But I’d be damned if I was going to let him go down without fighting for him.

  Dylan had just given me a ray of hope. He was angry, and I hadn’t seen that emotion from him in a long time.

  Before, all I’d seen was apathy.

  I’d take his outrage over his indifference any time.

  In fact, I welcomed it, and I’d be more than happy to do everything in my power to irritate the hell out of him in the future if that’s what it took to see some kind of emotion from him.

  Maybe my biggest mistake had been leaving him alone in the first place.

  I didn’t regret giving him his space and privacy from other people. He did need that right now. But maybe I shouldn’t have backed off, even though he’d requested that, too.

  I’d empathized from a distance for two very long years.

  I’d probably given him too much space from me to screw up his life when he hadn’t been thinking straight.

  I tossed the bottle I’d emptied into the trash can. “From now on, no more drunken orgies, setup or not. No more alcohol until you can handle it. No more hanging out with people who just want to party and don’t give a damn about you. You don’t need another beer; you need help. It’s time to get your head on straight, Dylan, and start acting like an adult instead of a spoiled adolescent.”

  It wasn’t easy for me to say that because I knew what my brother had been through, or at least, I knew the basics. But he wasn’t helping himself at all, and most likely wouldn’t if somebody didn’t step in.

  And I was that somebody. It would be better to gain his hatred than to see him end up dead somewhere.

  “Who in the fuck made you my boss, Damian? You can’t tell me what to do. I’ll live my life exactly the way I want.” His voice was dripping with acrimony as he fisted my linen shirt like he meant to threaten me.

  Again, his irritated tone did nothing except encourage me. “I’d be interested to see how that all works out for you since you gave me power of attorney to handle everything, so you’ll need my approval to transfer funds into your bank account. Judging by the amount I last deposited for you, I’d say you’re going to be running low very shortly. Which is really too bad because I’ve just decided you’re cut off until you get yourself sober and at least presentable again.”

  I almost hated myself for threatening the brother who should be my partner with poverty, especially when he was entitled to half of Lancaster International’s wealth.

  I let the considerable guilt I felt cover me, but not break me.

  Dylan gripped my shirt harder and tried to shake me, but he didn’t have the strength to move me very far in his intoxicated state. “You can’t do that, Damian. I’m a Lancaster, too. You can’t just take everything.”

  Remorse continued to claw at me, but I shrugged it off. “I can. You gave me that right when you wanted to disappear from the public eye. You signed over all of your responsibilities to me two years ago. Pull yourself together, and we’ll talk. You look like shit.”

  Dylan’s eyes lit with fury, his usual icy stare completely gone as he pulled his arm back in what I knew was going to be the first punch ever thrown between the two of us.

  Not today, brother. Not today.

  He was shirtless, dressed only in swim trunks, so I gripped his shoulders and heaved before he could land a single hit on me, sending him hurtling into the swimming pool.

  I folded my arms over my chest as I watched him come to the surface, making sure the idiot wasn’t drunk enough to drown. “Meet me for breakfast in the morning, and make sure you’re sober,” I instructed.

  Dylan sputtered. “I swear, I’ll beat the crap out of you for this, Damian.”

  I grinned back at him as I said, “Try it, tosser.” If he ever got sober and balanced enough to throw a real punch, I’d probably be fucking ecstatic.

  I turned and left the pool area.

  Maybe I couldn’t make Dylan pull himself together, but I could certainly make him uncomfortable enough to try.

  CHAPTER 10

  Nicole

  “I PICKED UP YOUR usual,” Kylie said as she breezed through the door of my office with a couple of food bags in her arms.

  My eyes raised to the clock. “Wow! It is lunchtime already.” I was surprised at how fast the morning had flown by.

  I’d had a lot of work back up while I’d been in London, so I hadn’t even paused to look at the clock after I’d gotten into the office this morning.

  “You’ve been pretty quiet in here.” Kylie pulled the soup and sandwiches from the bags. “You’re not still upset over the whole Damian Lancaster thing, right? I mean, he’s a jerk, and it was just a kiss.”

  I looked up at her and frowned. Okay. Yeah. It was just a kiss, and I couldn’t think of a way to explain just how intimate that embrace had been. “I’m good. I was just trying to get my email caught up and some proposals done.”

  Kylie shot me a puzzled gaze. “You know you don’t have to do any proposals, right? You own the business. You can leave that to the rest of us.”

  “Mom did some of her own proposals,” I argued. “And I feel like I need to know every part of this business to be able to lead everyone else.”

  How could I be in control of a business I knew nothing about?

  Kylie dropped my lunch in front of me, grabbed her own soup, and plopped down in a chair in front of my desk.

  Even though she’d just made a food run outside in the heat, my best friend still looked as fresh as she’d appeared first thing this morning.

  Her makeup was perfect, covering every freckle she’d abhorred since childhood. Kylie had gotten teased in grade school about her endless freckles, bright-red braids, and her willingness to take on anything a boy could do.

  That tough girl had blossomed into a beautiful redheaded woman with more confidence in her little finger than I had in my entire body.

  “Your mother loved doing proposals, which is why she did some herself,” Kylie pointed out. “She didn’t need to be that hands-on, either. And since you don’t exactly enjoy doing proposals, neither do you. Nic, you’re allowed to be who you are. You don’t need to be your mother. You’re the boss, which means you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. Just because you’re keeping your Mom’s business, it doesn’t mean you can’t put your own spin on it, and do things your way.”

  I pulled the lid off what I already knew was minestrone soup. I’d caught the mouthwatering aroma before Kylie had pulled the food out of the bag. “I’ve been doing this for a year, and I still feel lost,” I confessed.

  Kylie lifted a brow. “Did you really expect to be perfect in just a year? You were a corporate attorney, not a PR expert.”

  “I don’t think I knew what to expect. I just wanted to keep Mom’s company alive.” I’d been thinking with a broken, grieving heart when I’d impulsively packed my stuff and moved back to Newport Beach.

  “And you’ve done that, quite successfully I might add,” Kylie answered. “Give yourself a break, Nic. The company is still thriving, and it has so much potential for future growth.”

  I shot her a doubtful look. ACM was flourishing as a result of my employees like Kylie, not because of my leadership. “Sometimes I wonder if I should have sold and stayed in my corporate law job.” I’d never actually said those words out loud, but I’d thought about it plenty of times over the last few months.

  “I think Estelle would have been perfectly okay with that,” Kylie answered gently. “In fact, she expected it. She was proud of you, Nicole, and she’d want you to be happy with whatever you choose to do with your life. If I could, I would have been the first one in line to buy ACM, but I’m not in the position to do that right now. I don’t have that kind of cash.”

  I stopped eating, and looked at Kylie. “I didn’t know you’d be interested.”

  Never once had my best friend mentioned that she’d like to actually own an agency herself. In fact, she never stopped talking about how much she loved her job as director of ACM, and how it allowed her to pursue her personal interests outside work.

  She shrugged. “I would like to have my own business someday, but it wouldn’t have mattered. I couldn’t have bought ACM, anyway.”

  That wasn’t entirely true. I owned the business, and Kylie and I could have worked something out. We still could. Nobody was more qualified to step into my mother’s role than Kylie. After her short marriage, my best friend had come back to Orange County to work for my mother. Kylie had fallen in love with the PR business, and had worked to complete her college degree while she’d worked beside Mom.

  ACM was probably never going to make me outrageously wealthy unless we expanded significantly, but it was a profitable company that made me a good living right now. Realistically, Kylie probably couldn’t afford to buy the entire company right now, but we could have come to some kind of understanding.

  Because of my mother’s hard work, and the scholarships I’d been awarded, I’d gotten all the way through law school without a single student loan. I’d been making a good living as a corporate attorney. The last thing I’d needed was income from ACM.

  Granted, I hadn’t wanted to see ACM go to a stranger, but I could have let it go to Kylie. My mother had adored her, treated her like a second daughter.

  “I’m sorry, Kylie,” I said sincerely. “I should have thought of a way to bring you into ownership. I had no idea that you wanted that, or I would have done it.”

  Her eyes widened. “What? No! Why would you do that?”

  I sighed. “Because you loved her, too, and you belong here more than I do.”

  She shook her head. “Don’t be silly, Nicole. You were her daughter.”

  “She loved you, too,” I said softly.

  She smiled. “I know that. Your mom was always there for me, even when we were kids. But she sure as hell didn’t expect me to take the business away from her only child. I’m happy in my job, Nic. I make a great salary plus bonuses. I’m saving. I have plenty of time to seek out my own company when I’m ready. I’m perfectly content exactly where I am right now.”

  I eyed her skeptically one last time before I started eating again, thinking about how we could revisit the idea of her taking over ACM in the future.

  “I wasn’t exactly levelheaded when Mom died,” I told Kylie ruefully. Normally, I was far from impulsive, but I’d nearly lost my mind when my only parent had died.

  Honestly, I was still grieving Mom, and probably would for the rest of my life. Her death had left a big, dark hole in my world that nobody could ever fill up again. Yeah, the excruciating pain of losing her had dulled, but there wasn’t a single day that went by that I didn’t miss her.

  Kylie nodded. “That’s to be expected, Nic. You were her only child, and she was your only parent. You guys were really tight.”

  “We were,” I agreed. If I’d only known what was going to happen in the future, I would have spent more time in Southern California as an adult.

  I could have practiced corporate law in Los Angeles, but my mother had encouraged me to apply to one of the most prestigious law firms in New York. She’d fought her battle with cancer alone so I wouldn’t feel like I had to come back to California, not telling me about her diagnosis until she knew she was going to lose that fight.

  I sighed. I couldn’t have a do-over. Regrets wouldn’t bring her back. And if I’d done everything differently, I wouldn’t have the memories of all the times Mom had come to the East Coast to see me.

  We’d traveled from New York to Maine. Every time she came to the East Coast, we found a new place to visit, a new adventure. Those road trips had been some of the happiest times of my entire life.

  “I know time is supposed to make her death easier, but it hasn’t taken away how much I miss her,” I admitted to Kylie.

  Maybe the acute pain was gone, but the ache and emptiness were almost as bad.

  Kylie shot me an empathetic look. “It hasn’t been that long, Nic. She was your mom, and your only immediate family. It’s going to take time.”

  I nodded. “I know.”

  “How about we grab Macy and do a girl’s weekend soon?” Kylie suggested.

  Okay, maybe it wouldn’t exactly be a road trip, but spending time with my two best friends was always an adventure, too.

  I smiled at her. “I’m game. As long as we stay away from the clubs, and you promise not to drink tequila. Last time we all went out, you were dancing on the bar.”

  Macy and I had slowly talked Kylie down from the bartop, and gotten her home to her bed.

  None of us had ever suggested going to a nightclub again.

  Honestly, it wasn’t like I didn’t know that Kylie was way beyond that kind of behavior now. That incident had happened soon after she’d become single again, and she hadn’t been in a good place back then.

  Kylie scoffed. “One time. I got on the bar one single time, and you’re never going to let me forget it. That was a decade ago, Nic.”

  “Nope. I won’t stop talking about it,” I agreed. “If I’d done that, you’d be reminding me of it on a daily basis for the rest of my life. Admit it. You’d love to have something like that to tease me about forever.”

  Kylie smirked. “You’re probably right. It kind of sucks that you’ve never done anything even remotely inappropriate. Well, except for kissing a stranger on an airplane,” she reminded me. “Believe me, I’ll never stop giving you a hard time about that one since it’s the only dirt I have on you.”

  “I know,” I said with a chuckle. “But I was under the influence at the time, just like you were a decade ago.”

  She rolled up the empty wrapper from her sandwich. “So are you really feeling better about kissing Mr. Orgasm? I know you, Nic. Are you telling me the truth when you’re insisting that you’ve just blown the whole thing off?”

  “No,” I said immediately. Dammit! Kylie did know me way too well. “You’re right about the kiss just being a kiss, but I feel like an idiot when I think about the way he was trying to console me about bombing a presentation with his damn company. What kind of guy does that sort of thing?”

  “Let’s see,” Kylie pondered. “I’d say he’s either really twisted or really desperate. He’s either a psycho who enjoys sick little mind games, OR…he liked you and didn’t want you to know it was his company that gave you the we’ll-call-you-later brush-off.”

  I preferred the second explanation. “Are you certain the guy you saw getting into that car at the airport was Damian Lancaster?”

  She raised her brows. “Nicole Ashworth, don’t try to tell me that you didn’t look that picture up for yourself last night.”

  I had, and she knew it. “Maybe the guy has a doppelganger?”

  Hell, maybe I was grasping at straws, but I didn’t want the man I’d shared an intimate kiss with to be the owner of Lancaster International. For me, that kiss had been real…

  “Right. And that doppelganger just happens to be named Damian, too?” Kylie asked wryly.

  “Okay. It was him,” I conceded. I had found the scandalous picture of him, and the more serious picture of him on the Lancaster International website. “But why in the hell would he be taking a flight in business class on his own airline, for God’s sake? He must have a private jet or two.”

  “It’s definitely weird,” Kylie agreed. “But what if he really did like you, and then couldn’t reveal who he really was? It would completely explain why he never asked for your number. The truth would have come out eventually.”

  I rolled my eyes. For a woman who had experienced her share of heartache, Kylie could still be the eternal optimist. I let out a groan of mortification before I said, “I wouldn’t have kissed him if I’d known his true identity.”

  Damian had made me feel special, and it did hurt to know that the entire encounter had been nothing more than a game to him.

  “Exactly!” Kylie exclaimed as she wriggled her eyebrows. “He didn’t fess up because he wanted to kiss you. Maybe he wasn’t messing with you, Nic. Maybe he isn’t a complete narcissistic asshole. I can tell you from experience that things aren’t always how they seem. When someone is out of their mind from alcohol, sometimes shit just…happens.”

  I tossed the trash from my lunch into the garbage can, and crossed my arms as I watched my best friend try to make something out of…nothing. “He wasn’t intoxicated on that flight.”

  “But he definitely was in that naughty picture,” she said. “Sometimes, people do things when they’re drunk that they’d never do sober. Honestly, he was so glassy-eyed in that picture that I’m not even sure if he was capable of getting it up. I’m not saying that you should forget all about the whole orgy thing, but maybe you need to hear his side of that story.”

  Really, I loved Kylie dearly for not wanting me to feel like a fool, but there was no saving Damian Lancaster.

  He was a liar.

  He had to be twisted to play that stupid game with me on our flight.

  He was the type of guy who indulged in orgies and multiple female partners.

  Lastly, Damian was exactly the type of man I’d run from like my ass was on fire if I’d known who he really was before I’d kissed him. Maybe I had been tipsy, but I couldn’t blame that damn kiss completely on the alcohol. Even after the alcohol had worn off the next morning, I’d still been just as attracted to him as I’d been the night before.

  “Give it up, Kylie,” I urged. “You just can’t save Damian Lancaster. Nothing you say is going to convince me that he isn’t a complete jerk.”

  A deep baritone voice suddenly sounded from the doorway. “I’m definitely a wanker, but I’m hoping I can change your opinion of me, eventually, Nicole.”

  I didn’t have to shift my eyes to my open office door to know exactly who was standing there.

  I could feel his presence, and even if I couldn’t, that damn voice with that sexy British accent was unmistakable.

  What in the world was Damian Lancaster doing at my office?

  CHAPTER 11