”
He laughed softly, but then he did as she requested.
“The name is Havenhurst, and it’s a 6,900-yard, par 72 located on Long Island. It’s hosted a couple of minor tour events. I like the look of it. And I thought we could talk with the greenskeepers. They’ve had a lot of success with organic fertilizers, pesticides and soil amendments.”
“Good. I’ve been doing a lot of research on that. I’d like the Rebel to be as environmentally friendly as possible. Are we going to play Havenhurst today?”
“No. Tomorrow. I made tee-times for the morning. I thought you might not feel up to golf after the flight, as relatively short as it is. You can do a little shopping this afternoon if you’d like or go to a museum. My car will be at your disposal.”
“Where will I be staying? You never did get back to me on the name of the hotel.”
For the first time since concocting his plan, nerves assailed him. “Actually, I thought that you could stay…with me.”
Her eyes popped wide open then, fear receding behind fury. “You thought what?”
“I have four guest bedrooms in my penthouse, Ali. It hardly seemed necessary to book other lodgings when we will be spending so much time together anyway.” When she just continued to regard him as if she were considering how best to flay his skin, he added, “Besides, we’re both adults.”
The mutinous set of her mouth told him she didn’t buy his rationale. In truth, he didn’t, either, even though he fully intended to respect her privacy and keep his hands to himself throughout her visit.
Unless she explicitly told him differently. And he planned to do his damnedest to ensure that happened. Something told him this was his one shot at convincing her they belonged together.
“I’m not staying in your penthouse, Luke. No way. You can ju
st forget that.”
“Don’t trust yourself?” he asked.
“God, your ego is as large as ever.”
“After that evening in your kitchen it’s not the only thing,” he murmured, enjoying the way her cheeks turned pink.
“That was a mistake. One I don’t plan to repeat,” Ali snarled.
“If you say so.”
“I do.”
“Then it shouldn’t be a problem for the two of us to stay under the same roof—in separate bedrooms, of course.”
She opened her mouth to protest, but then snapped it shut. She had backed herself into a corner and she knew it. After that there was no face-saving way for her to refuse his hospitality.
Traveling with Luke Banning definitely had its perks, Ali had to admit. Bypassing luggage pickup at busy LaGuardia International was one of them. As was the fact that he had Ali in a chauffeured limousine heading toward his home in the time it would have taken them to wind their way up to the front of the line of folks waiting to catch a taxi.
She glanced out the tinted windows as the car made its way into the heart of Manhattan on streets choked with honking yellow cabs, cars and diesel-fume-spewing trucks and buses. The sidewalks were filled with bustling pedestrians, all looking eager to finish up the last day of the work week and head home or to the nearest bar for happy hour.
The sheer volume of humanity was staggering, but no more so than the ways the buildings shot up from the pavement, all but blotting out the sky.
“What do you think?” Luke asked quietly.
“It’s something else,” she answered, unable to mask the awe she felt.
“The first day I was in New York all I did was walk around looking up.” He laughed ruefully. “Of course, that’s probably why my pocket wound up getting picked.”
She turned away from the window and regarded him across the limo’s climate-controlled interior.
“Weren’t you…afraid living here all by yourself?”
“Afraid? No.” He shook his head. “I’d been alone before, Ali.”
She knew that he had been—both as a boy waiting for his father to stagger home and then later as a young man whose only other close relative had died. Why was it, she wondered, that he still seemed so alone now?
“But this city is so huge, so…so impersonal.”
“I think that’s why I loved it. It accepted me, no questions asked. No one here knew my dad had died a drunk or that my mom had left me and never looked back. No one asked and no one cared. I got a job cleaning offices at night my second week in the city. One of those offices belonged to a big shot businessman who liked to work late. I picked his brain and he let me do some research on his company’s computer system. When the time was right, and with some backing from him, I launched my dot-com.”
“I still remember the article in Business Week about your success.” She shook her head. “It was all they talked about over at the Sandpiper until Audra got a recurring bit part on a primetime sitcom. Then it was, Luke this and Audra that. It was all I heard for weeks on end. My sister and my ex-boyfriend had hit the big time and everybody on Trillium wanted to know what I thought about it.”
He grimaced, one side of his mouth lifting in a sardonic smile. “I can only imagine what you told them.”
“I probably said something snarky at the time,” she admitted. “But I was proud of Audra and you, too. I’m still proud.” Ali surprised them both by reaching across the seat to take his hand. “You’ve come a long way, Luke, and it has nothing to do with bank accounts, private jets or penthouses.”
He squeezed her hand and his voice was choked with emotion when he said, “Thank you.”
The shackles of the past finally seemed to be falling away, freeing them both.
“You’re welcome.”
“Ali, will you do me a favor?”
“What?”
“Will you keep an open mind this weekend?”
Her brows pulled together. “An open mind about what?”
Me.
Us.
But he settled on, “The possibilities.”
CHAPTER NINE
LUKE’S penthouse home was not at all what Ali expected. Oh, it was grand, both in size and the caliber of its furnishings. She didn’t doubt everything from the chrome lighting fixtures that hung from the high ceiling in the kitchen to the odd metal statue that coiled up from the cool black marble floor in the foyer had cost top dollar. But the place, all six thousand square feet of it, seemed so austere, so dispassionate, so absolutely un-Luke.
“Your decor is very…modern,” she said as they sat in his living room, enjoying the finger foods and beverages that had just been served by his housekeeper, an efficient but dour-looking older woman whom Ali suspected had last smiled during the Carter administration.
Floor-to-ceiling windows offered a bird’s view of the treetops in nearby Central Park, but they also made Ali feel a bit dizzy, as if she were perched up in the clouds rather than sitting on a squat red chair with foot-wide armrests.
Luke studied her for a moment from his seat on the opposite side of a boomerang-shaped coffee table made of glass and chrome. Despite the fact that he had not changed out of his pricey designer suit, he looked as out of place as she felt in her conservative khakis, twin set and penny loafers.
“You don’t like it?” he asked, his expression unreadable.
“It’s not that I don’t like it,” she hedged, glancing around again. In her head she heard her mother’s admonition about being polite and complimentary to one’s host. “It’s just not my taste.” Or what I remember to be yours, she almost said before finishing with, “It’s…it’s very, um, modern.”
“Yes, I believe we’ve established that.”
His lips twitched and she relaxed a little. Still, she felt compelled to apologize.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. It’s not exactly my taste, either.”
Ali couldn’t have said why she felt so relieved to hear that, but she did. It just seemed so incongruous that the man who’d once picked her a fistful of wild wood lilies could now prefer the odd arrangement of metal geometric shapes that served as a centerpiece on his dining room table.
“Did the place come furnished then?”
“No.” He glanced around and shrugged. “I gave the interior designer, whom I’ve worked with on other projects, carte blanche when I bought the place a year ago. I told her to do it up in whatever style she felt best suited the rooms.”
“What about your taste?” she asked, amazed that he could spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not more, on furnishings, original artwork and accessories, and not want to have more input than signing his name on the sales receipts. On Trillium, he’d had his head together with Tom Whitey for more than a week over basic repairs to his grandmother’s cottage.
He shrugged again. “I’m no expert on decorating. Besides, the penthouse is just an investment. I don’t spend much time here except to sleep.”
She thought of her own home and the way it represented a haven of sorts, a place where she could regroup and recharge after a long day.
“Expert or not, surely you know what you like.”
He leaned forward in his low-slung chair and the slow smile that curved his lips sent a shower of sparks ricocheting around in her system, obliterating all thought of home furnishings.
“Oh, I know what I like, Alice.”
She cleared her throat, determined to change the subject. “So, what are we going to do?”
“What would you like to do?”
Before she could stop it, her gaze dropped to his mouth and the scene in her kitchen played back. She remembered exactly where she’d wanted those lips. His grin widened. Apparently he knew, too. She glanced away.
“You said our tee-time is in the morning, so that leaves the rest of today.”
“And tonight.”
She motioned toward his suit. “Do you need to be somewhere?”
“No
. I didn’t have time to change after a business meeting that ran late this morning. I’m all yours this evening. All yours,” he repeated, and she was reminded of the way he had signed his e-mails.
“Luke,” she said evenly after managing to swallow. “I’m here in my professional capacity as one of the owners of Saybrook’s Resort.”
She sounded like a weenie even to her own ears.
“Whatever you say, Alice.”
“Luke—”
He held up his hands. “I’m just stating fact here. I canceled my other plans for the weekend once I knew you would be coming to town. I thought this evening we could grab an informal bite to eat at my favorite pizzeria near Hell’s Kitchen and then go on a carriage ride through Central Park.”
It sounded perfect. And a little too romantic.
“You didn’t have to cancel your plans for me. I bought a guidebook and I noticed that we passed several museums and galleries on our way from the airport. I don’t want to be any trouble.”
His laughter seemed self-mocking. “Ali, you’ve been nothing but trouble for me since the day you hit puberty.”
“Thanks a lot.” She was insulted, she told herself, even though she felt oddly flattered.
“I mean that in a good way.” Then he sobered. “I thought you had agreed to keep an open mind. Reneging on your promise already?”
“I just don’t think we should stray from business.”
“Then I have a confession to make. Business isn’t the only reason I asked you to come here.”
“Luke—”
But he shook his head. “Let me show you my New York, Ali. It’s a great city.” When she hesitated, he added, “Please. It would mean a lot to me.”
Possibilities, he’d said earlier. She swallowed hard. And because he also reminded her so much just then of the troubled young man who’d first stolen her heart, all she could do was nod.
Luke assured her the evening would be casual and she could wear what she had on, but she decided to change. She’d brought a couple of simple outfits, both of which went fine with the practical walking shoes stowed in her luggage. When she opened her suitcase, however, she didn’t recognize anything inside it.
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