“Yeah, the celebrity thing sucks. Anyway, they show up and they’re waiting in the parking lot, and Ian happens to be there that night. No one wants to tell my mom that five crazy fans are waiting for Sean to walk out into the parking lot and they’ll likely heckle her. So Ian goes out to talk to them.”
“Oh, shit.” She hoped the big boss had buried the bodies well.
“He talked to them by turning the hose on and spraying the hell out of them,” David explained. “He said they were obviously overheated and needed a cooldown. They did not come back, and my mom never even knew it happened.”
“That sounds like Ian.”
“Yes, it does. Do you know who it doesn’t sound like?” David asked. “The Malones. They’re always in the public eye, and they’ve learned to navigate it. My stepdad still kicks people in the balls when they deserve it. The Taggarts aren’t the Malones. Ian might know how to put on a tux, but I assure you the minute he can take it off it’s gone. But none of this matters. You don’t owe me a date. All you owe me right now is the promise that you’ll let me do what I need to do.”
It was completely perverse that she didn’t like the sound of that. Wasn’t he offering her exactly what she wanted? He was offering up a completely professional relationship with no hope of slipping up and whoops, we didn’t mean to end up in bed together. The one tent thing was sounding better and better. He was right about Ian not being anything like the Malones. The guys she worked with talked about how he used to get in the ring with them when he was frustrated and let everyone punch him. Of course, he punched back. “As long as it’s safe, I promise.”
“Okay.” He kept his eyes on the road. “And there’s this app I use. It shops around for the cheapest price on the groceries you want, and it even applies coupons it finds online.”
Naturally they even liked the same apps. “Grocery Pro. I love that one.”
“Yeah, I do, too.” He went quiet and took the exit that would lead them to the private airport.
And Tess wondered if she’d made a big mistake. The good news was she had some time to think about it.
* * * *
David yawned as he looked out over the ocean and had to admit that he hadn’t been all that great at tempting Tessa so far. He’d brought out the big guns when he’d picked her up. He’d hoped showing up in the Mustang would buy him points, and then there had been that completely coincidental choice of music.
He wasn’t a man who believed in fate, but damn the universe seemed to be pointing him directly at Tessa Santiago. They liked the same things. He’d never known a person he could talk to as easily as he did Tessa.
Unfortunately, he seemed to be the only one who felt that cosmic pull.
He was never telling his brother he’d thought those words. Nope. Kyle would give him the emotional equivalent of a noogie and never let him forget what a romantic douche he could be.
Except he wasn’t. At least he’d never been before. He was a focused academic. He was the guy someone had to pull away from a book. His mom used to have to remind him to eat at times.
It wasn’t that he didn’t have needs. He absolutely did, and he certainly indulged them, but he was a guy who sometimes scheduled his sexual encounters. Everything in his life was organized. There was study time. There was teaching time. There was perverted fun time. Until now he hadn’t had sit-and-think-about-Tessa time.
He’d had ten hours on a flight, and he’d barely cracked open his notes. When he wasn’t napping, he’d been wondering what Tessa was thinking about and if it was anything but him.
“Is that the island we’re going to?” Tessa had been inside the cabin of the boat trying to get a cell signal for most of the thirty minutes they’d been sailing. “It’s pretty.”
It was a lovely place to be. He would like to show her all the sights. There was a pool in the middle of the island where the water glowed from the phosphorescent algae found there. “Montez bought it in the late eighties. He’d sold his first company for almost a billion dollars, a number unheard of then.”
Her pretty face had a quizzical expression on it. “Why haven’t I heard of this guy?”
There was a simple explanation for that. Americans focused almost exclusively on their own world. Even at the university he taught at almost all the classes were focused on Western history. “Because his business was based outside the US. Tell me how many billionaires do you know who aren’t Americans or Richard Branson? Yet, they exist now and they existed then. Montez wanted to get away from the stress of dealing with his company, so he bought this island as a place to unwind and get back to nature. I don’t think when he started out that he meant to write entire manifestos that would change politics in the Southern hemisphere. He was an engineer, after all. But he was changed by the island we’re about to go to. By the end of his life, he’d given away almost a billion dollars, and world leaders would flock here to get his guidance.”
“Okay, maybe I’m going to have to read this book of yours.”
He wasn’t expecting it to be some crazy best seller. It would be an academic tome. What it might get him was tenure, and that was better than gold in his world. “He’s an interesting man. His son became a friend of mine when we were in São Paulo together. Eddie was a late in life kid for his dad. He was Montez’s only child, so he inherited the island, but you should know Eddie’s not a billionaire. Remember the part where Montez gave it all away? The only thing Eddie inherited was the island and the trust his dad set up to keep the island running. By the time he died, there were over two thousand inhabitants and a pretty decent scientific presence. So he set up a kind of government, and it’s been run that way ever since.”
“Wow, that must be interesting for the political historian.”
It was completely fascinating. “Obviously.”
“So your friend lives here?”
“No. He lives in Buenos Aires. He often visited his father on the island before he passed two years ago. The money left over kept up the big house Montez had built out here. It’s pretty much a mansion in the middle of the jungle. At one point in time, Ricardo Montez had these crazy week-long parties where famous people would come out and have these long dinners and discuss politics and metaphysics. And they did a lot of drugs, of course.”
“As one does.” Tessa’s lips curved up, and the wind blew her hair to the side, showing off the long line of her neck. She looked back out to sea. “How much longer do you think we have?”
“At least fifteen minutes. Maybe twenty. Then we’ll have a drive out to the estate.”
“I thought I read there weren’t many cars here.”
It was good to know she’d done some research. He happened to know what Kyle had left her was on the thin side, but then his brother hadn’t taken this all that seriously. He’d thought their mom was overreacting, too. “There aren’t, but there are a few buses and some all-terrain vehicles. There are several scientific teams studying the wildlife on the island, and they’re allowed to use Jeeps. We’ll hop on one of the buses and then we’ll have to walk about half a mile from the stop to the villa.”