One Night With the Billionaire (Men of the Zodiac) by Sarah Ballance Page B

happy to show her—”
    A cutting look from Ryder put a quick end to Neil’s sentence, but the smile didn’t fade. Clearly he’d been goading Ryder.
    “You boys behave,” Aggie said. She winked at Zoe and playfully popped Hector across the back of the head.
    “What?” he sputtered. “I didn’t say anything!”
    “But you were about to,” Aggie shot back.
    Carson shook his head and bypassed Ryder to personally hand Zoe her drink. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you, Miss Elliot.” Of the four men, Carson, with his clean-cut, graying hair and button down shirt, looked the executive part. Ryder had told her Carson was a former CFO, and he hadn’t entirely shed the look.
    She gave him a grateful smile and forced herself not to tell them to call her Zoe. “The pleasure is all mine. That was one of the best drinks I’ve had in quite a while.”
    “Always happy to serve. And also, it’s my job.”
    Zoe laughed.
    Ryder touched her arm. “Shall we?”
    “It’s good to meet you all,” Zoe said with a small wave. “Aggie, nice to see you again.”
    “We need to open in a week,” Ryder said, “so don’t tear down the place.”
    “Hear ya, boss-man.”
    Ryder shook his head, then touched her back to indicate she should start walking. The intimacy of the gesture didn’t elude her, nor did the signal it sent to the rest of the guys. Hands off. The caveman tactic probably should have offended her, but it had been so long since she’d felt wanted, and it didn’t hurt that she was madly attracted to him. There could never be anything between them—her father was grooming her to take over his DC law firm, which seemed about as far from the sparking Caribbean as a person could get—but it didn’t matter. Just being near Ryder resurrected feelings she had long forgotten. He represented a time of her life when she’d been carefree—when the greatest of her problems was the noise he made outside her window and whether he’d ever look her way and actually see her.
    He sees you now .
    He looked as if he wanted to ask her what she was thinking, but he didn’t. Instead, he let the wash of the sea do the talking. Soft. Melodic.
    Beautiful.
    Quietly, they walked the short distance over powder soft sand to the water’s edge. Unlike the ocean, with its huge waves and churning water, this water lay calm, the moonlight glinting nearly undisturbed at the edge of the sea.
    “I can see why you love it here,” she said.
    “It felt like home the instant my feet touched the sand,” he admitted. “First time since I sold the security firm that anything felt right. Bought it on the spot.”
    “Did you always want to open a resort?”
    He laughed. “I can honestly say there wasn’t one moment while I stood there tinkering with that car that I ever thought I’d open a resort. I never knew how to dream. Never knew I could.”
    “You’re a long way from that.”
    “Yeah. A lot happened in ten years.”
    That was the understatement of the century. “So how did you get here?”
    He looked past her, to a point somewhere over her shoulder. “I left town on graduation day. The rest is a cliché in the making. I was in a bar, three sheets to the wind, when a fight broke out. It didn’t look like a fair fight, so I jumped in to even things up a little. I was angry with the world and took it out on a guy twice my size.” He grinned and looked at her. “The little guy I’d saved was a hot-head celebrity trying to go incognito off the grid, and when he figured out he was out of his element, he threw some cash at me to sit by him the rest of the night. A couple of referrals later, I was in the personal security business. I signed on with an agency, and in no time, they were pulling me in for foreign dignitaries and high-profile cases, and suddenly I was someone . I had no family, no ties. No reason not to take every risk to keep my clients safe, and it showed. I was top man. I never spent a dime of that money, just