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He looked insulted. “I can be inconspicuous when I choose. In fact, I’m amazing at it.”
She rolled her eyes. “Just do your best, okay? If anyone asks, you’re my cousin’s best friend from Coeur d’Alene. Come on.” Motioning him to follow, she led him to her old, beat-up SUV parked on a side street. She opened the passenger-side door with a squeal of rusted metal. She had to wrench the handle just right to get it open.
Ares looked at the truck dubiously.
“Not scared of a little worn upholstery, are you?” she challenged.
“That truck is older than I am.”
“How old are you?”
“Thirty-six.”
“You’re right. Get in.”
Going to the driver’s side, Ruby climbed in. He slid in beside her on the bench seat, then slammed the passenger door shut with a clang. It actually latched. She was impressed. Most people weren’t strong enough to close it unless they knew the trick. She looked at him.
Ares looked out of place sitting on the worn bench seat in his elegant black cashmere coat and well-cut white shirt and black trousers. She hid a smile. If he was bothered by her old truck, just wait till he saw what she planned for him to wear up on the mountain. Her smile spread to a grin.
“Ruby?”
Starting the engine with a low roar, she glanced at him. “Yeah?”
Ares caught her gaze beneath the moonlight. “Thank you.”
His dark eyes burned through her. Her grin faded. Looking away, she muttered, “It’s no big deal.” Glancing over her left shoulder, she twisted the steering wheel and pushed on the gas. “I’m just going to stop at my house and pick up some ski clothes for you.”
“Whose are they? Your brother’s? Your father’s?” He paused. “Your lover’s?”
“I don’t have any of those things,” she said, staring forward at the road. “My father deserted my mom before I was born. It’s just my mom, my little sister and me.”
“The same little sister who planned to seduce me?”
He sounded amused, but her cheeks burned. She could only imagine what he thought of Ivy. “Don’t judge her. She should be in college, having fun. Instead, she spends most of her time in a sickroom. Our mom’s been sick a long time. And Ivy doesn’t even remember her father. He died a long time ago.”
“You and your sister have different fathers?”
She looked at him fiercely. “So?”
He shrugged. “Sometimes I think fathers are overrated. My own was a piece of work.”
Slightly mollified, she changed the subject. “Did you grow up in Greece? You don’t really have an accent.”
“I was born in Greece. But most of my life I’ve lived elsewhere. New York, mostly.” For a moment, silence fell as she drove the truck down the thin sliver of highway going through the moonlit, snow-covered valley. Then he said, “In my experience, all fathers do well is pay the bills.”
With a snort, Ruby shook her head. “My father never paid a single bill for us. Neither did Ivy’s.”
He frowned. “What about child support?”
“They found ways around it.”
“But legally...”
Gripping the steering wheel, Ruby looked at the road. “It’s complicated.”
He turned away. “You don’t have to explain.”
She glanced at him, her mouth curving with humor. “What is that, reverse psychology?”
“No. I really don’t need to know. I don’t do complicated.”
Ruby’s lips parted. “What do you mean, you don’t do complicated?”
“Just that.”
“How do you have relationships, then?”
“When my relationships get complicated, they end. I don’t do love, either. I don’t even know what it is.”
He sounded almost proud of that fact. “Is that why you broke up with your girlfriend?” Ruby asked. He gave her a sudden searching glance, and she ducked her head, embarrassed at her own curiosity. “Sorry. Everyone was talking about it at the club.”
“No. Poppy didn’t need me to love her. That was one of her best qualities. But her debut film didn’t do as well as she hoped at the festival. She wanted me to fly her to the Himalayas on some mystical experience to seek redemption. I declined. She left. End of story.”
Ruby turned her truck off the highway.
“Where are you going?”
“Star Valley’s expensive. Most of the people who work there can’t afford to live there. I live in Sawtooth.”
“How far?”
“About twenty minutes more.” Turning her truck onto a rough mountain road, she glanced at him. “I heard you have a private jet.”
“I have a few.” His voice wasn’t boastful, just factual.
Her eyes went wide. “A few jets! What’s that even like?”
He shrugged. “They get me where I need to go.”
In Ruby’s one flying experience, traveling to Portland to visit an old high school friend, she’d been stuck in a middle seat in economy, between two oversize men who took her armrests and invaded her space. The flight had arrived an hour late, and her suitcase had arrived twelve hours after that.
Thinking of what it might be like to have one’s own private fleet, she shook her head, a little awed in spite of herself. “I can’t even imagine.”
“It’s no big deal.”
“It must be hell.” Tilting her head, she gave him a cheerful grin. “Your friends must be always hitting you up for rides. Nagging and begging all the time.”
The corners of his lips curved upward. “Actually, they don’t. Most of them have planes of their own.”
That brought her up short.
“Oh,” she said faintly. As she changed gears, her old truck rattled and coughed smoke behind them. “I live just up here.”
Ares turned to look out the window, and unwillingly, her eyes lingered on his silhouette. The hard line of his jaw, the curve of his lips. He was so handsome, she thought. So masculine. So powerful. So everything she was not.
Then, following the direction of his gaze, she saw her neighborhood with fresh eyes. The trailer park was small, tidy and well maintained. Ruby’s neighbors were kind and hardworking, but the trailers looked old and plain, with snow piled haphazardly on the road. The flowers that made the street so beautiful in summer were nowhere to be seen in winter. And her neighbors’ cars, like her own, had all seen better days.
As she parked in front of her own family’s single-wide mobile home, she saw how careworn it had become. But good people lived in this neighborhood. Good people who worked hard. Telling herself she had nothing to be ashamed of, she put her truck into park and turned off the engine. “Would you like to come in?”
Ares’s darkly handsome, chiseled face held no expression. “To meet your sick mother and the little sister who was planning to trap me into marriage?”
“Right. You don’t do complicated.” She tried to keep her voice light, even as her cheeks burned. “I’ll be right back.”
Closing the door solidly behind her, Ruby went into her home. The living room was dark. “Ivy? Mom?”
“I’m in here,” her mother’s voice called weakly.
Ruby hurried into her mother’s small bedroom and found Bonnie propped up in bed, a small television blaring from an opposite shelf. Pill bottles were on her nightstand table, along with an untouched plate of food.
“Mom! You didn’t eat!”
“I wasn’t...hungry,” her mother said apologetically. Her voice was small, and she paused to take breaths sometimes between words. “Why are you...here?”
“I got out of work early, so I’m going up on the mountain for Renegade Night.”
Her mother beamed at her, her kind blue eyes shining.
Ruby hesitated. “I’m, um, bringing someone. A man I just met.” She bit her lip, but she wasn’t used to hiding things from her mother, so she finished reluctantly, “That Greek guy who bought the thirty-million-dollar house.”
The smile slid from Bonnie’s wasted face. “No.” She shook her head weakly. “Rich men...cannot love...”
“Don’t worry,” Ruby said quickly. “It’s not like that. We’re not on a date. He just helped me get the night off, so I’m returning the favor by bringing him on the mountain. I’m sure I’ll never see him again.” Lowering her head, she kissed her mother’s forehead. Drawing back with a frown, she touched Bonnie’s forehead with her hand. “You feel cold.”
“I’m fine. Ivy said...be home soon.”
“She called you?”
“She...was here. Changed to...jeans. Out with friends. Pizza.”
Ruby hoped that was true, and that Ivy wasn’t trying to get into some other club downtown. But if she’d changed into jeans, that was unlikely. And she knew Ivy wouldn’t be on the mountain. She hated winter sports with a passion. “I could stay with you.”
“Go,” Bonnie said firmly. “You deserve...fun. You always take care...of us.” She took a rasping breath. “Go.”
“All right,” Ruby said reluctantly. She squeezed her mother’s hand and smiled. “When I get back tonight, I’ll hopefully have funny stories to share. I love you, Mom.”
“Love...you...”
Ruby hurried down the hall to the oversize closet, where she stored all the interesting vintage clothes she’d collected over the years, in dreams of someday starting her own business. Now, let’s see, where had she put it? Digging through boxes, she finally found what she was looking for and grinned. She could hardly wait to see Ares’s face.
CHAPTER THREE (#ue7500a0d-918b-50ca-8dcf-3902c4ab390b)
SCATTERING SNOW AS he twisted his snowboard to a stop halfway down the mountain, Ares straightened, looking back.
The night was clear and dark with stars. He could see his breath in the cold air, illuminated by moonlight and the slow trail of fire-lit torches of skiers zigzagging single file down the mountain. He’d never seen anything so beautiful.
Or maybe he had.
Ruby came to an abrupt stop next to him on her snowboard, pelting him with a wave of snow. Her face was indescribably beautiful as she laughed merrily, her cheeks pink with cold, her eyes sparkling bright.
“For a man who claimed to suck at skiing,” she observed, “you’re pretty good.”
“This is snowboarding. I never claimed to suck at snowboarding.”
“Flying down the hill like that, I thought you’d break your neck. No doubt causing anguish to starlets and lingerie models everywhere,” she added drily.
He grinned. “Don’t forget the swimsuit models.”
Her trash talk reassured him. He knew if she’d been underwhelmed by his snowboarding skills, she would have instead been patronizingly kind. He was relieved, since he’d nearly broken his damn neck trying to stay ahead of her.
Ares looked back at the torchlit parade. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
“I’m happy to be here.” Looking at him, she said softly, “Thank you, Ares.”
Hearing her low, melodic voice speak his name, he felt a strange twist in his heart. Was it her beauty? Was it the winter fantasy around him, the sense that he was a million miles away from his real life?
It was excitement, he told himself. Excitement and lust. And triumph. He was winning her over. She would soon be his.
Ruby gave him a sudden cheerful grin. “No one even recognized you.”
Wryly, he glanced down at his vintage 1980s one-piece ski suit, bright blue with white and red racing stripes. He’d almost refused to wear it when she’d given it to him. Then he’d realized it was a test of sorts, and had taken it without complaint, along with the antiquated snowboard equipment, old goggles and a dark beanie hat from the resort’s lost-and-found bin.
“Perfect,” she’d said when he’d come out of the dressing room, her eyes twinkling with glee. “You’ll fit right in.”
And somewhat to his surprise, he had. The other ski instructors participating in Renegade Night were mostly in their twenties, both men and women, all of them fit and reckless. Even with Ares’s height and broad physique, no one had looked at him twice. Not with two Olympic athletes joining them, Star Valley locals who’d won medals in ski jumping and downhill skiing. And also some famous hockey player, apparently. They were the local heroes. No one had looked twice at Ares in his thick goggles.
It was disconcerting. But also strangely liberating.
Anonymity meant privacy. It meant freedom. That kind of invisibility was exhilarating and new.
Even as a boy in Greece, Ares had been constantly under a microscope, the only child of Aristedes and Thalia Kourakis, the glamorous, fabulously wealthy Greek society couple. His mother was famous for her beauty, his father for his ruthless power, and both of them for their tempestuous marriage, a five-year battle that had ended in a ten-year divorce.
And if they were merciless to each other, they’d been even more so to their only son. They’d used him as a pawn, first in the marriage, then in their divorce, in the court of public opinion. Ares had been recognized, and fawned over, wherever he went, if not for his appearance, then for his family’s wealth and name.
Appearance was what mattered. His parents had taught him that well, spending almost no time with him, leaving him in the care of nannies as they tried to outdo each other by buying him ridiculous gifts. The gifts always came with strings. Like on Ares’s ninth birthday, when his father had bought him a Brazilian aerospace company. As Ares had blinked in confusion—he’d dreamed of a puppy—his father had added casually, “And in return for this amazing gift, I expect you to report on the activities of that whore you call a mother.”
Now, as Ares felt the ice-cold wind of the Idaho mountain whip against his face, he realized he’d never had the chance to cast off his name and everything that came with it—fame, power, yes, but also darkness.
He felt strangely free. Strangely alive.
