Interview with a Tycoon
Шрифт:
Or maybe, she thought, with a small shiver of pure apprehension, more like Beauty when she found Beast’s lair.
McAllister let go of her finally when he reached the front door and held it open for her. She was annoyed with herself that she missed the security of his touch instantly, and yet the house seemed to embrace her. The rush of warm air that greeted her was lovely, the house even lovelier.
Stacy’s breath caught in her throat as she gaped at her surroundings.
“It’s beautiful,” she breathed. “Like upscale hunting lodge—very upscale—meets five-star hotel.”
“It suits me,” he said, and then as an afterthought, “far more than my condo in Vancouver.”
Again, her intuition kicked in, and this time the reporter in her went on red alert. Was that a clue that he was going to leave his high-powered life behind him as rumors had been saying for months?
McAllister turned, stepped out of his sandals, expecting her to follow him. Stacy realized she couldn’t tromp through the house in her now very wet—and probably ruined—shoes. She scraped them off her feet, dropped her wet sweater beside them, and then she was left scrambling to catch up to his long strides, as it had never even occurred to him that she was not on his heels.
As McAllister led her through his magnificent home, Stacy was further distracted from the confession she should have been formulating about why she was really here, by not just the long length of his naked back but the unexpected beauty of his space and what it said about him.
The design style was breathtaking. Old blended with new seamlessly. Modern met antique. Rustic lines met sleek clean ones and merged.
There were hand-knotted Turkish rugs and bearskins, side by side, modern art and Western paintings, deer antler light fixtures and ones that looked to be by the famous crystal maker, Swarovski. There were ancient woven baskets beside contemporary vases.
The decor style was rugged meets sophisticated, and Stacy thought it reflected the man with startling accuracy.
“I’ve never seen floors like this,” she murmured.
“Tigerwood. It actually gets richer as it ages.”
“Like people,” she said softly.
“If they invest properly,” he agreed.
“That is not what I meant!”
He cast a look over his shoulder at her, and she saw he looked irritated.
“People,” she said firmly, “become richer because they accumulate wisdom and life experience.”
He snorted derisively. “Or,” he countered, “they become harder. This floor is a hundred and seventy percent harder than oak. I chose it because I wanted something hard.”
And she could see that that was also what he wanted for himself: a hard, impenetrable surface.
“This floor will last forever,” he said with satisfaction.
“Unlike people?” she challenged him.
“You said it, I didn’t.” She heard the cynicism and yet contemplated his desire for something lasting. He was an avowed bachelor and had been even before the accident. But had the death of his brother-in-law made him even more cynical about what lasted and what didn’t?
Clearly, it had.
They walked across exotic hardwood floors into a great room. The walls soared upward, at least sixteen feet high, the ceilings held up by massive timbers. A fireplace, floor to ceiling, constructed of the same river rock that was on the exterior of the house, anchored one end of the room.
A huge television was mounted above a solid old barn beam mantel. It was on, with no sound. A football game in process. A wall of glass—the kind that folded back in the summer to make indoor and outdoor space blend perfectly—led out to a vast redwood deck.
Through falling snow, Stacy could see a deep and quiet forest beyond the deck and past that, the silent, jagged walls of the mountains.
To one side of that deck, where it did not impede the sweeping views from the great room, steam escaped from the large hot tub that her arrival had pulled McAllister from.
The tub seemed as if it were made for entertaining large groups of people of the kind she had written about in her former life. She had never attended a gathering worthy of this kind of space. Or been invited to one, either. As reporter, she had been on the outside of that lifestyle looking in.
The room made Stacy uncomfortably and awkwardly aware she was way out of her league here.
What league? she asked herself, annoyed. She wasn’t here to marry the man! She just wanted to talk to him.
Besides, it seemed to her that a room like this cried for that thing called family. In fact, she could feel an ache in the back of her throat as she thought of that.
“Are you coming?”
She realized she had stopped and he had kept going. Now he glanced back at her, and she sensed his impatience. She was trying to savor this unexpected glimpse into a different world, and he wanted their enforced time together over!
Given that, it would be foolish to ask him the question that had popped into her mind the moment she had entered the grandeur of this room. But ask she did!
“Do you spend Christmas here?” She could hear the wistfulness in her own voice.
He stopped, those formidable brows lowered. “I don’t particularly like Christmas.”
“You don’t like Christmas?”
“No.” He had folded his arms across his chest, and his look did not invite any more questions.
But she could not help herself! “Is it recent? Your aversion to Christmas?” she asked, wondering if his antipathy had something to do with the death of his brother-in-law. From experience, she knew that, after a loss, special occasions could be unbearably hard.
“No,” he said flatly. “I have always hated Christmas.”
His look was warning her not to pursue it but for a reason she couldn’t quite fathom—maybe because this beautiful house begged for a beautiful Christmas, she did not leave it.
“A tree would look phenomenal over there,” she said stubbornly.
His eyes narrowed on her. She was pretty sure he was not accustomed to people offering him an opinion he had not asked for!
“We—” He paused at the we, and she saw that look in his eyes. Then, he seemed to force himself to go on, his tone stripped of emotion. “We always go away at Christmas, preferably someplace warm. We’ve never spent Christmas in this house.”