Page 53 of The Sugar Maple Inn

“Fifteen cars you don’t drive.”

“They’re investments.”

“They’re ridiculous. What about staff? How many people work for you?”

“Directly? Maybe twenty. Cleaning staff, personal assistant, property managers, pilots. If you count all my businesses, couple thousand.”

Grace whistled low. “A couple thousand people depending on you for their livelihood. That’s a lot of pressure.”

“Yeah.” He hadn’t expected her to see that part. Most people just saw the money. “It is.”

“Last question. And you have to answer honestly.”

“All right.”

“All the rumors. About actresses and models and—” She waved her hand vaguely. “All that. True?”

Reese’s eyes darkened. There it was. The question every woman wanted to ask.

He thought about his ex-wife, Megan. The way she’d looked at him that last night, mascara running, face red from crying.

“Yeah, some of it’s true,” he said finally. “I’ve dated models, actresses, executives. Usually lasts a few months before they figure out I’m married to my work and they’re the mistress.”

Grace watched him carefully. “That sounds lonely.”

“It is what it is.”

“That’s not an answer.”

Reese met her eyes. Pale blue in the moonlight. Searching his face for something he wasn’t sure he could give.

“Yeah,” he said quietly. “It gets lonely.”

Grace held his gaze for a long moment, then raised her glass. “To lonely people trapped in towers.”

Despite everything, Reese smiled. Raised his own glass. “To lonely people.”

They drank.

Outside, lightning split the sky again and the tower shuddered with thunder that felt like it was coming from inside the stone itself.

And Reese realized, with a clarity that was probably the whiskey but felt like truth, that he was in serious trouble here.

Because Grace Sullivan wasn’t just attractive. Wasn’t just competition.

She was dangerous in ways he hadn’t anticipated.

And they still had hours until morning.

And now she was leaning over to place her glass down, the blanket slipping, a hint of nipple beneath that thin fabric and he was truly about to lose his mind.

Twenty

Grace

Grace could feel his eyes on her.

Not the polite, I’m-pretending-not-to-look eyes. The actual, full-blown, I’m-absolutely-looking-and-I-don’t-care-if-you-know-it eyes. The kind that made her skin feel too tight and her breath come shorter and her traitorous body respond in ways it absolutely should not be doing.