THE SILVER JET swooped over Espada and touched down on the Barons’ private airstrip. The landing was quiet and uneventful, but the black stallion in the small paddock nearest the stables snorted and danced with terror.
Esmé, who’d been working with the horse most of the morning, barely had time to grab its bridle and hang on.
“Dammit,” she said, through her teeth.
All this effort spent soothing the animal, talking to it, letting it grow accustomed to her, and now some idiot in a shiny toy had all but ruined her hard work. The same idiot she’d probably be stuck with for the weekend, somebody with too much money, too much machismo, and too many people to do his bidding.
Someone like the man she’d left almost three months ago, but why ruin the day by thinking about him?
The horse nickered softly and nuzzled Esmé’s shoulder. She smiled, dug into the pocket of her jeans, and offered him a chocolate mint.
“Okay,” she said, “you’re entitled to a treat.”
The stallion took it delicately from her outstretched palm. She looked past him, to where a plume of dust rose lazily against the cloudless sky, proof that the plane had landed. It had to be that Eastern big shot, flying in to buy a stallion. Or a mare.
“He ain’t said which,” Jonas had told her, with a grin. “That’s your job, missy. You got to help him figure it out.”
Help him, indeed. Esmé led the horse toward the stables. Men with enough money to own planes and buy Baron-bred horses didn’t need to bother themselves with the down and dirty details of life. They could snap their fingers, bark out orders, behave as if they owned the planet and everything on it, the way Rio …
“Dammit,” Esmé muttered again. The horse shied and she patted its neck. “Easy, handsome. I’m talking to me, not you.”
Why was she wasting time thinking about Rio de Santos? He was out of her life and she was out of his. That was the good news. That she’d made the first move was even better. It had been the only possible move, to save even a vestige of her pride.
Esmé slipped the bridle from the stallion, patted his muzzle and shut the gate to his stall.
Why think about a man who wouldn’t have spent a moment thinking about her? Oh, maybe he’d have wondered about her a little, but only because she’d put a dent in his precious ego. Except for that, he’d be glad she was gone. He’d been planning to end their affair. The signs had all been there to read.
She blinked as she stepped out into the sunlight. She knew she should never have become involved with him in the first place. The fellow models she’d worked with had warned her. He was gorgeous, they said, and sexy, and incredible, but he went through women like candy.
“He’ll break your heart,” one had said, but that wasn’t true. Rio hadn’t broken her heart; you had to love a man for that to happen, and she’d never loved Rio. Never. She was too wise for that, and if it still hurt to think about him, if she sometimes imagined how it would feel, if he came after her …
“Hello, Esmé.”
The earth seemed to tilt. Her heart and soul knew that deep, lightly accented voice, but it wasn’t possible. Rio couldn’t be here. He couldn’t be.
“Are you afraid to look at me?”
She was trembling, but she knew better than to let him see it. “That’s stupid,” she said, and managed to sound as if seeing him again wasn’t sending her pulse into overdrive. “Why would I be afraid?”
Esmé took a deep breath, fixed a polite expression to her face. Then she turned around and looked at the man who had been her lover until a few months ago, the man who had awakened her to passion.
He was wrong. She wasn’t afraid of seeing him again. She was terrified.