Chapter 1 Beneath The Chandelier
The chandelier, soft golden, gleamed, flooding the grand ballroom of the Fairmont Hotel. In the sumptuous ballroom, the cream of society mingled—expensive gowns and suits tailored to a T. It was this annual charity gala that held the high spot on the social calendar—one of those nights when the rich and mighty came out to play, ostensibly for the sake of philanthropy, but really about networking and show.
Ethan Blackwood moved around the room with a practiced ease best described as an earthly seasoning on the performance of someone used to stepping on boards. Thirty-five and counting, Ethan put the finishing touches on that benign smile of his and coupled it with a firm handshake that all too often lured others into the fallacy that there wasn't a calculating mind behind those very cool blue eyes. He was a self-made billionaire, very competent at creating something out of nothing, turning the empire of a small technological start-up into a global conglomerate. Ethan was tall, dark, and positively dangerous to look at. As stretched as a large physical specimen, he seemed to carry about an air that said he meant business, and everybody looked in his direction.
He felt, for some reason, the weight of it pressing down on him this evening—the last couple of months of board meetings and acquisitions had just whisked by and had so taken its toll. He ached for just a short minute of silence to rest from the irritating demands of his life. He would get no such release tonight—eyes were peering at him—the taut eyes of the city's élitist.
As he began to address the room full of investors, his person bore a number of interested, admiring gazes. Not that he didn't know what that felt like, but something was very off tonight. It was almost an undercurrent of anticipation one could tangibly feel in the room, and he kept it off as he began focusing on the discourse at hand.
Lila Hart stood at the far side of the tent-framed room, at the edge of the crowd, completely out of her element. For crying out loud, she'd never had a black tie in her life. It was her friend Sophie, who worked for one of the gala sponsors, that had dragged her along, insisting that it would be fun. All her life, Lila had been satisfied with an ordinary life.
Now, surrounded by people who flowed with money and jewelry, Lila was indeed a fish out of water.
Lila was a rather plain girl with simple tastes in most respects. She ran a small and not particularly well-paying bookstore—it was more of a passion than a business—that, like her life in general, kept her on the brink of making ends meet. She loved books—more than any single thing, books, which were a door to other places. She had wandered into the town—what was it now?—and felt that more had been lacking in that feeling of homecoming; that, in the end, she always felt it lie behind her: the feeling of rejection, casting herself among people she never wanted to belong to. She was dressed in a very modest blue dress which she had bought on sale, woefully inadequate next to the flowing designer gowns of which she was not part.
To stay unnoticed, she started gradually moving to the edge of the room, yet within moments, her gaze was involuntarily fixed toward the very middle, where Ethan Blackwood seemed the prime object of attention. Of course, she'd heard of him—who hasn't? He is a backbone of sorts to the business page, a man about whom any step one has to think twice, who is asked, analyzed, and speculated about. A monument to some dark charisma of the low-key variety that menaced and drew in equal measure.
Their eyes met—he had been watching her. In that one second of catching each other's eyes, everything in the rest of the room faded to a muffled noise, and Lila felt the oddest lurch of recognition, as though she'd seen him before. His gaze didn't slide from hers; his lips arched into the faintest hint of a smile. That moment was full of some nameless energy—a charge—electric.
She had hardly been absorbing the scene when, bingo, Sophie was by her side again, tugging back on her arm, this time toward the buffet table.
"Come on, Lila, you've just got to taste the caviar! It's fabulous!" She prattled on, totally unaware of the fact that Lila's mind was elsewhere.
She was different, he could tell, from all the other women in that room. She didn't have that veneer of polish that most of the socialites and business moguls he used to come across seemed to have. That was what had drawn him to her—that softness, that genuineness. He made a mental note to find out who she was.
An ordeal of speechifying and sales, punctuated with endless acts. Lila warmed to the evening - the flattery, the attention, maybe something in the maybe-too-free-flowing champagne - made this one just a little bit easier to bear. In fact, she even turned up the interaction with some older man about classic literature to where a love of a book overcomes awkwardness for just a bit.
The hours dragged on into their dying close, dragged deep under the bones of Ethan. He'd done all the socialite moves, gone through his two-step in conversation, and hit up the right people but he had this sinking feeling he needed more. Something in that quick look of the mystery woman had woken something within him that wouldn't leave him, an impossibility to curb his growing curiosity. His eyes then went into the corner where he had seen her, but she wasn't there, not anymore.
Lila had just slipped away to some tiny dark cranny of the ballroom, feeling very much overwhelmed. She needed a second away from all this noise and confusion of human beings around her at this very moment. To step out of the doors onto a balcony would come the coolness of the night air. Before her, the lights of the city spread out like the shining sea of destiny.
She had stood with her arms crossed, a hand holding onto the deck railing, and lost in her thoughts. She had whirled at the door behind her with its creaking openness—must be Sophie or one of the waiters. But it was someone else whose presence left her dumbfounded. Her breath was caught within her throat, as he stood much more breathtakingly close, towering over her with a commanding and stifling presence.
