“What sort of development is it?”
He looked into my eyes, weighing me, and I wondered what he saw—a tipsy and brainless female unworthy of an in-depth explanation, or someone seriously interested.
“It’s a resort and residential development along the coast about four hours’ drive south of Sydney,” he said. “A very high-end marina with a lodge and rental-cottages component on an estuary.” He glanced at the fire for a moment, then smiled and said, “It’s just north of an area I loved to visit as a kid. We spent several family holidays there. A place called Jarrawarra Bay. We’d go after Christmas each year when I was around nine, ten, eleven, and the last trip was when I was twelve.” He paused. “Those years in some ways were the best part—the truest part—of my life.”
I chilled inside. I’d had almost those exact same thoughts just moments ago—that the years just before and when I was nine—before my mom died—those had been the truest, most real parts of my life. I’d even mentioned this to a magazine journalist who’d written a feature on the “Grieving Hartley Heiress.” It had been a sympathetic piece, for a change. The journalist had lost a child of her own and had understood me. I stared into his baby-blue eyes, memories surging over me.
“What is it?” he said, attentive. “You look like a ghost just walked over your grave.”
“It’s nothing. I . . . just . . . it’s like you read my mind.” I smiled, feeling a deepening kinship with this warm, attractive, attentive, charismatic man who shared my sorts of feelings. “I’ve thought the same thing before. Tell me about those holidays?” I reached for my glass and sipped, absorbing him wholly, the evening of drinking lending a pleasant warmth and evaporating the last of my reserve. “Why were they so happy?”
“Oh, I guess it was because I still got on with my father, before I disappointed him.”
My pulse quickened.
“Sounds crazy,” he said.
“No, I understand. Really, I do. What about siblings?”
“Older brother and older sister. I’m the baby.” He made a rueful face. “And yeah, the family disappointment, as it turned out.”
“Why?”
Martin leaned back in his chair and cradled his drink. “My whole family are—or were—über athletic. Glorious human specimens, really. Unlike me, especially as a child. My sister was a minor tennis star before she became a top corporate executive. My brother’s sport was rugby. He could have gone far professionally had it not been for a boating accident the family blamed on me.”
“What happened?”
“I didn’t listen to the ‘captain,’ which happened to be my father. We were going out from the river mouth, and big waves started to break over the sandbar which had formed at the tidal mouth of the river. When a bar breaks you need to time everything just right—it’s when most boating accidents happen—going in or out when the bar is breaking. I didn’t listen to an order, got in the way . . . and the end result was the boat hit a wave as it was breaking, and we went nose-up into the air and the boat flipped over backward. My brother was hit, broke his back.” Martin’s face and voice changed as he spoke about it. Pain showed. Unresolved pain. My heart squeezed.
“Anyway . . . Jeremy—my brother—ended up okay in the long run but unable to play rugby. He went into real estate development with my father, and my dad spent everything on him—time, money, love . . .” His voice faded.
“To make up to him?”
Martin took another sip of his drink. “In part, yes, I think so. And also to shape Jeremy into his own image, equip him to take over the empire, so to speak. I was cut from my father’s life. Nothing I did could meet his approval. God knows I tried one crazier scheme after another to get his attention. I just ended up screwing up.” He laughed, but there was no mirth this time. “I was the runt, the little black sheep. A tad too tubby, not at all athletic, nor handsomely chiseled, nor quite as tall as the rest of them. Including my mom.”
But I liked this runt. I liked the substance of what he’d grown into. I’d never been partial to perfect features or skinny triathlete types anyway.
“End result—I left Aus when I was nineteen and never looked back, really.”
“Although you did go into property development like your dad,” I said. “And there’s the marina project back in Australia.”
He laughed again. Warm. Everything Martin did was warm. Engaging. “Touché, yeah,” he said in that flat Australian way. “The project of my heart. I should have said that I never looked back until that part of the world started calling a couple of years ago. I realized I still hankered for that coast where we spent such amazing family holidays. Maybe it’s the kid in me.” He finished his drink. “Or maybe it’s because my brother tried to buy that land for development some years back and failed to develop it.”
I raised my brows. “So this is payback?”
“Nah. More like, ‘I’ll show you all that I am not a loser. Jeremy failed but I won’t.’”
“Except the China money backed out.”
“Yeah. But I’m here. I got some nibbles I hope will pan out.”
“Hard to see you as a loser from where I’m sitting, Martin.” I reached for my glass.
Something changed in his face. His gaze locked with mine. The air thickened between us, and I felt heat low in my belly.
He broke the gaze, cleared his throat. “Yeah, well, maybe it is just another subterranean way for that kid in me to get Daddy’s attention. But it’s a damn good project. Enough about me. Tell me about you, Ellie Tyler.”
And I
