Читать книгу Billionaire Bosses Collection - Кэрол Мортимер - Страница 64

CHAPTER TEN

HE LEFT.

Neely heard him go.

She had run up to her bedroom and shut the door and prayed that he would come after her. But there were no footsteps on the stairs. There was no light knock on her door. There was no sound of her name.

There was only silence—and then the front door opening and closing.

She ran to the window and looked out to see him walking up the dock. He looked weary and exhausted and alone, and she wanted nothing so much as to call to him, to tell him to come back and to wrap her arms around him and tell him she loved him.

But if she did, he wouldn’t believe her. He didn’t trust her, didn’t trust her word.

So he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—believe she loved him.

He kept walking until he disappeared into the darkness. Moments later an engine started, headlights came on. A car backed out and turned to go up the hill.

He drove away.

She was mad. She’d get over it.

Neely wasn’t silly. She had to see that they were good together. And she had to know it wasn’t worth throwing away over nothing.

He gave her the weekend to come to her senses. In the meantime, he made his sisters double up, his brothers take the sofas, and he moved back into his penthouse. It was a madhouse. Noise, clutter, commotion. It should have taken his mind off her.

It might have if they hadn’t all asked, “Where’s Neely?” and “What are you doing here?”

“I live here,” he said shortly.

But as he took them one by one to the airport over the next day and a half and got his penthouse back, he didn’t feel as if he lived there anymore. The penthouse didn’t feel like home at all.

Home was where Neely was.

Tuesday evening he spent the day listening to Roger Carmody sing Neely’s praises once again— “Makes complete sense, that girl. Got a feel for what makes people tick. Made sense of all that soaring space you like so much. Good thing you sent her to talk to me.”

“She’s very astute,” Seb said in his best politic manner.

Now he hoped she was astute enough to have come to her senses. He’d missed her. He was ready to let bygones be bygones. So he went home.

And when he parked his car and went down the steps to the dock, despite his earlier anger, he felt that increasingly familiar sense of anticipation, of the eagerness he always felt when he was coming home to the houseboat.

To Neely.

Of course she wouldn’t be home yet. He’d left Carmody early and she’d still be at work. But that would give him a chance to be there first, to surprise her.

He opened the door, prepared now for Harm’s immediate dash and skid around the corner from the living room. He was already grinning in anticipation.

But the entry was silent and empty.

“Harm! Hey, buddy! Where are you?”

Seb supposed the dog could be out on the deck. It was a sunny day. He liked to lie in the sun’s warmth. Or maybe Cody had come to take him running if Neely knew she was going to be late. A glance toward the hook told him that Harm’s leash was gone.

But so was his food dish. And his water bowl.

Seb’s stomach did a slow awful somersault and ended feeling as if it had lodged in his throat.

“Harm?” He called the dog’s name louder now, an edge to his voice. A new unwelcome feeling settled in his chest.

Apprehension? Worry? Panic?

No, he thought. No!

But all the same, he strode quickly down the hall into the living area. The sofa was there, and the armchair, the lamps, the desk with his computer, the bookshelves.

But only half the books were there. His half.

The rocker Max had made Neely was gone. So was the afghan he knew her mother had knitted her.

And the coffee table that had been in front of the sofa—the one with the drawers for architectural drawings, the one that Neely had talked Max out of, her pride and joy, the one she wouldn’t let him set his boxes on when he’d first moved in—that was gone, too.

Max could have taken it back, Seb told himself. Neely had said she was “trying it out” to see if it was the one she wanted or if she wanted Max to make her something else.

“Anything I want, he said,” she’d told Seb. “But that’s silly. He knows very well I want this one.”

And Seb knew it hadn’t gone back to Max.

It had simply gone.

Like Harm. And the kittens. And—he looked around desperately, hardly able to breathe—the rabbits and the guinea pig.

Gone. All gone. With Neely.

“The Iceman is back.”

Seb heard Gladys mutter the words under her breath to Danny when Seb snapped at one of her questions. He stiffened, but ignored it, just as he had ignored every curious look and leading question the past five days.

It wasn’t any of their business. He worked with them. He didn’t owe them explanations.

If they wanted explanations, damn it, they could ask Neely.

But Neely wasn’t here.

“She’s out of town. She’s taken on another project,” Max had reported when Seb had rang him, demanding to know where the hell she was.

“And she took all her books and her furniture?” Seb said before he could stop himself.

“Did she?” Max said. “Mmm. Interesting.”

That wasn’t the term Seb would have used.

He had given up being gutted about personal relationships gone awry about the time his father had split with his third wife.

It didn’t do to get close. It didn’t do to try to make something more out of what was clearly going to be no more than a brief encounter.

Oh, sure, his new stepmothers might have promised “forever” but it hadn’t taken Seb long to learn that it never lasted. They grew weary of Philip’s absences, his distractions, his inability to get involved. And they left.

They took their children with them and made new lives for themselves. But they never took Sebastian because Sebastian wasn’t theirs.

He only belonged to Philip—and Philip didn’t care.

No one cared.

Three stark words that cut to the core of his soul.

For years Seb hadn’t let it matter. Though at times the knowledge pressed against the inside of his head, making it throb, had clogged his throat, making it ache, he’d ignored it, put it aside, soldiered on.

He’d been wounded by his father’s neglect, but he’d survived because he’d refused to care enough—to love enough—to let it hurt.

But all the resolve in the world was no proof against this pain. This emptiness.

This was different. This wasn’t his childhood. This wasn’t his past. He was an adult. He was over all that. This was now.

This was Neely. And there was no way to fight against her leaving him. No way to turn his back, to say it didn’t matter.

Because it did.

Because, God help him, he was in love with her.

Fiercely Seb shook his head. Fought it off, lied to himself, told himself he didn’t love her. Couldn’t. Wouldn’t.

“Can’t, Seb?” she’d said coolly. “Or won’t?”

He hated the challenge that echoed in his mind. He fought it off. Denied it.

He wouldn’t love her. Or if he already did, damn it, he’d stop.

It would be all right. He would get by. There was nothing wrong with being an iceman. It was a hell of a lot safer. Saner. Less painful.

He’d cope.

He threw himself into his work. He spent hours overseeing every single detail of the Blake-Carmody project. If Neely wasn’t going to be there to do her part, so be it. He’d do it himself.

He wondered what other project could possibly be more important, that Max would have sent her off now, but he didn’t ask.

He didn’t want to know. Max worked from home and Seb worked in the office and in the field. When he had questions on Blake-Carmody, he asked Danny or Frank or he got Gladys to call her.

“Don’t you have her number?” Gladys asked.

“I don’t have time. Just get the answers and put it in a memo,” Seb said.

He didn’t want to talk to her. It still hurt too much.

He left the houseboat and moved back to his penthouse. It was what he’d intended all along, wasn’t it? The houseboat had been a stopgap, just until the wedding was over. Now he had his place back—all to himself.

The pizza boxes were gone. So were the panty hose. The bathroom countertops had been swept clean of nail polish, hair spray bottles, foundation, powder, lipstick and mascara.

He didn’t step on plastic soda bottles or tortilla chips. He didn’t see any remnants of his sisters’ occupation after his cleaner blitzed her way through the place. And if there was a lingering odor of overly cloying cologne in the rooms, he could leave the windows open and it would vanish within days.

Everything went back to being exactly the way he’d left it.

Only he had changed.

Now he stood in his spare austere living room with its view across the skyline to the sound and didn’t relish the view anymore. Or not as much as he had in the past.

It seemed too remote. Too far above things. Too impersonal.

It made him long for the little houseboat on the water. It made him want a kitten leaping out at his shoelaces when he walked into the kitchen. It made him want a dog smiling a doggy smile and thumping its tail when he walked in the door. He wouldn’t even mind if it shed on his navy suit coat.

He had no one to talk to. No one to share a meal with.

He had no one at all.

Jenna was the first of his sisters to call him.

“How are you?” she asked, which surprised him. Usually she only called when she wanted something and it was the first thing she said. But while he waited, the expected request never came.

“I had such a good time with you,” she said. “It was fun being a family, being together. I thought I might come back,” she said. “To go to the university. If that’s okay with you?”

“If you want,” Seb said, wondering where this had come from and waited again for the request for money or advice. But Jenna only said, “Can you have cats in the dorms, I wonder.”

“I doubt it,” Seb said. “Who cares? You don’t have a cat.”

“I do. Her name is Chloe. Neely gave her to me.”

Seb felt as if he’d been punched in the gut. “Neely gave you a cat?”

One of their kittens?

“Mmm-hmm.” Jenna sounded thrilled. “She said she needed to find homes for them. They were getting big enough. We all have them.”

“What?”

“She gave us each one.”

She, the triplets and Sarah each had one of Neely’s cats?

“And Marisa took the guinea pig,” Jenna told him gaily. That was Sarah’s mother.

“Yeah?” Seb wondered who got the rabbits. And Harm. He didn’t ask.

“She said she wanted us to have a part of her,” Jenna reported.

But she hadn’t wanted him to have a part of her.

Or did she think he wouldn’t want one?

The next day he bought a fish. Neely had once said she had started with a fish. They’d been sitting on the deck one evening and she’d told him about her first pet.

“I had a fish because fish are portable. Easier to take when we moved. And they don’t run away back to where they’ve been. They’re there for you.”

Like Neely had been.

He knew that now. There was no way to deny it. And as time passed he didn’t want to. He fed his fish and cared for his fish.

But frankly he thought the fish looked lonely. So two days later he bought another fish.

Maybe they’d have little fish. Or one would eat the other.

He wondered which.

Would Neely know?

“It’s nearly midnight!” Max, hair ruffled and wearing what looked like hastily pulled-on shorts over his cast, leaned on his crutches and scowled furiously at Seb when he opened the door. “You might work at all hours, but some of us like a little time off now and then.”

“I’m taking time off,” Seb said gruffly, brushing past Max heading straight into the living room without waiting for an invitation. “But first I need to know where Neely is.”

He turned and waited while Max crutched his way into the living room, sputtering and looking indignant. “What do you care where she is?”

“I need to talk to her. And don’t ask me about what. That’s between your daughter and me!”

Max’s brows shot up, but he didn’t answer at once, just looked Seb over sceptically.

Seb waited. He’d wait till kingdom come if necessary.

“She’s with your old man,” Max told him.

It was a blow. Seb felt his teeth come together, but he forced himself to simply nod. “Her choice,” he said evenly.

Max’s brows lifted. “One you didn’t agree with.”

“No.” No use arguing that. “I didn’t.” He took a breath. “I’ve changed my mind.”

Now Max’s eyes really did go wide. But before he could reply, a husky female voice spoke up. “About time.”

Seb looked up to see Neely’s mother standing on the landing clad in what had to be Max’s bathrobe and little else. Obviously there was more going on here than simple nursing care.

“Give him the address, Max,” she said. “He looks ghastly.”

“Maybe she won’t want to see him,” Max said.

“Up to her. At least he’s going after her,” Neely’s mother said pointedly. “Which is more than you ever did.”

Max grimaced and rubbed a hand against the back of his neck. “Well, you know how it is. Some of us take longer to wise up.” He copied an address down and handed it to Seb. “Good luck.”

“You’ll need it,” Lara added.

Seb had no doubt about that.

* * *

The cabin was in the middle of nowhere. Admittedly it was the most beautiful bit of nowhere that Neely had ever been in—a balm to the most troubled soul—and good thing because she needed all the balm she could get.

She stopped now to stare out the window at the expanse of Lake Chelan through the trees. She drew on the view for inspiration as she tried to bring the outside in—to capture the grandeur that Sebastian did so well in his soaring spaces and expanses of glass, while at the same time trying to create the sense of safe harbor, of peaceful retreat that her own heart sought.

Finding the balance between the two was the hardest work she’d ever done. Particularly because half the time she wasn’t even sure she should be here.

Neely knew perfectly well that Philip had only asked her because he really wanted his son to do it. He’d been perfectly polite and welcoming when she’d shown up instead.

He’d been a little wary of course. “Does Sebastian know you’re here?” he’d asked her the afternoon she’d come to discuss the idea.

Neely had had to admit he didn’t. “We didn’t exactly see eye to eye on things.”

Philip wasn’t clueless. “He doesn’t want anything to do with me.”

Neely rather thought that Sebastian felt Philip had never wanted anything to do with him. But she only said that she had discussed it with Max, and if Philip was interested in having her work on a design, she would be happy to do it.

She’d brought him a portfolio of her other work, and he’d been impressed enough to agree. Over the past two and a half weeks, she had worked with him almost every day, exploring the site, listening to his ideas, creating sketches and working out plans.

It was intense and creative and energizing—exactly the sort of time that would have gone a long way toward healing the rift between Philip and his son—if his son had deigned to come.

She hadn’t seen Seb or heard from him since he’d stalked out of the houseboat the night of Vangie’s wedding.

She’d waited. And waited. Had wanted to talk, to discuss, to explain. But when he hadn’t come back she realized he didn’t intend to.

No doubt he’d simply moved back to the penthouse and taken up his old life right where he’d left off. Without her.

Still, when she’d packed up her furniture, her books and her animals, Neely had dared to hope he would come after her.

She knew she loved him.

And despite his resistence, despite his reluctance to trust, she believed, deep down, that he loved her.

She stared at the boat cruising up the lake and wondered if Philip would be here soon. He came most afternoons and they reworked the sketches she came up with the day before. He was easy to talk to, warm and engaging, yet always edgy and on the move. There wasn’t the peace in him that she saw in his son.

Peace? In Sebastian?

Maybe not always. But she dared to believe that he’d found a little with her.

Would that peace have been enough? Certainly she could have stayed—could have simply shared his bed and his houseboat and taken what he thought he could give.

And they would have had great sex and also a certain degree of contentment.

But it wasn’t enough. Just as her mother had never been able to accept the little Max had been willing to give years ago, Neely knew she wanted more than great sex, a bit of peace and contentment with Sebastian.

She wanted everything. She wanted the love and connection that her parents finally seemed to be finding with each other now. Max and Lara together at last. Who’d have thought it?

It just proved, Neely supposed, that it was never too late.

But she couldn’t imagine waiting another twenty-seven years or so for Seb. After three weeks and not a word, not a sign— nothing at all—she didn’t expect there was any point.

She reached her toe out and nudged her sleeping dog. “You’re here for me, aren’t you?”

Harm opened one eye and closed it again. So much for that.

She forced her attention back to the sketch she was working on. It was for the lobby area of what would be a fifteen-room inn. “Small and intimate, yes,” Philip had said, “but with light and space. Bring the outside in.”

He sounded just like his son.

Neely chewed on her pencil and tried to think how to convey exactly that when Harm jumped up and went barking to the door.

“It’s just Philip,” she said. “Don’t fuss.”

Usually Harm didn’t. But he was barking his head off today. “Stop it, you stupid dog!” Neely got up and jerked open the door. “See! It’s just—”

Sebastian.

She stared. Not Philip at all. His son. Lean and dark and as serious looking as ever Neely had seen him. Every bit as gorgeous, too, in a pair of faded blue jeans and a long-sleeved grey shirt.

The Iceman? Or not?

Harm flung himself onto Sebastian who scratched his ears and rubbed his fur and grinned broadly at him, making Neely want to fling herself at him as well.

She didn’t because she didn’t know why he was there.

For all she knew Max had sent him up here on some wild- goose chase. That would be just like Max—he was turning into an unrelenting romantic.

“Harm, get down!” she said, trying to tug the dog back.

But Sebastian just said, “It’s all right. I’ve missed him.” And then his grin faded and their eyes met and Neely thought she might drown in the depths of them before he said, “I’ve missed you.”

There was a ragged edge to his voice she hadn’t heard before. This wasn’t The Iceman, then. She wet her lips. Her fingers gripped the handle of the door.

“Can I come in?”

She nodded and stepped back, waiting until he came in, and she shut the door to ask, “Issomething wrong? AreMaxandLara—?”

“They’re fine. Together, apparently.” He sounded a little dazed at that.

“Yes,” Neely said. “They might make it this time. They have a ways to go, though.”

“But they’re taking a chance.”

She nodded again. He was so close. She could see the pulse beat in his throat and wanted to reach out a finger and touch it. She could see whiskers on his jaw and wanted to rub her cheek against them, feeling them rough one way and smooth the other. She wanted—

“Will you take a chance on me?”

Sometimes in the forest all sound stopped. The birds hushed. The wind dropped. Nothing sounded. No one moved. It was like that now.

“Your father—”

“This is not about my father,” Seb said firmly just as she had said it to him. But as he spoke there was a ghost of a smile on his lips. “But if you must know, he says you have to make up your own mind.”

“He—” Neely stared. “You talked to him?”

Sebastian shrugged. “How do you think I found you?”

Abruptly Neely sat down. Her mind spun. He had come after her? He had talked to his father?

“He says you do wonderful warm and cozy,” Sebastian told her, “but that you’re struggling a bit with the light and space.”

“He said that?” She didn’t know whether to be delighted or outraged. “You’ve discussed this, have you?”

“I got to Chelan last night,” Seb said. “I couldn’t get a boat and come up the lake until this morning. We had a lot of time to talk.”

Neely opened her mouth and closed it again. “I don’t know what to say,” she murmured.

A corner of Seb’s mouth lifted. “How about yes?”

“What would I be saying yes to, exactly?” She held her breath, daring to hope, but wondering if she was actually dreaming. Perhaps she’d been in the woods alone far too long.

“Yes to taking a chance on me for starters,” Sebastian said. He dropped down on one knee next to the chair where she sat and took her hands in his. “Yes to letting me contribute a little light and space to those hotel plans you’re working on—”

She caught her breath and blinked in surprise.

“—but mostly yes that you’ll marry me because you are the woman I love, the one who gives light to my life and joy to my heart and—” he swallowed and went on, his voice ragged “—because wherever you are is home.”

She leaned toward him, his arms came around her and as their lips touched she answered him. “Yes and yes and yes.”

When Philip came later that afternoon, Seb told him to go away.

“Don’t be rude,” Neely protested.

Seb shrugged. “It shouldn’t be any hardship. He goes away all the time.”

Father’s and son’s eyes met in challenge, acknowledgment and acceptance. Philip nodded. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said to them. “It’s a workday.”

“We’ll be there,” Neely promised, even as Sebastian scooped her up in his arms and carried her back to bed.

They’d already been there once. And now once again they shared their bodies as well as their hopes and their dreams and their hearts. Only after, when they were lying wrapped in each other’s arms, did Sebastian sit up and say, “I brought you something.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, a few things, actually,” he confessed. “I’ll be right back.”

He yanked on his jeans and disappeared out the door. Bemused and baffled, Neely waited while he went down to the boat—twice—and then came back.

“This is for you,” he said, holding out a package that had a shape she recognized at once.

With reverent hands, Neely took it and unwrapped it. “Your grandfather’s violin?”

Seb nodded. “Yours now.” And she knew the depth of his love from the gift of the one thing of enduring love he’d carried with him all his life.

“Play for me?”

“Here? Now? Naked on the bed?”

He nodded. “Please.”

And so she sat up straight and tuned the strings and, after a moment, she began to play. She played a minuet. She played an étude. She played a favorite from her commune childhood, the simple folk hymn, “Morning Has Broken,” because in fact, it had.

And when she was done, she handed him the violin and he set it on the dresser, then came down on the bed beside her and loved her again, with a tenderness and a warmth that showed her once again that Sebastian Savas wasn’t an iceman at all.

And after she kissed him, then asked, “What else did you bring? You said you had two things.”

He smiled. “Fish.”

She sat up. “What? For dinner?”

He folded his arms behind his head, grinning now. “No. For the menagerie. They’re what got me here. You gave my sisters the cats.”

“Well, yes. But I didn’t think you’d want them.”

“And my stepmother the guinea pig,” he went on. “And I was alone. And I remembered about the fish. You started with fish. So I did, too. But I don’t have a clue about fish. So I thought you might be able to help me raise them.”

Neely laughed. “I might be able to do that.”

“And kids?” Sebastian said.

“As many as you want,” she promised, her heart full to overflowing.

He rolled her beneath him and began to love her again. “What’d you do with the rabbits?”

She grinned. “I gave them to Max and Lara.”