Seduction on the Sand (The Billionaires of Barefoot Bay #2)(13)
Author: Roxanne St. Claire

“So, can you make it?” Zeke’s question brought Elliott back to the conversation.

“Sorry, make what?”

“Brunch tomorrow at Casa Blanca. Nate’s docked his yacht in the harbor, and he’s meeting Mandy and me for brunch. Why don’t you come over and join us? I mean, if you can get away from the goats.” He chuckled, and in the background, his girlfriend was laughing, too.

But Elliott ignored them, looking from one picture to the other, both of which had to have been taken in the same year. With her grandfather, she had hunched shoulders and a shadow of pain around her young eyes.

“We’re meeting around noon at the restaurant. Be there, because I have some great news to announce.”

Elliott pictured that great news in bed next to Zeke—the woman he’d known from high school and found not so long ago cleaning his villa over at Casa Blanca. “I can only imagine.”

“No, you can’t,” Zeke said, his voice rich with a contentment that Elliott had never heard in Einstein’s tone before.

No surprise, really. Zeke had confessed his longing to settle down awhile back, when he and Elliott had become friends. They’d had Yankees season tickets near each other and had then joined the same recreational softball team. But the very idea of settling anywhere with anyone made Elliott’s teeth itch.

Zeke covered the phone, muffling his words but not the woman’s laugh. Okay, it didn’t sound exactly like hell to be that happy, but the same woman forever? That was not easy enough for Elliott Becker. That was downright…difficult. 

He signed off the call and picked up the two pictures again, looking at them side by side, imagining that little—

“Can I help you find something?”

He jerked around, stunned that he hadn’t heard her come in. “Just looking at your pictures.”

“Also known as invading my privacy.” She strode closer and took the photos, placing them exactly where they’d been on the bureau.

“What happened to your parents?” he asked, letting his gaze shift to the other picture.

She swallowed, hard. “9/11.” Her words were so gruff, so soft, he almost didn’t understand. But then he did. And he felt his own shoulders sink with the truth.

“Both of them?” God, that wasn’t fair. So, so not fair.

She blew out the slowest, saddest breath he’d ever heard, closing her eyes. “Both of them.” Her voice cracked on the last word, and he couldn’t stop himself from reaching to her and pulling her into his arms.

“Frankie, I’m sorry.”

She was stiff at first, but then she molded into him with the next sad sigh. “Not as sorry as I am.”

Something in his heart just twisted and cracked and fell right open. Easing her down on the bed purely so he could sit and hold her, he stroked her hair off her face and looked into her eyes.

He shouldn’t do this. He shouldn’t get personal or care. Zeke and Nate wanted this land, and when they wanted something, they got it. She’d just be the collateral damage of their unstoppable success. Well-paid collateral damage.

His job was to figure out how to get this land, not how to understand her heart. That’s why they’d sent him.

Still, he couldn’t help himself. “Tell me about them,” he whispered.

He felt her lean further into him, one step closer to trust he knew in his gut he didn’t deserve. Trust he’d be betraying soon. But he held her anyway because there was no way he couldn’t. No way.

Chapter Six

Comfort. Sweet, strong, delicious comfort in the form of muscular arms wrapped around her and a bare chest beating with a heart she wanted to rest against. The consolation felt so good and necessary when she let herself slip to that sad place, so Frankie just let herself fall into Elliott’s embrace.

“I really don’t talk about it, about them.” She swallowed against the rock in her throat, sniffing the lingering smell of lavender and sea salt. “You used my goat’s milk soap.”

“That creamy stuff?”

She nodded and sniffed again. She’d never smelled it on anyone but herself, and on him it was divine. “I made it.”

“Nice.” She could feel his face move in a smile against her head. “And nice attempt at a subject change. Talk to me, Frankie.”

She exhaled, knowing this man well enough to realize he wouldn’t let her stand up and go on until he got what he wanted. Inching back, she met his gaze, unashamed of her tears. “My parents are the reason you can’t sway me with money. I really do believe it is the root of all and every evil, including the greed that stole their lives.”

He narrowed his eyes. “Greed didn’t drive jets into the World Trade Center, Frankie.”

“No, but greed had my parents insisting on being workaholics, never missing a day, even an hour. Even that day, when…” She fought the lump again, the injustice, the bad timing, the big fat what if that had ruled her life for so long after September 11, 2001.

Every time she’d heard a miracle story about someone who hadn’t gone to work at the Twin Towers that day, she choked on her own “what ifs.”

“What if they’d skipped work that morning to come to the school open house instead, like they promised they would?” she asked, giving voice to a question she’d asked herself a million times. “What if they’d chosen to meet my new teacher like all the other parents? What if they had a story like that…and they’d been saved?”

He stroked her hair, not saying anything or passing judgment on her bitterness.

“They didn’t have to be there that day,” she whispered. “They were supposed to be at my school, but some big multimillion-dollar client was coming in that afternoon and at the last minute, they bailed on the school meeting.” She closed her eyes, remembering that last breakfast, the punch of disappointment because, once again, money trumped everything else. Not even one of them would pick school over a client, so she’d lost them both.

“And they could be alive if they could have been somewhere else, and they would have been if their priorities had been in order.”

“Everyone who died could have been somewhere else, Frankie.” His voice was as calm and sweet as the fragrant soap he’d washed with, but the words did nothing to help her.

“But they should have been somewhere else,” she insisted, clinging to the regret and anger that always bubbled under the surface. “I’ve forgiven them, but…”