Billionaire Bosses Collection. Кэрол Мортимер

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СКАЧАТЬ Philip had handed his daughter off to Garrett and had gone to stand by his string of ex-wives. She was craning her neck trying to find Sebastian.

      Ah, there. At the very back she spotted his dark head. He was perfectly composed, though she was sure she wouldn’t have been. He stood ramrod straight, looking for all the world like one of the ushers and not the man who had every right to have walked his sister up the aisle.

      The wedding was short and sweet—at least Neely supposed it was. She barely noticed. Her mind was consumed with indignation for Sebastian, with annoyance toward his father. No one else seemed to notice.

      The Savases looked like a normal family on the eldest daughter’s wedding day: mother with a tear-streaked smiling face, father beaming as he bestowed her hand on her groom, the bride joyful, the groom solemn.

      And where the eldest brother was no one cared.

      Except her.

      Neely cared. And she barely waited until after the ceremony to slip away and go to him. But when she looked around, he wasn’t there. Vangie and Garrett, his parents and hers were in a reception line and everyone was lined up to go past and congratulate them.

      Sebastian should have been there, too. If anyone deserved congratulations for getting Vangie married it was him. But she didn’t see him anywhere. She could have waited in the reception line and asked Vangie, but judging from the happily dazed expression on Vangie’s face, she wouldn’t have known.

      She did ask Gabriel, “Where’s your brother?”

      But Gabriel just shrugged and looked blank. So did Milos and the triplets. “He’s around somewhere,” Jenna said, waving her hand toward the hundreds of people milling about on the lawn.

      It was Sarah who pointed. “He’s over there.”

      Following her pointing finger, Neely spied Sebastian on the far side of the gathering. He was standing with a couple she’d never seen before. They were talking and he was listening. He had his hands tucked into the pockets of his black trousers. His dark head was bent.

      He didn’t look shattered. He looked perfectly fine. But Neely couldn’t help cutting through the crowds of people to get to him.

      “Ah, there you are!” She smiled brilliantly as she came up to him, and he lifted his gaze and smiled. It wasn’t the best Sebastian Savas smile, the one that could curl her toes. But it was warm and welcoming and he reached out a hand and drew her to him, looping an arm over her shoulders.

      “This is Neely Robson,” he told the other couple, and to Neely he said, “My cousin Theo and his wife, Martha.”

      He introduced her to more cousins and aunts and uncles, and was completely affable and pleasant. He never once mentioned his father, never said a word about the switch. Of course she knew Sebastian well enough that she didn’t expect him to make a fuss about it, but she thought he might say something to her in the few moments they were alone.

      But when they were alone he stole a kiss, and while it was a perfectly discreet kiss in public, it meant she didn’t get to find out what happened.

      “Are you all right?” she asked him briefly.

      He blinked, surprised. “I’m fine.”

      “Your father—”

      But Sebastian simply turned away. “Let’s get something to eat.”

      They got something to eat. They talked to a myriad Savas aunts, uncles, cousins and friends. Sebastian was perfectly polite, completely composed. He didn’t seem like an Iceman on the surface—not the way he used to appear at work sometimes—but beneath the surface charm, Neely began to suspect that the ice was there.

      She caught a sense of it in his tone of voice. It was that easy, polite and on-the-surface-pleasant tone, yet there was in it, too, a distance, a determined emotional detachment.

      Yes, Sebastian agreed with everyone who said so, Vangie was a beautiful bride and Garrett was a lucky man. He allowed that it was terrific that their whole family could be here. And he even nodded and said, yes, wasn’t it nice that they all—even the exwives—got on so well.

      “Philip always did know how to pick ’em,” his father’s older brother, Socrates, said cheerfully. Socrates’s son, Theo, winced at the comment, but Sebastian didn’t bat an eye.

      But he wasn’t, Neely started to understand as time went on, quite as sanguine as he seemed. It was unobtrusive but apparent, to her at least—though she was sure she was the only one who noticed—that he was careful to keep a couple hundred people between himself and his father at all times.

      Not that it was difficult. Philip Savas was clearly a charming, gregarious man. He was every bit as handsome as his son with a more affable outgoing manner. In situations like this Sebastian was pleasant but quiet. He didn’t have the innate ease his father did with social settings. Wherever Philip went, people were smiling and laughing, beaming at him, shaking his hand, clapping him on the back.

      His children—except for Sebastian—flocked around him, eager for fatherly attention. Even his ex-wives seemed to preen under his benevolent eye.

      Philip was in his element. He paid attention to them all, charmed them all—his oft-neglected family, the multitude of wedding guests and, of course, Garrett’s family as well. Her father’s presence and his behavior was everything Vangie had wanted.

      Neely found it interesting, though, that even as he conversed with all of them, his gaze kept shifting toward Sebastian. At first she thought she might have imagined it. But the more she watched, the more often she saw Philip’s glance move their way. As he chatted his way from group to group, he seemed to be edging closer and closer to his eldest son.

      Sebastian never looked his way. He kept a possessive hand on Neely’s arm or looped his over her shoulders, but his focus was on whichever friend, relative or guest was talking with him.

      And yet, somehow, without Neely quite realizing how, Sebastian managed to move them further away. It was a dance of pursuit and avoidance. Never directly acknowledged by father or son.

      Once Philip caught her eye and smiled at her. She supposed it was even a genuine smile, but it couldn’t hold a candle to his son’s. She didn’t smile back, but she did say to Sebastian, “I think your father wants to talk to you.”

      But Sebastian acted like he didn’t hear, instead spinning her onto the small dance floor and taking her in his arms. “Let’s dance.”

      Oh, yes. It was a slow dance, one that allowed Neely to loop her arms around his neck while his held her close to his chest. They moved together, swayed, shifted, shuffled.

      Neely closed her eyes and rested her head on his shoulder, breathing in the scent of him—the piney aftershave, the starch of his shirt, a hint of the sea, something uniquely Sebastian. She felt the touch of his lips to her hair, felt his arms tighten around her. And she savored it, stored away the moment and knew she would always remember this.

      “May I cut in?”

      Neely’s head jerked up as Sebastian’s arms went stiff around her. They both looked around to see Philip just behind Sebastian, his hand raised from apparently having tapped his son’s shoulder, a hopeful smile on his handsome face.

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