Riptide Read Free Page A

five-inch heels was a nifty trick. She was lucky she didn’t break a leg as they ducked under the still spinning blades.
    Bria straightened and pushed open the glass door, looking around for a second to orient herself as the man shut it behind him. The noise of the helicopter abruptly cut off.
    The vast room, surrounded on three sides by enormous windows, gave a panoramic view of nothing but flat water all the way to the horizon. A massive stone wall fountain—wall waterfall —taking up the entire far wall provided a pleasant ambient sound and reminded her she needed a bathroom.
    She ran a light hand over the coil at her nape to make sure her hair hadn’t fallen out of the combs. It hadn’t. Double-checking was a nervous habit.
    The room was elegantly, if austerely, furnished in white with touches of navy. Very “Give-me-something-clean-looking-not-fussy-money’s-no-object.” Sleek white canvas sofas and wavy chairs, glass and chrome, some interesting, but sparse, objets d’art here and there, and a highly polished, dark teak floor. Impersonal and expensive, and impossible to gauge the personality of the person who’d paid for it. The room was too modern for Bria’s tastes, but then she wouldn’t be staying long enough to care one way or the other.
    Sunlight streamed through the windows, and she wished she hadn’t put her dark glasses away. But she wanted to appear sincere and open when she met Mr. Cutter.
    Before leaving the hotel this morning, she’d exchanged the jeans and T-shirt she’d traveled in for a figure-skimming red sundress that showed off her bare arms, had enough cleavage to distract a man, and was short enough to display her long legs to advantage. Red-soled strappy black sandals with five-inch heels made walking on a slightly bobbing ship a bit problematic, but the killer heels accentuated the outfit to perfection.
    Unless Nick Cutter was gay or blind, he was going to be putty in her hands.
    The man who’d brought her inside crossed the room to her side. He was in his fifties, with ginger hair and a thick beard. His unwelcoming glare wasn’t in any way masked behind frameless glasses. “Is Mr. Cutter expect—” he began, just as she said, “I’m—”
    “Principessa Gabriella Visconti,” a deep, vaguely familiar voice said from behind her.
    Bria turned around slowly. She hadn’t heard the second man approaching although the floor was uncarpeted. Which was weird, because he was large and imposing, and seemed to suck up all the oxygen in the room by his very presence.
    He was barefoot and half naked, wearing just the bottom half of a wetsuit. Diamond-like droplets of water sparkled in the dark hair on his sculptured chest, then ran in a straight, neat line down his flat belly to disappear under tight black neoprene.
    The punch to her gut was completely unexpected. Bria had expected Nick Cutter to be in his late sixties at least. She’d pictured paunchy, dissipated. Gray hair if any. She’d pictured avuncular.
    He was none of the above.
    She noticed his dark hair and that he was tall, tanned, and had the long lean muscles of an athlete. She noticed the wet sheen on his skin, and the smell of salty male. But it was his striking, impossibly blue eyes that made Bria want to press her fist to the pterodactyls swooping in her tummy, and caused her breath to hitch. Testosterone poisoning, she diagnosed, feeling a little panicky.
    And here she’d only brought determination and cleavage.
    “You know who I am?” Please , Bria thought a little desperately, please don’t be Cutter. This man had his own gravitational field, complete with tractor-beam eyes. He had an almost visible aura of raw power kept on an incredibly tight leash.
    He didn’t appear to be a man who’d be distracted by long legs or boobs. He looked like a man who had things to do and places to go, and she was an inconvenience. A not-that-interesting inconvenience.
    “I read the papers,” he said smoothly in flawless