Interview with a Tycoon

His sense of needing to get rid of her strengthened. But then he saw the blood in her hair.

* * *

Stacy could have kicked herself! What on earth had made her say that to him? It was not at all in keeping with the new her: strong, composed, sophisticated. You didn’t blurt out things like that to a perfect stranger! She had intended it to sound light; instead, it sounded like a pathetic play for sympathy!

And, damn it, sometimes when you opened that door you did not know what was going to come through.

And what came through for her was a powerful vision of the worst moment of anything that can go wrong will in her entire life. She was standing outside her high school gym. She closed her eyes against it, but it came anyway.

Standing outside the high school waiting anxiously, just wanting to be anywhere but there. Waiting for the car that never came. A teacher finding her long after everyone else had gone home, wrapping her in her own sweater, because Stacy was shivering. She already knew there was only one reason that her father would not have come. Her whole world gone so terribly and completely wrong in an instant...left craving the one thing she could never have again.

Her family.

She had hit her head harder than she thought! That’s what was causing this. Or was it the look she had glimpsed ever so briefly in his own eyes? The look that had given her the sensation that he was a man bereft?

“You actually don’t look okay,” he decided.

She opened her eyes to see him studying her too intently. Just what every woman—even one newly devoted to independence—wanted to hear from Kiernan McAllister!

“I don’t?”

“You’re not going to faint, are you?”

“No!” Her denial was vehement, given the fact that she had been contemplating that very possibility—heart implosion—only seconds ago.

“You’ve gone quite pale.” He was looking at her too intensely.

“It’s my coloring,” she said. “I always look pale.”

This was, unfortunately, more than true. Though she had the dark brown hair of her father, she had not inherited his olive complexion. Her mother had been a redhead, and she had her ultrapale, sensitive skin and green eyes.

“You are an unusual combination of light and dark.” She squirmed under his gaze, until he tightened his hold.

“Remember Murphy’s Law,” he warned her. “It’s very slippery out here, and those shoes look more suited to a bowling alley than a fresh snowfall.”

A bowling alley? “They’re Kleinbacks,” she insisted on informing him, trying to shore up her quickly disintegrating self-esteem. The shoes, after all proclaimed arrival, not disaster.

“Well, you’ll be lyin’-on-your-backs if you aren’t careful in them. You don’t want to add to your injuries.”

“Injuries?”

Still holding her one arm firmly, he used his other—he seemed to have his cell phone in it—and whipped off the towel he had around his waist!

Still juggling the towel and the phone, he found a dry corner of it, and pressed it, with amazing gentleness, onto the top of her head. “I didn’t see it at first, amongst the chocolate curls—”

Chocolate curls? It was the nicest way her hair had ever been described! Did that mean he was noticing more about her than his sack-of-potatoes hold had indicated?

“—but there’s blood in your hair.”

His voice was perfection, a silk scarf caressing the sensitive area of her neck.

“There is?” She peeked at him around the edges of the towel.

He dabbed at her hair—again, she was taken with the tenderness of his touch, when he radiated such a powerful aura—and then he turned the towel to her, proof.

It looked like an extremely expensive towel, brilliant white, probably Egyptian cotton, and now it had little speckles of red from her blood. Though for some reason, maybe the knock on the head, the sight of all that blood was not nearly as alarming to her as he was.

Since he had removed the towel, Stacy forced herself not to let her gaze stray from his face. Water was sliding out of the dark silk of his hair and down the utterly and devastatingly attractive lines of his features.

“You aren’t naked, are you?” she asked, her voice a squeak of pure dismay.

Something twitched around the sensual line of his mouth as McAllister contemplated Stacy’s question, but she couldn’t really tell if he was amused or annoyed by it.

His mouth opened, then closed, and then, his eyes never leaving her face, he said evenly, “No, I’m not.”

She dared to unglue her eyes from his face. They skittered over the very naked line of his broad shoulders, down the beautiful cut of chest muscles made more beautiful by the snowflakes that melted on them and sent beads of waters sliding down to the ridged muscle of washboard abs. Riding low on his hips...her eyes flew back to the relative safety of his face.

Only that wasn’t really safe, either.

“Underwear?” she squeaked.

He regarded her thoughtfully for a moment. She resisted an urge to squirm, again, under the firm hands at her elbow, and his stripping gaze.

“Kleinbacks,” he said, straight-faced.

She was pretty sure the designer company did not make men’s underwear, and that was confirmed when something very like a smile, however reluctant, played along the hard line of those lips. Stunned, Stacy realized she was being teased by Kiernan McAllister.

But the light that appeared for a moment in his eyes was gone almost instantly, making her aware he had caught himself lightening up, and not liked it. Not liked it one little bit.

“Swim trunks.” His voice was gravelly, amusement stripped from it.

“Oh!” She sagged with relief, then looked, just to make sure. They were really very nice swim trunks, not the scanty kind that triathletes wore. Still, there was quite a bit more of him uncovered than covered, and she felt herself turn scarlet as she watched a another snow drop melt and slide past the taut muscles of his stomach and into the waistband of his shorts.

“It doesn’t really seem like swimming weather,” she offered, her voice strangled.

“I was in the hot tub in the back of the house when I heard the commotion out here.”

“Oh! Of course.” She tried to sound as if she was well acquainted with the kind of people who spent snowy afternoons doing business from their hot tubs—he did have his phone with him, after all—but she was fairly certain she did not pull it off.

Knowing what she did about him, it occurred to her that perhaps, despite the presence of the phone, he wasn’t doing business. One thing she knew from her life interviewing high-powered execs? They were attached to those phones as though they were lifelines!

Kiernan McAllister might be entertaining someone in his hot tub.

“Alone,” he said, as if he had read her thoughts.

She didn’t like the idea that he might be able to read her thoughts. But there was also something about the way he said alone that made her think of icy, windswept mountain peaks and a soul gone cold.

Even though he was the one with no clothes on, in the middle of a snowstorm, it was Stacy who shivered. She tried to tell herself it was from snow melting off her neck and slithering down her back, but she knew that was not the entire truth.

It was pure awareness of the man who stood before her, his complexities both unsettling her and reluctantly intriguing her. His hands resting, warm and strong—dare she consider the thought, protectively—on her. How on earth could he be so completely unselfconscious? And why wasn’t he trembling with cold?

Obviously, his skin was heated from the hot tub, not that he was the kind of man who trembled! He was supremely comfortable with himself, radiating a kind of confidence that could not be manufactured.

Plus, Stacy’s mind filled in helpfully, he had quite a reputation. He would not be unaccustomed to being in some state of undress in front of a lady.

Impossibly, she could feel her cheeks turning even more crimson, and he showed no inclination to put her out of her misery. He regarding her appraisingly, snow melting on his heated skin, a cloud of steam rising around him.

Finally, he seemed to realize it was very cold out here!

“Let’s get in,” he suggested. She heard reluctance in his voice. He did not want her in his house!

She was not sure why, though it didn’t seem unreasonable. A stranger plows into your fountain. You hardly want to entertain them.

But he was expecting someone. He didn’t want to entertain that person, either?

“I’ll take a closer look at your head. There’s not a whole lot of blood, I’m almost certain it’s superficial. We’ll get you into Whistler if it’s not.”

It occurred to her he was a man who would do the right thing even if it was not what he particularly wanted to do.

And that he would not like people who did the wrong thing. She shivered at the thought. He misinterpreted the shiver as cold and strengthened his grip on her, as if he didn’t trust her not to keel over or slip badly on his driveway. He turned her away from her car and toward the warmth of his house.

Aside from her car in the garden, the driveway was empty. The household vehicles were no doubt parked in the five-car garage off to one side.

The house inspired awe. If this was a cottage, what on earth did McAllister’s main residence look like?

The house was timber framed, the lower portions of it faced in river rock. Gorgeous, golden logs, so large three people holding hands would barely form a circle around them, acted as pillars for the front entryway. The entry doors were hand carved and massive, the windows huge, plentiful and French-paned, the rooflines sweeping and complicated.

Through the softly falling flakes of snow, Stacy was certain she felt exactly how Cinderella must have felt the first time she saw the castle.

Or maybe, she thought, with a small shiver of pure apprehension, more like Beauty when she found Beast’s lair.

McAllister let go of her finally when he reached the front door and held it open for her. She was annoyed with herself that she missed the security of his touch instantly, and yet the house seemed to embrace her. The rush of warm air that greeted her was lovely, the house even lovelier.

Stacy’s breath caught in her throat as she gaped at her surroundings.

“It’s beautiful,” she breathed. “Like upscale hunting lodge—very upscale—meets five-star hotel.”

“It suits me,” he said, and then as an afterthought, “far more than my condo in Vancouver.”

Again, her intuition kicked in, and this time the reporter in her went on red alert. Was that a clue that he was going to leave his high-powered life behind him as rumors had been saying for months?

McAllister turned, stepped out of his sandals, expecting her to follow him. Stacy realized she couldn’t tromp through the house in her now very wet—and probably ruined—shoes. She scraped them off her feet, dropped her wet sweater beside them, and then she was left scrambling to catch up to his long strides, as it had never even occurred to him that she was not on his heels.

As McAllister led her through his magnificent home, Stacy was further distracted from the confession she should have been formulating about why she was really here, by not just the long length of his naked back but the unexpected beauty of his space and what it said about him.

The design style was breathtaking. Old blended with new seamlessly. Modern met antique. Rustic lines met sleek clean ones and merged.

There were hand-knotted Turkish rugs and bearskins, side by side, modern art and Western paintings, deer antler light fixtures and ones that looked to be by the famous crystal maker, Swarovski. There were ancient woven baskets beside contemporary vases.

The decor style was rugged meets sophisticated, and Stacy thought it reflected the man with startling accuracy.

“I’ve never seen floors like this,” she murmured.

“Tigerwood. It actually gets richer as it ages.”

“Like people,” she said softly.

“If they invest properly,” he agreed.

“That is not what I meant!”

He cast a look over his shoulder at her, and she saw he looked irritated.

“People,” she said firmly, “become richer because they accumulate wisdom and life experience.”

He snorted derisively. “Or,” he countered, “they become harder. This floor is a hundred and seventy percent harder than oak. I chose it because I wanted something hard.”

And she could see that that was also what he wanted for himself: a hard, impenetrable surface.

“This floor will last forever,” he said with satisfaction.

“Unlike people?” she challenged him.

“You said it, I didn’t.” She heard the cynicism and yet contemplated his desire for something lasting. He was an avowed bachelor and had been even before the accident. But had the death of his brother-in-law made him even more cynical about what lasted and what didn’t?

Clearly, it had.

They walked across exotic hardwood floors into a great room. The walls soared upward, at least sixteen feet high, the ceilings held up by massive timbers. A fireplace, floor to ceiling, constructed of the same river rock that was on the exterior of the house, anchored one end of the room.

A huge television was mounted above a solid old barn beam mantel. It was on, with no sound. A football game in process. A wall of glass—the kind that folded back in the summer to make indoor and outdoor space blend perfectly—led out to a vast redwood deck.

Through falling snow, Stacy could see a deep and quiet forest beyond the deck and past that, the silent, jagged walls of the mountains.

To one side of that deck, where it did not impede the sweeping views from the great room, steam escaped from the large hot tub that her arrival had pulled McAllister from.

The tub seemed as if it were made for entertaining large groups of people of the kind she had written about in her former life. She had never attended a gathering worthy of this kind of space. Or been invited to one, either. As reporter, she had been on the outside of that lifestyle looking in.

The room made Stacy uncomfortably and awkwardly aware she was way out of her league here.

What league? she asked herself, annoyed. She wasn’t here to marry the man! She just wanted to talk to him.

Besides, it seemed to her that a room like this cried for that thing called family. In fact, she could feel an ache in the back of her throat as she thought of that.

“Are you coming?”

She realized she had stopped and he had kept going. Now he glanced back at her, and she sensed his impatience. She was trying to savor this unexpected glimpse into a different world, and he wanted their enforced time together over!

Given that, it would be foolish to ask him the question that had popped into her mind the moment she had entered the grandeur of this room. But ask she did!

“Do you spend Christmas here?” She could hear the wistfulness in her own voice.

He stopped, those formidable brows lowered. “I don’t particularly like Christmas.”

“You don’t like Christmas?”

“No.” He had folded his arms across his chest, and his look did not invite any more questions.

But she could not help herself! “Is it recent? Your aversion to Christmas?” she asked, wondering if his antipathy had something to do with the death of his brother-in-law. From experience, she knew that, after a loss, special occasions could be unbearably hard.

“No,” he said flatly. “I have always hated Christmas.”

His look was warning her not to pursue it but for a reason she couldn’t quite fathom—maybe because this beautiful house begged for a beautiful Christmas, she did not leave it.

“A tree would look phenomenal over there,” she said stubbornly.

His eyes narrowed on her. She was pretty sure he was not accustomed to people offering him an opinion he had not asked for!

“We—” He paused at the we, and she saw that look in his eyes. Then, he seemed to force himself to go on, his tone stripped of emotion. “We always go away at Christmas, preferably someplace warm. We’ve never spent Christmas in this house.”

Her disappointment felt sharp. She ordered herself to silence, but her voice mutinied. “It’s never had a Christmas tree?”

He folded his arms more firmly over his chest, his body language clearly saying unmovable. She repeated the order for silence, but she could not seem to stop her voice.

“Think of the size of tree you could put there! And there’s room for kids to ride trikes across the floors, and grandparents to sit by the fire.”

He looked extremely annoyed.

She could picture it all. Generations of family sitting in the two huge distressed leather sofas faced each other over a priceless rug, teenagers running in wet from the hot tub, eggnog on the coffee table made out of burled wood. Toys littering the floor.

Over there, in that open-concept kitchen with its industrial-sized stainless-steel fridge, the massive granite-topped island could be full of snacks, the espresso machine pumping out coffee, or maybe you could make hot chocolate in them, she wasn’t certain.

“I guess in your line of work,” he said gruffly, “you’re allowed a certain amount of magical thinking.”

What kind of work did he think she did? And why couldn’t she just leave it at that?

“It’s not magical,” she said through clenched teeth. “It’s real. It can be real.”

He looked annoyed and unconvinced.

Why had she started this? She could feel something like tears stinging the back of her eyes.

“You have that about-to-faint look again,” he said, coming back to her. “I think you hit your head harder than we realize.”

“I think you’re right,” she said. She ordered herself to stop speaking. But she didn’t.

CHAPTER THREE

“IF I HAD a room like this? That is what I would want to fill it with,” the woman said. “The important things. The things that really last. The things that are real. Love. Family.”

Real. Kiernan could tell her a thing or two about the reality of love and family that would wipe that dreamy look off her face. But why? Let her have her illusions.

They were no threat to him.

Or maybe they were, because just for a flicker of a moment he felt a whisper of longing sneak along his spine.

He shook it off. He just wanted to have a look at the bump on her head and send her on her way. He did not want to hear about her sugarplum visions of a wonderful world!

“Nothing lasts,” he told her, his voice a growl.

Stacy went very still. For a moment she looked as if she might argue, but then his words seemed to hit her, like arrows let loose that had found her heart.

To his dismay, for a moment he glimpsed in her face a sorrow he thought matched his own. He was intrigued but had enough good sense not to follow up! Not to encourage her in any way to share her vision with him.

“Follow me,” he said. “I think I’ve got a first-aid kit in my bathroom.”

His bathroom? Didn’t he have a first-aid kit somewhere else? He did, but it was outside and around the back of the house, where the staging area for outdoor excursions was, where he stored the outdoor equipment.

No, it was sensible to take her to the closest first-aid kit, to keep her out of the cold, to not take her through more snow in those ridiculous shoes.

But through his bedroom? Into his bathroom? It occurred to him that he should have sat her down in the kitchen and brought the first-aid kit to her.

He was not thinking with his normal razor-sharp processes, which was understandable. He told himself it had nothing to do with the unexpected arrival of a beautiful woman in his fountain and everything to do with Ivan.

He hesitated at the double doors to his master suite and then flung them open and watched her closely as she preceded him. He saw the room through her eyes, which were wide and awed.

The ceiling soared upward, magnificent and timber framed. But here the floors, instead of being hardwood, were carpeted with a thick, plush pile that their feet sank into. There was a huge bed, the bedding and the abundance of pillows in a dozen shades of gray.

She was blushing as she looked at the bed, which he should have found amusing as all get-out. Instead, he found it reluctantly endearing.

Who blushed anymore?

Something that heightened color in her cheeks, the way she caught her plump lower lip between her teeth, made Kiernan’s mouth go dry, and so he led her hastily through to the bathroom. Again, he saw it through her eyes. A wall of windows opened to the deck and hot tub area.

There was a shower a dozen people could have gotten into, and her blush deepened when she looked at that.

He’d never shared this room with anyone, but let her think what she wanted. It might keep him safe from this niggling awareness of her that was bugging him the way a single gnat could spoil a perfect summer day on the hammock with a book.

She stared at the deep, stand-alone tub and swallowed hard. While the shower might hold dozens, it was more than evident the tub could only comfortably fit two! Her eyes flitted wildly around the room and then stopped and widened.

Her eyes, he noticed, annoyed with himself, were green as the moss that clung to the stones of the hot spring deep in the mountains behind this cottage.

“That is not a fireplace,” she whispered. “In your bathroom?”

“You want it on?” he asked innocently. “Are you cold?”

He was fairly sure it was evident to even her, with her aura of innocence, that a fireplace like that was not about cold but about romance.

And yet he did not like thinking about her in that light. It was evident to him, on a very brief acquaintance, she was not the type of woman who would share his vision of romance.

For him, it was a means to an end, the age-old game of seduction.

The remarks about his floors and the suitability of his room for a Christmas tree were little hints she was not his type. By her own admission, she was the kind of girl who believed in love and things lasting.

Romancing a girl like her would be hard work! He was willing to bet, despite her awe of the room, it would require something a little less superficial than a bathtub and a fireplace. Romancing a girl like her would require time and patience and a willingness to be a better person.

No, he would stick with his type. Because his type required nothing of him but a few baubles and some good times, no real emotional engagement.

He had always been like that, avoiding emotional attachment. He had been like that before his friend Danner had died. Kiernan had a sudden unwelcome memory of Christmas ornaments being smashed. He suspected the memory had erupted out of nowhere because Murphy here had seen Christmas in a room where it had never been. Kiernan’s early life had always been threaded through with the tension of unpredictability, Christmas worse than most times of year.

For a while, having survived the minefield of his childhood, Kiernan had enjoyed the illusion of complete control. He had a sense of making not just his world safe and predictable, but that of his sister, Adele, too.

Yup, he had felt like quite the hero. And then Danner had died. Plunging him into a dark place where his real power in the world seemed horribly limited, where hope and dreams seemed like the most dangerous of things.

And none of that fit with a girl like this, who, whether she knew it or not, wore dreams on her sleeves. Who, despite—if her eyes were any indicator—having gone a round or two with life, seemed to still have that inexplicable ability to believe...

“Sure,” she said after a moment, startling him out of his thoughts. “Put it on. The fireplace.” She giggled. “I may never pass this way again.”

“We can only hope,” he muttered, and saw her flinch, the smile die, the words striking her like arrows again.