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Heath assured her he was fine and ended the call. He stared at the phone dumbly.
If the woman he had spent the night with wasn’t from the escort agency, then who the hell was she?
He realized now that he truly was letting Kassy, or whatever her real name was, slip through his fingers. She’d left and he had no idea who she was.
He had to catch her.
He bolted out of the room for the elevator. Heath slammed his fingers against the elevator call button. He cursed the entire time he waited. How could he have been so blind?
“Kassy” had been so engaging and funny and smart. She was totally unlike all of the other dates that he’d ever hired from the escort agency. From any agency. Of course, she wasn’t an escort. But why didn’t she tell him the truth?
He frantically got into the elevator as soon as it got there and then moaned in frustration every time it stopped all the way down to the ground floor. He darted ahead of the people in front of him as he ran to the hotel entrance looking anxiously from side to side for the woman that he only knew as Kassy.
The doorman acknowledged Heath as soon as he stepped onto the sidewalk. “Is there something I can help you with, Mr. Collins?”
“There was a woman who was just here. She was wearing a champagne colored dress. I don’t know about her coat. Damn. She may have checked it last night. I’d say she’s late twenties. Beautiful. Gorgeous, big brown eyes, killer smile. Did you see which way she went?”
“I have seen her, Sir. I just whistled over a taxi for her,” the doorman said. “I didn’t overhear where she said she was going, though. I’m very sorry.”
Heath stood there in shock.
Kassy was gone. Just like that, disappeared, consumed in the mass of people streaming through the great city.
Gone.
After a few moments, he realized he undoubtedly looked like a buffoon standing there in the middle of the sidewalk with his mouth hanging open. He made his way back into the hotel wondering what he was going to do.
He was just entering his room when it came to him. He was Heath Collins.
He was filthy rich and had practically unlimited resources at his disposal. One little woman shouldn’t be that hard to find.
He started to walk more confidently as he headed to the wall of windows overlooking the city. As his gaze swept over all the buildings and people, he saw “Kassy” in his mind’s eye.
No matter where she was off to, no matter where she ended up, he would find her. And then he would have her.
This transaction and their game weren’t over yet, not by a long shot.
IT WAS HARD FOR HEATH to believe that it had been nearly a year since he’d last seen the mystery woman, Kassy, in Chicago. He sat in his office overlooking downtown Seattle and sighed. It was a typical overcast, rainy, late January afternoon.
It was even cooler this year than years past, and everyone was complaining about it. It had been over a week since the sun had last peeked through the clouds, but the weather matched Heath’s mood perfectly.
He should have been on top of the world. He was on the cusp of the largest acquisition in his company’s history and was being heralded across the world by financial analysts and industry experts as being one of the savviest businessmen in the country. As soon as this deal closed, he would be bona fide filthy rich.
A year ago, when he canceled the business dinner in Chicago to spend time with Kassy, the executives at Yurovize thought that he was possibly pulling out of the deal. It had started a flurry of frantic emails and urgent conference calls that Heath had leveraged to his full advantage.
In the end, when he finally did sit down to meet with the Yurovize team in person, he had been able to negotiate a far better purchase price than expected. His financial future was set. And he owed it all to Kassy. Or whatever the hell her name actually was. Not-Kassy.
He’d soon have more money than he would ever know what to do with. It was unsettling to know that despite this impossible wealth and power, he couldn’t find the one thing that he wanted most in the world.
It was simple. He just wanted to know the woman’s name. He figured the least he could do was send her a thank you note.
Dozens of times he’d written the note in his head:
Dear Not-Kassy,
Thanks for the best night of my life,
and for making me a billionaire.
Best wishes for the future
to you and yours.
Sincerely, Heath Collins.
That night with her had taken on the aura of a dream. He often wondered if the time that they’d spent together was as perfect as he remembered, or if time had idealized it, created a perfect fantasy out of what was actually merely satisfactory.
Her face was burned into his memory, and he was certain he would recognize her laughter anywhere. He could still feel her curvy body writhing beneath him when he entered her, and he could still hear her calling out his name as he brought her to the heights of ecstasy.
But all those memories added up to nothing in the bigger picture. He didn’t have her real name. Without it, he would never be able to find her.
It hadn’t been for a lack of trying. His accounting team was mortified at the amount of money he had thrown at a variety of private investigators to try to find out who the mystery woman was.
He had only bare-bones facts to guide them, her approximate age, height, weight, and body type. He’d paid dearly for a member of the hotel’s security staff to obtain several grainy photos from the hotel’s cameras. But the quality was so poor that the still shots were of no use for identification purposes.
The only other clues he had were the generic things she’d told him throughout the course of their silly game at dinner. He had thought at the time, it was amusing to hear how different they were from each other; but later, her disappearance made everything she told him that much more important.
She came from a big family and had grown up with a myriad of cousins to play with, unlike Heath. Her parents were divorced. Heath’s were still married. She said she’d always aspired to own her own business, but she wouldn’t tell him what kind. Heath had admitted he was a CEO, but he hadn’t told her what his company did because of their ongoing bet.
In her spare time, Not-Kassy loved reading fashion magazines and keeping up with current fashion trends. His personal assistant did all of his shopping. She loved her parents. He tolerated his. She had grown up in a small town while he had grown up in the city.
It seemed at every turn, they were opposites, and yet, Heath had never felt so perfectly in tune with a person as he did with her. And that’s why he had been dead set on finding her. He didn’t care how much it cost.
All of the little things he did know, when combined, should have been enough to provide a reasonable profile to assist in finding her. Chicago was a big city, but it wasn’t that big. He had scoured the city and its environs and still could not find her. Every lead ran straight into a dead end.
The most recent private investigator had kicked his case file back to him within minutes of re
ceiving it. He said he knew that Heath had already hired all of his competitors, and they had all failed to find what Heath sought.
In the process of conducting search after fruitless search, Heath’s rants had become legendary in PI circles. So now, no PI anywhere in or around Chicago wanted anything to do with him for any amount of money. Heath was fresh out of options.
It had been a year, and Heath sensed that he’d reached the end of the proverbial road. He was going to have to give the search up and do something he never did.
He was going to have to admit defeat.
She was gone from his world forever. That idea gnawed at his insides, but there was nothing to be done about it.
He nursed a scotch on the rocks from his private collection as he gazed out the window. He didn’t break into the expensive liquor very often. Usually, it was just for celebrations. But the mood in his office that day felt more like a funeral.
He simply had to wrap his brain around the fact that he was never going to find Not-Kassy. He wasn’t a man who easily admitted failure, but this time, one curvy, sexy woman had gotten the better of him. If it were a game, she’d have won hands down.
He glanced at the stack of paperwork on his desk. He was going to have to sign the papers on the acquisition soon to make it official, and for the first time in his life, the idea brought him no joy. His victory tasted like sawdust in his mouth.
He swept the documents into his briefcase. It was the biggest deal of his life, and he had to make sure he read and understood every word. They weren’t the kinds of documents to sign when he was distracted. He’d take them home and try again tonight after a long, hard workout. He wanted to have a clear head.
He stopped by his assistant, Jamie’s, desk on the way out. It was late, and he was surprised that she was still there. Jamie looked up as he approached her, and he could tell that she had probably just closed her browser window given the quick click of the mouse.
He didn’t care if she was surfing the internet at work. Jamie was the best assistant he had ever had, and she got things done. He didn’t think of his employees as mindless robots. He understood that they had lives outside of work, even if he didn’t.
