Chapter 2
Diamond stood in front of Ben, and for the first time, she was feeling a gamut of emotions running through her; this had never happened to her before, needing a man’s help, and specifically Ben’s. She didn’t know if she liked this feeling and knew that her life was about to change with what just transpired.
The Brooks are a powerful family, and needing their help sometimes comes with a cost. Especially Ben, who was known for his lack of empathy when it came down to business or his family’s assets.
She stared at Ben’s lowered head, and his light brown hair that he kept short and neat. Her eyes then swept over his dark purple suit; he looked good wearing it, his broad shoulders and the length of his arms, down to his tanned hands that swallowed up her phone in his grasp. She felt very tiny and feminine when she stood near him. He was slightly more muscular than his twin, but they were both the same height. Both were very good-looking men with matching silver eyes, but where Michael had dark brown hair, Ben’s was light brown. Michael was boisterous, whereas Ben was quiet and gave an aura of being dark in nature.
Standing near Ben, she took in a whiff of the cologne he was wearing; it was very nice, and she found herself pleased that he was wearing the brand of cologne she had gifted him that time she’d spent Christmas at the Chalet with him and his family. Well, her sister and his family had taken pity on her because her fiancée had gone away on business when they’d had plans to spend it together, but she’d enjoyed her time there and getting to know Carter’s now wife Zahara.
The drama had been a bit delicious with her refusing to marry Carter and him being determined to get her to say yes. Eventually, she agreed, but Diamond knew Carter had taken matters into his own hands, and in no time, they were finally married.
Her gaze swept back up from taking him in to meet his arresting pair of silver eyes. She felt heat sweep through her from their eye contact. Others, when they looked into his eyes, said they saw no warmth in them, but she found them beautiful and knew that he was just very contained and not erratic with his emotions like some men she knew.
He was studying her, and she thought she saw a flash of triumph in his eyes before he masked it.
“Start from the beginning.” He sat back from his desk, his face not showing concern or surprise.
She sat on the edge of his desk, not caring if it disturbed his space, and was pleased when his eyes focused on her legs before returning his attention to her face.
She remembered when he used to watch her like a hawk; she’d known that he was fascinated with her and even had a little school kid crush on her like most of the boys that went to their school when she was younger, but then they all became adults and life got in the way. She was busy with traveling for games with her fiancé, Bryce, and then getting involved with charities. The twins had traveled for a bit before finally coming home and then were busy setting up their own path in life and getting involved with the family business.
Recently, when their paths did cross, Diamond felt like sometimes being around him she lost her appeal to the opposite sex, but then there were flashes when no one paid attention that he found her attractive, and she liked that she could get any type of reaction out of him when she was around him.
The Brooks men were all very good-looking and had women drooling all over them, and Diamond had to admit that she wasn’t blind nor immune to Ben’s looks and could admit to herself that she was attracted to him even though she had been with her high school sweetheart since she was sixteen.
She had been engaged now for a while, and there were no immediate plans in sight to get married because she was busy, and her fiancé was currently playing for the Dragons and, in his off time, flying around to promote his sponsored brands, training, interviews, and managing his restaurants that he owned across the USA and Canada. She had taken a break from being away from home to establish her own career and didn’t mind her fiancée’s busy schedule and that they had not spent a lot of time around each other recently.
Her hard work was paying off with the two charities that she ran as funding director, and she was busy raising funds and throwing events like the one she did for the Brooks Hotel opening. That is how she now found herself in a dire predicament.
She swung her leg, her Jimmy Cho shoe swinging back and forth. “I was out at Don Knight's restaurant with Annabelle, who is one of the directors at Hope; she was treating me and commending me for a job well done raising the money from the auction and the fact that we had surpassed our goal of what we hoped to get when I got an alert on my phone telling me that there had been movement on the account. I had expected the last payment to come in, Ben, but not this. Every last dime is gone. I made up some excuse of an emergency and came to see you as fast as I could after trying Ambra and not reaching her.”
He frowned, seemingly not pleased that she had tried her sister first, but Hope was soon going to be Ben and Ambra’s client that they would take on after their office was getting built.
Diamond had thought of them when she’d started at Hope a month ago. She’d taken a look at Hope’s operations and the small accounting department and realized that they didn’t have any solid protocols in place in case of a cyberattack and ransom demand. Diamond recommended BenAm Tech to them and that Ben was to be the sole person to set up the system’s defense and the only one to maintain and monitor the software until it could later be handed over to another employee in the company once they were in a place to hire staff to help in their growing company. He’d been giving access, but setting up the new system did not happen yet because everyone had been busy with the hotel and its operations. Both Ambra and Ben also netted not only the New York brand-new Brooks Hotel as clients but also the new casino in Vegas.
The other hi-tech company that had been working with Hope charity had set up her phone and the one for the accountant manager, Michelle, handling the funds on the account to receive, alerts to their phones, but even that didn’t work out all the time like it was supposed to. She’d been receiving odd alerts all this week as the money had been coming in, and it seemed the app they used was having difficulty getting them to her phone or Michelle’s. Thank God the system wasn’t working very well right now, and Michelle, who also got the alerts, didn’t receive one again, and she was able to run over here to Ben to get him to fix the situation before anyone at Hope found out the money was gone.
Ben nodded and pulled his laptop close to him; his fingers flew over the keys, his eyes focused on the screen, and his tongue peeked out for a second, surprising her, and she took a small intake of breath and suddenly wondered how it would feel against her clit.
He glanced up, and the tongue vanished. She felt a little bit of disappointment that it was gone, but then she felt her gaze trapped by his light silver orbs again.
“You, okay?” his look now curious.
“Yes, why?” She feigned ignorance.
“I thought I heard something.”
She arched an eyebrow.
“Like what?”
“An intake of breath that sounded like fuck ?”
A laugh escaped her because the fuck at the end was what she had thought in her head when she saw the tip of his tongue and had been turned on imagining it doing dirty things to her.
He now seemed fixated on her laugh, the silver color darkening, and her laugh wound down, there now being sexual tension in the room.
The mood was broken when they heard a small chime coming from his computer; he frowned, a look of interest crossing his features before it was shuttered again, and he ran his hands over the keys again.
Ben then straightened. “Come here.” He ordered, and she would have bristled if it hadn’t been for something in his voice that suddenly told her that whatever he found was not good.
“What? Did you find the money and can you put it back?” She said hopefully as she moved off his desk and stood next to him, looking down at the screen now.
“Yes, I found the money.”
“Okay, good, what are we looking at? Was it just a glitch in the system and the money didn’t go missing?”
He turned his laptop window for her to get a better look, and she froze. “Your bank account, the money was transferred into your bank account, Diamond.”