Exposed

MAXWELL FORRESTER SHOVED his platinum credit card back into his eelskin wallet and shrugged over the cost of his and Madelyn’s wedding-rehearsal dinner. He had more than enough money to cover the expense, but growing up poor had saddled him with a frugal nature he constantly battled. A day didn’t pass when he didn’t remember going to bed hungry, knowing the food stamps had all been used, all too aware even at the age of ten that if he wanted so much as an extra peanut butter sandwich, he’d have to go out and earn it himself.

As expected of a man in his current financial position, he’d told Charlie, his best man, to spend whatever was necessary to make the evening elegant for Max’s future bride, their families and wedding party. He should have known better than to hope Charlie, Madelyn’s favorite cousin and Max’s best friend, would even think of capping his spending.

“You ready to go?”

“It’s early yet,” Charlie scoffed. “You’ve got one more night of freedom and you want to call it quits at—” he pulled his sleeve back to read his watch “—midnight?”

Charlie’s argument lost some of its punch when even he realized that it was indeed late, what with the wedding less than twelve hours away.

Eleven hours, to be exact, Max realized. Not twelve. Not a minute more than eleven. Once he said, “I do,” he’d be stuck with his decision to marry Madelyn. He shrugged away the thought. He wouldn’t be any more stuck tomorrow than he was today. Max had already made a promise to Madelyn that was just as binding as a wedding vow. And though he considered himself an arrogant, driven son of a bitch who sought financial gain over just about anything else, he’d never break a promise to a friend.

“Marriage to Madelyn isn’t a threat to my freedom,” Max grumbled. He wasn’t lying. Madelyn couldn’t be a threat to his freedom when he’d really never had any in the first place. Max was a prisoner of his ambitions—he’d accepted that fact before he turned sixteen. But tonight the reality really rankled, partly because he was tired of this conversation with Charlie, and partly because as he scanned the crowd in the barroom off to the left, he saw no sign of a Greek fisherman’s cap bobbing behind the bar—or more specifically, the exotic dark-haired beauty who wore it.

“That’s only because you don’t know what freedom feels like, tastes like.” Charlie grabbed his jacket from behind the chair, but slung it over his shoulder instead of putting it on, a sure sign that he wasn’t ready to go. “You should leave that office of yours every once in a while—and not to jog through a city you don’t see or to show a property you don’t appreciate as anything but a potential sale. Heck, you and Maddie barely even date each other!”

Max attempted to tear his gaze out of the bar before Charlie noticed, but he wasn’t quick enough. Charlie’s grin annoyed him all the more.

“I don’t want to hear this, Charlie. Madelyn is your cousin. You should be supportive of our marriage. It’s what she wants.”

Charlie grabbed Max’s arm and tugged him into the bar. “Maddie is not just my cousin. She’s my favorite cousin. She’s the one person in the whole snooty family who didn’t write me off when I flunked out of Wharton or when I decided to try my hand at acting before I moved back home. I owe her.” He forced Max onto a bar stool and waved at the carrot-topped, college-age kid tending the bar. “She introduced me to you, didn’t she? Got you to give me a try selling real estate. And who was your top agent last year? For the third time? Who’s helping you become a millionaire more than any of the Yalies or finishing-school lovelies who show your listings?”

Max glanced back at the door, knowing he should leave. He needed sleep. At least when he was sleeping, he wasn’t thinking. And tonight, he didn’t want to think. He’d promised Madelyn Burrows that he’d become her husband. They’d been friends since college. She’d helped him take the coarser edge off his Oakland habits, teaching him about designer clothes and fine wine and which 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 grinned sheepishly. “Yeah, guess I am. Then how about making one for my old friend here?” He slapped Max on the shoulder. “He needs it more than I do anyway.”

Ariana didn’t laugh as Max expected, or as perhaps Charlie expected as well. Instead, she grabbed a collection of exotic liqueurs, one blue, one green, one amber, pouring the jewel-toned liquids into the glass on the edge of a knife, skillfully layering them with a clear, unidentified libation, so the colors barely mixed. After floating a layer of ruby-red grenadine on top, she moved toward them.

With confident grace, she lifted the drink in one hand and a bottle of ouzo in the other. She set the glass down in front of Max and without a word, swirled the ouzo over the grenadine. Focused on the glass, Ariana shielded her eyes from Max behind thick lashes, pressing the lips of her generous mouth into a pout that was focused and sexy as hell. When she finally looked up, meeting his thirsty stare straight on, he caught the glimmer of a smile twinkling in her night-black eyes.

He slid his hand forward, brushing his fingers over the base of the glass. She crooked her finger around the stem. “Not so fast,” she instructed, her voice breathy and low, but compelling all the same.

He questioned her with raised eyebrows.

She stepped up on the lower shelf behind the bar so she could lean forward and keep their exchange private. Max wanted to glance aside to see if Charlie or anyone else was watching, but he was slowly, surely, losing himself in the depths of her fathomless eyes. To hell with everyone else. She was just offering him a drink, not her body.