She would have missed his sudden stillness if she hadn’t been looking directly at him. “Most of them.”
“Most? You told me before that you had a younger brother and two younger sisters. Which one moved on?”
A closed expression shuttered his face. “My newest sister.”
Her eyebrows hiked at his odd word choice. “Your newest sister? I’ve called my sisters a lot of things, but never newest. You’re going to have to explain that one.”
“You must be the only one in the country who missed the tabloid stories. Have you decided what you’d like to eat?”
If he thought she’d be deflected that easily, he’d better think again. “I know what I’m ordering. Your family is featured in tabloids? Mine only stars in the grapevine. It’s amazingly efficient. But I don’t read the gossip rags. What happened?”
Resignation anchored the corners of his mouth and formed a crease between his eyebrows. “A few months ago my mother introduced us to Lauren, a daughter she’d given up for adoption twenty-five years ago. Lauren worked as a pilot for us for a while, but she recently returned to Florida to run her father’s charter plane company. She’s engaged to my best friend.”
His tense tone raised flags. “Not happy about that, huh?”
“Lauren’s an excellent pilot and a hard worker. She’s made Gage happy.”
“But…?”
He lifted one broad, tense shoulder. “I don’t like surprises.”
“Have you had many of them this year?”
He flicked open his menu. “A few.”
That could have contributed to his changed demeanor. “Anything interesting?”
“No.” His clipped voice warned her not to pursue the subject. He signaled for the waiter. “Would you care for a glass of wine?”
“I can’t. I’m working. But the hotel’s cellar is top-notch, so I suggest you try something.” If she was lucky, it might loosen his tongue.
The waiter arrived with a bread basket, took their orders and departed. She noted Trent didn’t order alcohol.
“What does Hightower Aviation do again?” She remembered, but she didn’t want him to think she’d attached more importance to their night than she should have. The details were locked in her brain because their time in his suite had been a lightbulb moment for her.
After David dumped her she’d vowed that she’d only have temporary affairs from that moment on. She didn’t intend to invest her time and her heart in a guy only to have him ditch her when a more exciting opportunity came along.
Meeting Trent, a handsome stranger in town for only a short while, in the Lagoon’s bar had seemed like fate. She’d convinced herself she was ready for the first step of her new plan, and she’d allowed Trent to coax her upstairs. After she’d left him that night with her fledgling wings singed to a crisp she’d decided that maybe the exciting, romantic, sexually fulfilling life she’d hoped to find might not be worth the effort or the embarrassment.
“Hightower Aviation Management Corporation sells, leases, rents, staffs and maintains more than six hundred aircraft worldwide primarily for business travelers, but also for celebrities and political dignitaries. We have four global operating centers and service one hundred fifty countries. Our four thousand pilots are the most qualified in the business aviation industry.”
The pride in his voice as he tripped out his spiel hadn’t been there before. Or maybe she was the one with the faulty memory, but she didn’t think so. Being the middle of five meant she’d learned to read people pretty well. As for recalling details…keeping her sisters’ soap opera lives straight had been excellent training.
“And you’re the boss?”
“The CEO and vice president on the board of directors.”
She nabbed a sourdough roll from the basket and wished she had a hush puppy instead, but the crispy, fried, sweet cornmeal nuggets hadn’t made it to menus this far west—at least not in the fashion to which she was accustomed. If she ever found a steady boyfriend and took him home to show him off to the family, she’d stuff herself with calabash shrimp and hush puppies before coming home. But that wouldn’t be this year.
She debated cutting into the fancy seashell shaped pad of butter on her bread plate, but decided it was too pretty to destroy. “You were the convention’s opening speaker. I guess that makes you an industry expert?”
“We run a tight ship at HAMC. There’s no room for error at forty thousand feet. If other companies choose to emulate us, that’s their decision.” A corner of his mouth lifted, drawing her gaze like nectar draws a butterfly, and making her pulse skip. “A wise one, I might add. We are the best at what we do.”
His smile morphed into a frown. “But we could be better.”
She knew for a fact that previously Trent hadn’t used the words we and our when describing his work. He’d always said my or I very much like her oldest sister, who as the princess of the family and the first McCauley to graduate college, had always focused on herself until she’d gotten dumped and been forced to return home and beg for help.
It usually took something big to humble someone enough to make them aware of the world around them—not that Trent seemed at all defeated. But what had turned him from being the center of the HAMC universe to part of a whole? Had it been the surprises he mentioned?
Wishing he’d smile again, she tilted her head and studied him. Come to think of it, there’d been something different about his smile, too. He still had the same carved mouth and straight, white teeth, but there was something…“Tell me about your year, besides the new sister, I mean.”
“It’s been productive. Tell me about yours,” he said.
She wanted to groan in frustration. Getting information out of people was her specialty, but he was a tough nut to crack. Given he was footing the bill for this party, she’d let him lead while they ate their shrimp cocktails. She’d have plenty of time to delve into his psyche over entrées and dessert.
“I’ve spent most of the past fourteen months learning the job and slowly taking on more responsibility.”
“Sounds like you could use a vacation.”
She was due one after the current conference, but she’d plead work again and skipped going home to her family to rest here.
Coward.
She shrugged off her discomfort. “Couldn’t we all?”
“My private jet is sitting idle at the airport. I’ll loan it to you for the duration of the conference. All you have to do is choose a location—or a series of them—and pack. Within a few hours you could be parked on a beach, a tall cool drink in one hand and a thick beach read in the other. Or you could hit the slopes and do a little skiing.”
She chuckled at his humor. Then she noted his serious expression. “You’re joking, right?”
“My plane and crew are at your disposal.”
Wow. “Trent, as generous and tempting as that sounds, I can’t leave now. This convention is my baby, the first event my boss has let me handle alone. If I screw it up, my job could be on the line.”
“Do you like living in Vegas enough to want to keep it?”
Strange question. “My job? Absolutely.”
Vegas might not be as socially fertile as she’d hoped, but her career was far more stimulating than standing at the cash register at her parents’ hardware store. She hadn’t gone to college for four years to work at a small hotel like the one in Charleston. She’d always wanted to work in a big city…but she’d expected to do so with David by her side.
Their appetizers arrived. She popped a chilled shrimp into her mouth and chewed. The Coral Reef might be a five star restaurant, but it couldn’t compete with the East coast fresh catch seafood she’d been raised on. There was no comparison to seafood that had been caught in the morning and cooked the same evening.
She tried to hide her disappointment. “I like Vegas, although I’ve seen very little of it. My sisters keep threatening to visit. I really should hit some of the tourist spots so I’ll know what to show them if they can ever synchronize their schedules. But thus far, the only list of attractions I have is of the roller coasters I plan to ride…if I ever find the time.”
His eyes zeroed in on hers and his body tensed alertly. “Roller coasters?”
A little embarrassed by her obsession, she wrinkled her nose. “I’m an addict. I love them.”
“So do I.” He sat back in his seat, an odd look on his face. “Or I used to. I haven’t ridden one since college.”
The image of this polished version of Trent screaming his lungs out on an amusement park ride wouldn’t form on her mental movie screen. “Why haven’t you?”
He hesitated as if mulling over his reply. “Heading up a company as large as HAMC doesn’t allow for a lot of downtime.”
She filed away another clue to his personality change. All work and no play—an apt description of her life at the moment—could sap the energy right out of you.
“Now’s your chance. There are about twenty roller coasters in Vegas. You’ll be here for what…a week? Ten days? The conference can’t take up all of your time. You should ride a few…unless you’re a sissy like my sisters who would be too afraid to ride even the tamest of the bunch.”
His jaw jacked up at her jibe, and the fire of competition flamed to life in his eyes. “How many have you ridden?”
She grimaced. “None yet.”
“Why?”
Another pang of homesickness hit. “Riding alone is no fun. I used to ride with my father. Love of roller coasters was the one thing he shared with me, but none of my sisters.”
“Invite him for a visit.”
“He won’t leave his hardware store for more than a day or two, and with the current airline schedules…it just wouldn’t work.”
“My offer of a plane stands. Let me fly him out next weekend. That’ll give him time to find someone to cover the store for him. Surely you can take a few days off to show him around.”
She shook her head at the absurdity of his offer. Rich people who could jet off at the spur of the moment didn’t think like working folks who had regular jobs and bills to pay. “Thanks. But no. This close to Christmas he wouldn’t dare leave. People buy a lot of tools during the holiday season. And as I said, I can’t take the time until after the conference. Back to the roller coasters…I dare you.”
His dark golden eyebrows lifted. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me. And you have siblings, so you know what a dare means.”
He leaned forward and laced his fingers on the table. “Enlighten me.”
She wished she could forget those hands had once touched her and had little to no effect. Today, simply looking at his long fingers with their short-clipped nails made her mouth moisten and her pulse trip. Go figure. Last year when she’d desperately needed him to make her feel feminine and desirable he’d failed. But now that she wanted nothing to do with him he rang her chimes like a handbell choir playing “Hallelujah” with almost no effort.