Page 55 of Filthy Rich

“That makes me sad.” I smooth his hair away from his temple to keep it from blowing in his face. “Everyone should be excited about their life.”

He turns his head slightly, his lids drifting closed as he leans into my touch for a second or two. Then those eyes open again and he’s all focused intensity as he zeroes in on my face. “There are one or two things that hold my attention these days.”

“I’m all in favor of anything that puts a smile on your face,” I say, my skin tingling to life and my nipples hardening as always when he looks at me like that. My own smile feels like it originates from my heart rather than my lips.

I don’t know if he notices all the effects he has on me, but something washes over him. Maybe it’s only a trick of the Mediterranean light. Who knows? But the sun’s rays hit him just right, making his eyes glow.

We have a lot of quietly intense moments like these. That’s why I didn’t believe him earlier.

The two of us aren’t finished with each other. Bottom line.

“I’m a lucky guy,” he says, his voice gravelly.

I exert more pressure on his head, and he leans in to meet me halfway, slowly licking his way deep into my mouth and making me moan. The kiss is endless. Languid. Unbearably delicious. I find myself arching into it before I remember that we’re in the middle of my golden opportunity to discover more about him, and I don’t plan to squander it.

So I break the kiss, keeping my head back just enough to deny him of my mouth.

“Tell me about Ackerley,” I say, staring out at the water because I don’t want to accidentally reveal how interested I am in his answer.

His breath hisses with frustrated desire. And he doesn’t let me go, choosing instead to trail his fingers across my waist to the curve of my hip. But he does answer. “Ackerley is home. It’s me.”

“What do you mean?”

He shrugs, taking his time piecing together his answer. “You look at it from the outside and it looks good. Maybe it looks perfect. And you think that it’s everything it should be.” His jaw tenses, and I can feel him fighting the words he doesn’t seem to want to say. “But it’s empty on the inside. There’s nothing real there. Except painful memories.”

I hate the sound of that. I’m not sure I want to know what it means.

“Nothing?” I say, frowning.

“It’s empty. No heart. No soul.”

“So, you lost them?” I ask. “When Ravenna died?”

He stiffens at the sound of the name, making me immediately regret saying it.

“My dear, sweet Ms. Scott,” he says, now looking at me with dead eyes that have swallowed the glow from a few minutes ago. “Maybe I never had them.”

Never had them?

The idea chills me down to the bone on this sweltering summer day because he sure looks like he believes it. But…is it true just because he believes it? On the other hand, I don’t want to believe it. Does that make it untrue? Or does it make me a fool?

“Why don’t you sell Ackerley?” I say, too troubled to ponder those more difficult questions.

He blinks. Grimaces. “First of all, it belongs to me and my brother. Second, sell it and go where?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere that you can be happy.”

A spark of amusement from him. “If happiness was a place, I would’ve brought it long before now. Take my word for it.”

It would take a smarter woman than me to know what to say to that. Too bad she’s not here.

I sit up and turn away, my head spinning. I think about all the blog posts and magazine articles I’ve read over the years about dating and red flags. Most of them have to do with recognizing and deciphering them. But what do you do when the most intriguing man you’ve ever known walks up and waves a giant red flag in your face as though he’s the matador and you’re the condemned bull? What happens when a red flag is the only thing in your line of sight, and you can’t make yourself care about the pending disaster?

This man is broken from the loss of his wife because he’s still in love with her.

End of story.

Why am I pretending that I don’t know that his feelings for Ravenna spell doom for me?

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