“Yeah?” I pretend not to know.

  She nods and looks around the diner. It hasn’t changed much from what I can remember. The booths’ upholsteries have been redone, the counters changed out for some type of stone, the light fixtures upgraded, but for the most part, the feel is the same. A ’50s diner in the twenty-first century.

  “Yeah. It’s a big hangout for high schoolers after football games. Or at least it used to be.”

  “You came here?” I ask, wondering if she was one of the spoiled kids who would trash the place and make my mom stay here for hours after closing trying to clean it all up.

  “In the summer usually. With my sister.” Something glances through her eyes but it’s gone just as quickly as it’s there. “But it was typically my sister—Cassie—and Rhett who’d come here.”

  “You’re not a fan of football games?”

  She gives me a pseudo shrug. “When you go to an all-girls school a few hundred miles away, it doesn’t bode well for hometown football games.”

  “What do you mean an all-girls school?”

  “Just what I said.”

  I stare at her and question my sanity. But I saw her with my own eyes at the country club when I was working there. I listened to my mom complain about the Rothschild kids after games and the havoc they wreaked in this very diner.

  “You didn’t go to high school here?”

  She gives a slow shake of her head and a partial chuckle. “No, and I was okay with that.”

  “But…” I say the word and then wish I could take it back when her eyebrows furrow. I saw her here with my own eyes.

  “While all the other girls were ecstatic about their debuts, I was busy trying to figure out how to sabotage mine. My twin—Cassie—was everything my parents expected in a daughter. I refused to be any of it.” She shrugs and I’m surprised by her complete indifference in disappointing her parents. “I begged to go away to school. Anything other than the weekend social events, the pageant participation, and the expectations to be a cheerleader.”

  “And your parents let you?”

  “I went to Gilmore. It’s prestigious and I sold them on how it would make me more well-rounded—or in their eyes, it might tame me to make me more attractive to marry off someday.” She rolls her eyes.

  “Clearly the taming part worked,” I tease, at which she snorts.

  “You’re lucky I’m tired or you just might have a kick to your shin right now.”

  I laugh and for the first time a smile widens on her lips.

  I stare at her unapologetically.

  She’s beautiful even with a scowl, but hell if a smile doesn’t make her radiant. “Good thing you’re tired then.” I take a sip of my own milkshake. “So your parents sent you there and not your sister?”

  “They wanted to, but she fought them tooth and nail. Sold them as hard on staying here as I did on getting away.” She stares back at the straw wrapper she’s fiddling with. “We were that odd pair of twins that got along, but who were completely different in every aspect. Did I want her to go to school with me? No. Besides, she liked being the only daughter here. And she liked pretending to be me even more when she thought she was doing something she shouldn’t be doing.”

  “She what?” I ask as thoughts start colliding and truths I should have seen come crashing into me.

  “Just what I said. She used to pretend to be me. Whenever she wanted to rebel a little and step out of the perfect role, she’d say she was me, that I’d come home for a visit and…”

  “Caused trouble.”

  “Yep.” Her smile is bittersweet. “It only served to prove even more why I wanted my own identity away from Westmore and the Rothschild name.”

  “Yet you came back to claim that reputation anyway.”

  “I did,” she says softly. “Originally it was to figure out how to move forward after Cassie passed.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I offer.

  “It was a long time ago. A car accident that was her fault…”

  I don’t ask her for anything more because I know all about the circumstances around her death. Cassie Rothschild died at age seventeen, three days shy of her eighteenth birthday, when she drove her car into a telephone pole while texting and driving.

  What I didn’t know until now is that the Rowan Rothschild I thought I knew at the club most likely wasn’t really Rowan.

  It was Cassie.

  My head spins but her words pull me back into the conversation before I can spiral too much out of control. “Her … being gone. It ruined me for longer than I’d like to admit.”

  “I understand that. The being ruined and struggling to get over it.” I say the words, offering more of myself to this woman when I’m not supposed to be.

  “How?”

  “A younger brother.” It’s all I say. As much as I’ll admit to when I’m not supposed to be admitting anything to anyone.

  “I’m sorry too.”

  “Like you said, it was a long time ago.” I clear my throat and redirect back on her. “So what happened next? You came back?”

  “Yeah. For my last semester of high school. That summer. Then off to college.”

  “And then owning the business pulled you back for a final time?”

  “That. And my gran.” Her smile is automatic at the mention. “She was just like me but born generations too early to be able to act on it. She’s the reason I have the position I have at TinSpirits. My dad was against it. ‘It’s a male-dominated industry’ and all that bullshit. But Gran guilted him into it. The whole ‘I never got the chance to because of when I was born,’ and she convinced him to let me start at the ground level and work my way up. To learn it from bottom to top while Rhett got to ride the elevator to the top floor.”

  “Clearly that bugs you—as it should.”

  “It did. But I also realized I’m better for it. How can Rhett fix an issue six levels below him when he’s never had to figure it out on his own?” She sighs. “I don’t know. I always wanted to run the company, but the more I worked my way up, the more I saw his gross incompetence and complete arrogance in his entitlement. Then profits started to drop. At first, I thought it was just the downswing of the economy. Then I thought it was something he was doing—taking money out? Making poor purchasing decisions? I don’t know. Maybe it’s his blatant misunderstanding of how the company is supposed to be run. Perhaps a little of all three.”

  Perhaps a lot of all three and the flagrant spending on all things Rothschild while he’s at it.

  “I’ll just leave this here,” the waitress says as she slips our check onto the table.

  “Thanks. We’ll be out of your way soon,” Rowan says. “I’m sure you want to get out of here and home to your family.”

  “I do. Thank you. I have a sick kiddo at home.” She taps a button on her apron of a little boy in a baseball uniform.

  “I hope he feels better soon,” Rowan says, and as the waitress walks away I pull out some cash beneath the edge of the table, disguising a few hundred-dollar bills beneath a twenty, and slide it onto the receipt tray.

  “No. Let me.” Rowan digs in her purse.

  “I’ve got it covered.”

  “The least I can do is add more of a tip for her. She’s working her ass off.”

  I reach out and put my hand on her wrist. “I assure you, I have it covered.”

  It’s then that Rowan looks down and notices the large bills beneath the twenty, her eyes flashing back to mine, and nods.

  She narrows her eyes for a beat, almost as if she can’t reconcile the man who just did that with the man she normally sees.

  The problem is, right now I’m struggling with making the same damn correlation.

  We move on, leaving the discussion about work behind. She tells me about summers spent in the Outer Banks. I give her snippets—benign and generic—of my time in California. We talk about random things, sports teams, favorite vacation spots, the best local places in town to eat—but the whole time I fixate on the notion that none of it matters.

  That her caring about the waitress and her sick son and wanting to overcompensate shouldn’t affect my opinion of her—but it does.

  The Westmore elite don’t care about anybody else or their struggles. They never have.

  And yet Rowan’s frequent glances over to our waitress and the sympathetic smiles she gives her say the exact fucking opposite.

  She’s surprising me at every turn tonight and if she keeps it up, I’ll have no choice but to face my own suppositions about her.

  “Yes?” she asks with raised eyebrows, pulling me back from thoughts about her.

  “I’m sorry. What was that?”

  “Ignoring me already, Knight? That’s not a good start.” She laughs. “All I said was, so computer software, huh?”

  I nod. “Yep.”

  “That’s all you’re going to give me?”

  “What do you want to know?” I ask, my stomach twisting.

  You wouldn’t like me if you knew.

  “Where did you go to college? How did you come up with the software? Why did you sell?” She lifts her eyebrows when I don’t respond. “That shouldn’t be hard to talk about.”

  But it is. Every piece of myself that I give her leaves me vulnerable. Opens who I am and what I’m here for up to discovery. That can’t be known.

  I have a plan. A sequence of events that must occur in my head.

  When I want more known about me, there’ll be no mistake about it.

  And yet, I find myself wanting to tell her some of it. The view of myself from space versus ten feet away.

  “College wasn’t for me.” Besides the fact it was loaded with pretentious pricks like the ones I left behind in Westmore, I couldn’t burden my mom with more debt. We were drowning in medical bills, funeral expenses, and our move across the country so we could try to breathe without being reminded every single day of what had happened. And I sure as fuck wasn’t in the headspace for any of it.

  “No?”

  I shake my head. “Taught myself computer science. Enjoyed coding and the software aspect.” Loved breaking into servers behind the scenes even more. “I had a brief stint as a bank teller and was sick of listening to my boss complain to higher-ups about data security every time it was breached. So I solved the problem for them. It took me years to perfect my original software but when I did, it took off. Won an award at the Consumer Electronics Show. Things went from there. Ran the company for several years before I received an offer I couldn’t refuse. Then sold it.”

  “And that translates to buying other companies, including mine—”

  “You mean mine?” I say.

  “—how?” she finishes, completely ignoring me.

  “I’m an angel investor in many companies. For some reason, I wanted to be hands-on with this one.”

  “Why?” she asks.

  “Why not?” I shrug and don’t back down from her stare. “All of that could have been found out with a simple Google search.”

  “I’m aware,” she murmurs, scrutinizing me with her look. “And yet that’s still all you’ll give me.”

  “It’s all you need. Life is black. It’s white. It’s gray. I live in the gray.”

  She chuckles. “The gray?”

  I nod. “A little mystery never hurt anyone.”

  I sit there with my head angled to the side and study a woman who seems to be so much more than I expected upon that first meeting, and question myself over what to think.

  Ruining her family is my end game. She’s going to be a pawn in that game. And yet I can’t stop wondering what would happen if we’d met at a different time and in a different way.

  How would things between us have gone then?

  But what-ifs are hard to deal with when you’re dealing in what you need to do next.

  She meets me stare for stare, her lips a pout and her eyeliner smokey. “Give me time, Knight, and I’ll figure you out.”

  “Thanks for the warning.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  I lean forward, intrigued. “What about you? The woman who goes on dates with men who don’t respect her. Who is said to be marrying a man but tells me she isn’t. Who is most likely scheming behind my back on how to take me down. Who exactly are you, Rowan Rothschild?”

  She pauses for a moment, glancing away before turning back to me with a mischievous glint in her eye. “I thought a little mystery was a good thing?”

  I chuckle, admiring her wit. “Fair enough, Sunshine. Fair enough.”

  “Hey, Holden?” She smirks and leans in closer so that I have no other place to look besides her lips. Her cleavage. Her. “We should probably go.”

  “Should we?”

  “Mmm-hmm.” She nods. “The question is where.” With those words, she stands up and saunters away, leaving me looking after her with a shaking head.

  The damn woman was supposed to be a conquest. Collateral fucking damage. I’m not supposed to like her beyond her sex appeal. I’m not supposed to want to know more of her for reasons other than fucking revenge. I’m not supposed to want to fuck her for reasons other than simply fucking her to throw it in Chad’s face and to stake my flag in making the face of their company mine.

  But she opened up.

  She uncovered truths I thought were different. It was her sister here at the diner, not her. It was Cassie who owned the reputation for being a spoiled brat, not Rowan.

  How did I not put two and two together? How did I miss that Rowan went to a boarding school?

  How can I think I’ve figured every angle of every goddamn thing when it comes to all of this and then find out I haven’t? Are there other holes in my plan? Other things I missed?

  Will you look at that? You’re fucking human, Knight.

  Fuck that.

  Where does this leave me?

  I don’t have to particularly like someone to fuck them. It’s just a means to an end with a great orgasm in between.

  But I like Rowan and that’s an unexpected twist.

  I rise from the table, say good night to our server, and head out the door to the woman standing in the moonlight waiting for me.

  Fucking complications.

  I don’t need them.

  I don’t want them.

  And yet it seems I’m about to walk head-fucking-first into them.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Rowan

  The car ride was silent. The music was low and the streetlights made shadows play all over the interior of Holden’s SUV.

  I questioned my sanity. Why I went with him tonight. Why I initiated the kiss in the parking lot other than to prove the way he made me feel was more than just a one-time thing.

  It was.

  And having him walk me to the front door of my house, I wonder how I thought this was a good idea. Me. Him. The sex I know we’re about to have. And the fallout that’s no doubt going to happen afterward.

  Because we are about to have sex. Hasn’t every single moment between us since the auction been foreplay in one way or another?

  And to think we’ve only kissed twice and our connection, our attraction, our need for one another is so palpable, that us sleeping together is a foregone conclusion.

  Hating a man and finding him desirable at the same time is fucking with my head.

  I unlock my front door and step through it, ignoring Winnie whimpering in her crate in the back of the house. When I turn back, Holden is standing there, as devastating in appearance as his lips were to mine earlier.

  Our eyes hold through the silence. They question. They challenge. They want.

  “Are you going to invite me in?” he asks, his voice husky and the darkened porch only adding to his allure.

  “Tonight was a bad idea all around.” I speak the words while every part of my body craves him.

  “Probably.” He nods, his eyes unwavering.

  “It’s not in the best interest of … everything.”

  “True.” He steps into my house, up to me so that our bodies are all but touching. He reaches out and cups the side of my face, his thumb brushing back over my bottom lip like he did earlier. My breath stutters. My pulse races. Butterflies take flight in my belly. “Do you actually think I give a fuck about right and wrong, Rowan? About precedent or decorum, or that I’ll let it stop me from doing what I’ve thought about since that first night we met?” He brushes his lips against mine. “Do you?”

  “No.” The single syllable is strained. Desperate.

  “Good.” The warmth of his breath is on my lips. The heat of his body emanates off of him to mine. “I’m going to kiss you, Rowan. Then I’m going to fuck you. Take that as a warning or a threat, but just know you’ll take it. Understood?”

  His words, that low, even rumble he speaks them in, do things to me.

  “I—”

  “Understood?” he cuts me off, his voice a mere whisper now.

  “Yes. I mean … yes.”

  His chuckle vibrates around the room as he slides a hand down to the small of my back and splays it there. “Step into the gray with me, Row.”

  And before I can agree or disagree or overthink what is about to happen, Holden’s lips are on mine. They take and claim and possess with the same adeptness as earlier tonight but with a savage desperation that matches the way I feel.

  He has one hand under my neck with his thumb and forefinger on each side of my jaw holding my head still as he controls the kiss. A touch of tongues. A tug on my bottom lip. A lick up the line of my throat.

  My body convulses as he focuses on the spot just beneath my jaw. Chills chase over my spine with each openmouthed kiss. With each slide of his hand up my side. With every guttural groan he emits in response.

  My fingers fumble with the buttons on his shirt until it’s open. I run my hands over the hard planes and valleys of his abdomen. The corded muscle beneath tightens from my touch.

  “You have way too many clothes on,” he murmurs against my collarbone as the stubble on his chin tickles in the best kind of way.

  I pull my shirt over my head in response. My bra falls to the floor moments after.

  “Fuck.” His soft swear echoes around the room as his eyes scrape over every inch of my body while mine begs for his touch. And it doesn’t have to beg long as he closes his hand over one breast and then lowers his mouth to suck on the pebbled peak of the other.