An ‘uneducated maverick’, they’d called him. One who had swapped the polo field for the boardroom and invested in deals and stock market bonds more learned businessmen had shied away from. But then Cruz had been trading in the tumultuous early days of the global financial crisis and he’d already lost the one thing he had cared about the most. Defying expectations and market trends seemed inconsequential after that.
What had really fascinated him in the early days was how people had been so ready to write him off because of his Latino blood and his lack of a formal education. What they hadn’t realised was that the game of polo had perfectly set him up to achieve in the business world. Killer instincts combined with a tireless work ethic and the ability to think on his feet were all attributes to make you succeed in polo and in business, and Cruz had them in spades. What he didn’t have right now—what he wanted—was a text from his lawyer advising him that he was the proud owner of one of East Hampton’s most prestigious horse studs: Ocean Haven Farm.
Resisting another urge to check his phone, he prowled around the squash court, using the bottom of his sweat-soaked T-shirt to swipe at the perspiration dripping down his face.
‘Nice abs,’ a feline voice quipped appreciatively through the glass window overlooking the court.
Ah, there she was now.
Lauren Burnside, one of the Boston lawyers he sometimes used for deals he didn’t want made public knowledge before the fact, her hip cocked, her expression a smooth combination of professional savvy and sexual knowhow.
‘I always thought you were packing a punch beneath all those business suits, Señor Rodriguez. Now I know you are.’
‘Lauren.’ Cruz let his T-shirt drop and waited for her hot eyes to trail back up to his. She was curvy, elegant and sophisticated, and he had nearly slept with her about a year ago but had baulked at the last minute. He still couldn’t figure out why. ‘Long way to come to make a house call, counsellor. A text would have sufficed.’
‘Not quite. We have a hitch.’ She smiled nonchalantly. ‘And since I was in California, just a hop, skip and a jump away from Acapulco, I thought I’d deliver the news mano-a-mano.’ She smiled. ‘So to speak.’
Cruz scowled, for once completely unmoved by the flick of her tongue across her glossy mouth.
He knew women found him attractive. He was tall, fit, with straight teeth and nose, a full head of black hair, and he was moneyed-up and uninterested in love. It appeared to be the perfect combination. ‘Untameable,’ as one date had purred. He’d smiled, told her he planned to stay that way and she’d come on even stronger. Women, in his experience, were rarely satisfied and usually out for what they could get. If they had money they wanted love. If they had love they wanted money. If they had twenty pairs of shoes they wanted twenty-one. It was tedious in the extreme.
So he ignored his lawyer’s honey trap and kept his mind sharp. ‘That’s not what I want to hear on a deal that was meant to be completed two hours ago, Ms Burnside.’ He kept his voice carefully blank, even though his heart rate had sped up faster than during the whole squash game.
‘Let me come down.’
For all the provocation behind those words Cruz could tell she had picked up his not interested vibe and was smart enough to let it drop.
‘She your latest?’
‘No.’
Cruz’s curt response raised his brother’s eyebrows.
‘She wants to be.’
Cruz folded his arms as Lauren pushed open the clear door and stepped onto the court, her power suit doing little to disguise the killer body beneath. She inhaled deeply, the smell of male sweat clearly pleasing to her senses.
‘You boys have been playing hard,’ she murmured provocatively, looking at them from beneath dark lashes.
Okay, so maybe she wasn’t that smart. ‘What’s the hitch?’ Cruz prompted.
She raised a well-tended brow at his curtness. ‘You don’t want to go somewhere more private?’
‘This is Ricardo, my brother, and vice-president of Rodriguez Polo Club. I repeat: what’s the hitch?’
Lauren’s forehead remained wrinkle-free in the face of his growing agitation and he didn’t know if that was due to nerves of steel or Botox. Maybe both.
‘The hitch,’ she said calmly, ‘is the granddaughter. Aspen Carmichael.’
Cruz felt his shoulders bunch at the unexpectedness of hearing the name of the female he was doing his best to forget. The last time he’d laid eyes on her she’d been seventeen, dressed in nothing but a nightie and putting on an act worthy of Marilyn Monroe.