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Cody frowned. “But you love her.”
Nathan wasn’t surprised by the question. After five years of marriage, Cody and Jaime were still crazy about each other as they awaited the birth of their first child. Nathan wasn’t sure what sort of water the two were drinking, but he intended to stick with whiskey.
“You know how I feel about love,” Nathan said. He wasn’t looking to fall into that trap. “It’s never going to happen for me.”
“But you’re getting married.” Cody gaze shifted away from Nathan. With a glance over his shoulder, he edged Nathan toward the front door, but didn’t speak until the two men stood outside in the brisk January wind. “Does Emma know you’re not in love with her?”
Nathan wasn’t going to lie to his best friend. “She knows.”
“I can’t believe it’s okay with her. After watching her mother’s marriage to Dad fall apart, she’s pretty determined not to marry unless the guy’s crazy in love with her.”
Cody made no secret of his belief that Silas’s third wife had married her billionaire husband for financial rather than romantic reasons.
“She’ll come around.”
Cody shot his friend a skeptical look. “I don’t think she will. You’ve been on her radar since she was a teenager, but she’s got this whole fairy-tale happily-ever-after thing going. She’s not going to marry you unless she thinks you’re madly in love with her.”
“Have a little faith in my powers of persuasion.” Nathan offered his friend a slow grin.
A grin that faded as he strode to his car and gave his best friend a farewell salute. Cody’s words poked at him like a burr long after the wheels of the BMW 650i coupe hit the main road.
Love.
Emma wasn’t going to marry without it. Nathan wouldn’t marry with it. Stalemate.
He wasn’t sure when he’d decided that he’d never let himself go down that path. Had it been the Christmas morning when his mother burst into tears because he’d asked why his father didn’t spend any holidays with them? He’d been eight that year. Or maybe when he turned ten and Brandon Case’s wife had shown up to see for herself what sort of “whore” her husband had taken up with. His mother had cried for three hours straight after that. The next day she’d slapped him when he said he hated his father and hoped he rotted in hell.
Love made people miserable. It led to expectations. Expectations led to disappointment. Disappointment led to infidelity. Infidelity led to divorce. Except for Cody, all his friends had cheated on their wives or been cheated on. And they’d all started out madly in love.
He was an hour south of Dallas when his cell rang. He engaged the car’s hands free system. “Hello.”
“Hey, Nat, how’d it go?”
Hearing Max’s voice, Nathan restrained a snarl. He could tell from his older brother’s overly cheerful tone that he’d called expecting to hear that Nathan had failed. “It went fine.”
“So, Montgomery is doing the deal?” Max’s voice lost some of the good humor.
If his half brothers found out about the strings Silas had attached to the deal, Nathan would never hear the end of it. He intended to get the contracts signed without that happening.
“There are a few bugs to work out, but I’d say things look pretty good.” Nathan relaxed his death grip on the steering wheel.
In his early twenties, he’d spent almost a year on the poker tournament circuit, learning how to read people and to hide his thoughts. In the championship game, he bluffed two of the best poker players in the country and won half a million dollars. The skills he’d picked up during that time had come in handy these last six months working with his half brothers. He’d learned a long time ago never to let them see him sweat.
“But you don’t have a signed contract,” Max persisted, regaining his cockiness.
Nathan ground his teeth. Leave it to the middle Case brother to point that out. “As I said, there are a couple details still under negotiation.”
“You were pretty sure you’d come back with a signed contract. Wasn’t Montgomery impressed with your proposal?”
Nathan bristled at the implied insult. His brothers had developed their business acumen in the boardrooms of Corporate America. Nathan had taken an entrepreneurial approach. He’d grown his millions in the stock market and from venture capital investing. No matter how legitimate his investments, Max and Sebastian refused to give him credit for having a strong business sense. They couldn’t get past the fact that his fortune had grown from the seeds of his poker winnings.
