Find and seduce Marcus Colter.
Lara Bailey’s single-minded goal thrummed through her head as she swirled a straw in her untouched glass of iced tea. Her eyes roamed around the luxurious bar of the Rocky Springs Resort. Her first day here in the Colorado winter vacationer’s paradise had been an epic fail. She hadn’t once spotted Marcus, the eldest of the iconic, billionaire Colter siblings, and she hadn’t even been able to find out his whereabouts.
All she’d gotten out of today was a lightheaded, unpleasant episode when she headed down to the resort’s gym to do her usual, stringent workout this morning, obviously brought on by lack of adjustment to the altitude here in the high country of Colorado.
Brilliant. She had slowed down her workout for the day and started to drink as much water as possible. It was critical that she didn’t have any weaknesses right now, and she needed to adjust to the altitude as quickly as possible. She had started to feel better already, so she guessed her flatlander body was making the adjustments to being somewhere in the middle of the front range of the Rocky Mountains.
Looking around, all she could see was a sea of people who looked as if they’d just come off the ski slopes. Their faces were red from the cold, and they were dressed mostly in ski gear: ski jackets, ski pants, sweaters and scarves. Some of them even had their skis propped against the wall as they chatted with a warm drink in hand.
What would it be like to be one of those vacationers? At the age of thirty, I can’t even remember taking a vacation, or when I last did anything just for the fun of it.
Lara felt out of place in a black cocktail dress, especially considering it was barely four o’clock in the afternoon. But she had a mission, and she was dressed for the goal she wanted to complete. She crossed her long, slender legs, casually flipped her dark blonde hair over her shoulder, and surveyed the people as her mind worked frantically on another plan.
If I can’t find Marcus Colter, I’m going to have to make him come to me somehow.
Honestly, Lara would rather be almost anywhere else other than where she was right now—what looked to be a big, fabulous playground for the wealthy. She hated the flirty dress and power heels she wore: footwear that had nearly made her fall on her ass as she exited the elevator and caught the thin heel of her shoe in the small metal opening that accommodated the sliding door. Luckily, she’d been alone in the elevator and no one had seen her not-so-graceful entrance into the lobby.
Thank God nobody saw me. I need to act like I’m perfectly comfortable here—even though I’m not. I need to find Marcus Colter. But I’d really rather be home in my tiny apartment with several containers of Chinese food, a good book, and something chocolate right now.
She was starving, but she’d taken one look at the menu prices outside the swanky resort restaurant and nearly choked. Dinner would have to wait until she could drive into town.
The price of a basic room here in the resort was bad enough: one night cost more than her entire rent for a month. It wasn’t that she couldn’t pay for dinner here; she didn’t want to do it. More than likely, she’d still be hungry when she left the eatery. The fancy place looked like one of those restaurants with expensive, tiny portions that wasn’t about to satiate her hunger. Lara didn’t give a shit about the presentation of her dinner; she cared about whether the food was plentiful and good…or not. It irritated her when she left a restaurant with her purse a whole lot lighter and her stomach was still growling. What good was a pretty plate and a yummy aroma if she only got a few bites for an astronomical price?
There isn’t much reason to hang out here much longer. Time to change my clothes and head into town for dinner.
Obviously, the eldest Colter sibling didn’t hang out much here at the resort. Apparently none of the Colters did. At the very least, she’d hoped to bump into Marcus’s mother, Aileen Colter, a woman who was said to spend a lot of time managing the resort. Unfortunately, she hadn’t got a glimpse of one single Colter all day. And she’d recognize every one of them by sight, even if she wasn’t personally acquainted with a single one of them. She’d studied plenty of pictures of this particular wealthy family.
“I’d buy you a drink, but it doesn’t look like you’ve done much with the one you already have.” A low, sexy baritone reverberated behind Lara, surprising her enough that she had nearly knocked over her glass.
Startled because the man had approached her from behind, Lara turned as she finally spotted a guy she wouldn’t mind speaking with: Tate Colter.
The stats that she’d memorized about him snapped quickly into her brain: Thirty-one-year-old male, blond hair, gray eyes, six foot one inches, exemplary military record in the Special Forces until some kind of accident had required him to leave the military with an honorable discharge. Maddeningly, she hadn’t been able to get too much more information on Tate. He was a billionaire—like every other damn Colter in the family—and was the driving force that had made Colter Fire Equipment the biggest producer of firefighting and fire safety gear in the world. The company was under the Colter conglomerate, but Tate had made it his personal mission to manufacture more sophisticated equipment than any other corporation, had been the man to drive the company into the stratosphere of success. She hadn’t found anything negative in his information. Hell, he was even a volunteer firefighter.
Lara eyed him warily as he moved to the other side of the small table. He looked harmless enough. In fact, he looked amazing in real life—better than his pictures. His blond locks were still as short as they’d been in the photos she’d viewed, but he had a serious case of bedhead today, and some of his hair spiked in various directions. Lara was willing to bet the messy look had come from a hat considering it was the dead of winter in Colorado, and she grudgingly admitted that she kind of liked the fact that he wasn’t vain enough to fix it. The just-rolled-out-of-bed look of his hair, and the dimple she could see as he shot her an unassuming grin, made him dangerously attractive.
I’ve seen better-looking men. The defensive thought popped into her head, probably because of the shiver of awareness that slithered down her spine as she looked at Tate Colter. She had seen men more conventionally attractive, but none quite as compelling as the man she currently surveyed cautiously. Dressed casually in jeans, boots, and a green sweatshirt, he should have looked ordinary and drab in his surroundings, but he didn’t. Lara knew she needed to proceed with caution no matter how unassuming or nice he appeared to be. Tate Colter had a genius IQ, just like the rest of his siblings. His unassuming smile and boyish grin hid a mind that was assessing her, just as surely as she was checking him out and evaluating his motives.