Exposed. Julie Leto
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fork to use at the country-club dinner. He’d repaid the debt by giving her a shoulder to cry on when she broke her engagement to P. Howell Matthews, her parents’ handpicked son-in-law. She’d wept, not because she’d loved the guy, but because her parents had treated her like a mass murderer rather than a woman scared to death of choosing the wrong man.
So instead, she chose a friend, her best friend. He and Madelyn shared a love for jogging and naturalistic art, and they both appreciated old buildings—she saved them, he sold them. They also had a mutual desire to marry for reasons other than love.
Max had nothing against love. In fact, he admired the emotion. Revered it, even. His parents loved each other, and they loved his footloose brother, Ford, and Max unconditionally and with all their hearts. But love hadn’t paid the rent on their tired Oakland apartment. Love hadn’t kept his father from working twenty-hour days driving a cab. Love had only marginally helped his mother endure the frustrations of teaching six-year-olds how to read and write when most of them were more concerned with getting their one, state-subsidized lunch, usually their only decent meal all day.
Love hadn’t been enough to keep his family together when his father was shot on the job. Unable to work, John and Rhonda Forrester had shuttled their sons from resentful relative to resentful relative. Eventually, the family had reunited, but the result was Max’s single-minded pursuit of wealth and, over time, power, which had led him directly to the eve of a marriage that had nothing to do with love at all.
And he wouldn’t even go into the havoc the emotion caused his brother. Ford was the most easygoing, likable man on the face of the planet, but he fell in and out of love quicker than Max unloaded a waterfront foreclosure. His younger brother had absolutely no idea what real love was about, and this was one lesson his big brother wasn’t qualified to teach.
He was certain of only one immutable fact—love was fine and good for people willing to sacrifice and suffer for it, but Max preferred to pursue success and financial satisfaction. Romance was a distraction. Until he’d met Maddie in college, he’d considered dating an unnecessary expense. Then she’d introduced him to her friends, girls with rich fathers and boundless connections. He’d dated the ones he liked, but drew the line at emotional involvement. So after graduate school, when Madelyn had suggested they “date” to keep her parents from fixing her up with another son of the country-club set like P. Howell Matthews, Max agreed. The ruse was born and had lasted all these years.
Madelyn was a pal. She understood his desire to make all of San Francisco forget that he was once a poor kid from Oakland—that now he was a force to be reckoned with in the lucrative business of buying and selling the most valuable properties in northern California. The marriage thing was more than he had bargained for, but Madelyn insisted the deal would work out for both of them.
Married to a Burrows, Max would have every door in San Francisco opened wide to him. Her father, her grandfather and her great-grandfather before him had all been prominent bankers with ties to every section of the diverse San Francisco community.
For Madelyn, the trade-off wasn’t so clear—at least, not to Max. She claimed that marrying him would not only appease her parents, but the union would give her more clout with the wealthy matrons who financed her building restorations. Personally, he thought Madelyn deserved better—a man who loved her like a wife and would give her the passion she deserved. And he’d told her so on more than one occasion. But he owed her so much, cared about her so much, that when she begged him not to worry and to trust her decision, he’d gone along.
Like Charlie, he wasn’t so sure he was doing the right thing. But he’d made his choice and he couldn’t betray Madelyn now because of a bout of uncertainty.
“You’re a real pal, Charlie, but Madelyn and I have discussed this over and over. I won’t back out.”
Charlie ordered two beers and shook his head. “You and Maddie are so blind. Neither one of you knows what you’re missing. Lust, passion, desire. Marrying a friend is all well and good, but without the fire…” Charlie’s words trailed off, his blue eyes glazed over.
Recently wed in Las Vegas to a woman he’d met in a suspicious jogging accident at Pier 39, Charlie was still high on the thrill of pure passion and uninhibited lust. Max paid the young bartender when he slid the beers in front of them, shaking his head at his friend, then glanced over his shoulder to see if anyone had overheard this unusual prewedding conversation.
That’s when he saw her.
She entered through the front door between a departing party of four, stopping to shake hands with satisfied customers while Stefano Karas, the host for the evening, grabbed her backpack, shoved it at a nearby waiter and then ushered her into the bar.
Max turned aside. The last woman he needed to see tonight was Ariana Karas, with all her long, jet hair, ebony eyes and curves even her slimming black turtleneck, jeans and boots couldn’t hide. She was exotic sensuality and alluring confidence all molded and sculpted into a compact package that made him fantasize about endless nights of sex. Nights that turned into days. And weeks. Maybe months.
Nothing but sex. No work, no money. No troubles.
He downed half his beer without taking a breath.
“Sex isn’t everything, Charlie.”
Charlie took a generous slurp of amber brew. “Oh, yeah? Says who? And I’m not just talking about sex, anyway. I’m talking about true love.”
He sang the last two words as if he was joking, but Max knew Charlie well enough to realize his friend was a hopeless romantic. He was a free spirit who’d finally found some level ground with a job he was damn good at and a woman who obviously adored him, and vice versa.
“Yeah, well, if marrying your true love is so highly rated, what the hell are you doing here with me?” Max asked. “You should be home in bed with Sheri, not keeping me out till dawn.”
Charlie chuckled, then quieted when Ariana grabbed a black apron from the coatrack behind the bar.
“Sheri could use a little time to herself and you need me to talk some sense into you.”
Max barely heard Charlie’s explanation, more intrigued with watching Ariana flip the apron over her head before freeing her dark hair from beneath the pretied knot around her neck and fanning the luxurious length of it over her back. While wrapping the tie around her slim waist, she instructed the young guy who’d served their beer to cover the tables while she took over behind the bar. She tilted her hat at that jaunty angle that grabbed Max right at the center of his groin, and before he could look away, she captured his stare with a questioning glance.
“Something I can get you?” she asked.
Max sipped his beer, trying not to wince when the brew suddenly tasted strangely flat. “I’m fine, thanks.”
She smiled, then made her way from one end of the bar to the other, checking on her customers, making small talk, replacing empty glasses and refilling snack bowls—all done with a quiet animation that made her both friendly and mysterious at the same time.
Max decided then and there that he was an idiot. He knew all about the lust Charlie lectured about. He’d been feeling the pull with growing intensity ever since he jogged into Athens by the Bay a little over two years ago and caught sight of the owner’s niece helping a crew unload boxes from a delivery truck.
If he’d simply flirted with her and gotten to know her, he’d probably be long over this intense interest. Instead, he’d played cool, ignored the attraction, turned away from her not-quite-shy, not-quite-inviting smiles that haunted him long after he’d run from the restaurant to the office, showered and parked himself behind his desk.
Now he was less than a day away from marriage, and the woman of his dreams was only an arm’s length away.
“Hey, Ari,” Charlie called, “how ‘bout one of your specialty drinks for the road?”
“You driving?” she asked, grabbing a cone-shaped glass from beneath the bar.
Charlie