Second Chance Mess (Bad News Billionaires #1) - Lucia Jordan Page 0,21

that sentiment to myself for now. I opened the front door, and we went inside.

The walls of the house—at least the ones that weren’t in the mountainside—were mostly made of glass, so there was nearly a full panoramic view of the mountains from anywhere in the house. Since it was already evening, the night sky was starting to appear in all its brilliance. I gave Brooke the complete tour of the converted home, showing her all of the unique design elements that Max and I invented and which of those components I thought might be good to pull ideas from for the Spokane project.

When I had finished showing her everything, I was getting ready to walk her back out to leave even though I really didn’t want her to. But then I stopped when I noticed that it didn’t look like she really wanted to leave, either. I went out on a limb, fully aware that the last time I did, it bit me in the ass but taking the chance again anyway.

“Do you want to stay for a drink?” I asked. “I have a pretty awesome bonfire outside that I can light up if you’d care to join me. No pressure, just offering.”

“Sure,” she said to my great surprise.

I walked over to the kitchen to snag a bottle of bourbon and a couple of glasses and asked Brooke to grab some of the blankets off the couch since it was chilly out. Then we went outside to sit on the mountainside and have a drink beneath the stars.

I lit the bonfire as Brooke poured our glasses and laid out the blankets. The flames started to stretch up into the sky and let off a warm contrast to the chilly air that always sent my senses tingling. When I came back to sit down on the blankets with her, Brooke had her head tilted back to look at the stars in the sky. She handed me my glass, and we both took a sip that warmed us from the inside out.

“It’s so beautiful here,” she said in awe. “I can see almost every constellation. Cassiopeia is my favorite.”

“It’s that one there,” I pointed up into the sky at the star formation she was talking about.

“You know the constellations?” she said, sounding surprised.

I nodded.

“I think there are quite a few things that I don’t know about you,” she said. “Tell me something else that I don’t know.”

“Is this a test?” I asked.

“Maybe.”

“Okay, let’s see. I play the guitar,” I said.

“You do?”

“Yep. Only out here in the mountains, though. I like the way the acoustics here work, and I like how it sounds when there’s no one and nothing around but nature.”

“I would never have guessed that about you at all,” she said.

I noticed the corners of her mouth turn down into a slight frown. “What is it?” I asked. “You hate guitar?”

“No,” she laughed lightly before returning to a more serious expression again. “But I think that I may have been wrong about a whole lot of things.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “You thought that I was just an arrogant, billionaire playboy, who liked to use women for sex and use the money for everything else.”

When she didn’t say anything, I continued, “You thought that you were dating a man who took advantage of his position as your boss to have a convenient relationship with his assistant. And then when another woman came along, let’s say in a limousine maybe, that he stopped paying attention to you because he had his eyes set on other pursuits that didn’t include you anymore.”

Brooke looked as though she were transfixed by the words that I was speaking.

“Am I close?”

“Yeah,” she answered. “Dead-on.”

“Then it is my fault that I didn’t let you in to see who I really am, and for that I am sorry. I hope that I get the chance to show you that still and that I haven’t forever lost what we could have had. I care about you much more than you know, Brooke, and although I can be a real ass and a real moron sometimes, that doesn’t negate my feelings for you. I know you don’t think that I see you or that I listen to the things inside your heart, but I do.”

I stopped talking and noticed that our glasses were empty.

“Do you want me to walk you to your car?” I asked. “It’s been one glass already.”

“No,” she said. “If it’s okay with you, I think I’d