Chapter 17
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The west wing of the Horizon lounge had been cleared out for us, the kind of space that didn’t just suggest power—it enforced it.
Glass stretched from floor to ceiling, the Pacific bleeding gold under the setting sun, the city quiet beneath us. It was something I always appreciated about my hotel, this particular private lounge, but tonight? I didn’t care to admire any of it.
Blueprints for Hawk Crown Reserve were spread across the table. My current passion project was going to be six islands to start, with thirty villas per location. Private, controlled, untouchable, exactly how I built and preferred everything.
Yet, my jaw flexed as I stared down at the plans, seeing none of those things.
I’m no longer interested in working solely for you, Mr. Hawk.
The words hit again, as if I were reliving my earlier conversation with Catalina. Nothing, and I fucking mean nothing, ever consumed my mind the way this woman had, with every rejection she seemed so happy to send my way.
It wasn’t just rejection. It was final.
Across from me, Spencer leaned back slightly, watching me rather than the projections. I swear the bastard always saw more than he let on. That’s why Jim called him Mitchell and Associates’ bulldog. The man read rooms and people like a psychic—only without the crystal ball or the bullshit.
My brother, Wyatt, of course, didn’t care about this half as much as I did.
Ordinarily, I didn’t care about his easygoing ways because each of us brothers had our strengths—I was the visionary, Colton was the steady, brilliant one, and Wyatt had a magnetic personality that no one could say no to—but tonight, I wasn’t in the mood for any of it.
I downed the entire glass of bourbon and motioned for my staff to bring another. While waiting, I glanced over at my other brother, Colton, who tapped his tablet to pull up the location grid.
Thank God, maybe this will distract me.
“All right,” he said, all business, “we’ve locked the six island acquisitions into shell entities. No visibility back to Hawk Crown.”
“Good,” I answered. “And now we won’t have anyone inflating prices because they know Hawk Enterprise is buying them. Go on,” I nodded, taking my new glass of bourbon and sipping it.
Colton flicked the screen toward the center of the table, lighting up the map. “Right here, we have The Aegean…Mykonos side, on the private inlet.”
I nodded.
“Then, the Amalfi Coast. Cliffside, with limited access,” he moved his pointer. “We have St. Barts. The western ridge.”
Wyatt let out a low whistle, but it didn’t stop Colton from continuing.
“Maldives. Full island acquisition.”
“Of course it is,” Wyatt said.
“Fiji,” Colton continued. “Outer chain. No commercial traffic.”
“And lastly?” I questioned.
“The one you fought hard for,” Colton grinned. “I can confirm we now have French Polynesia. Bora Bora perimeter. Completely private.”
“And each of these locations can easily host at least thirty of our villas?”
“Easily,” Colton answered.
Spencer exhaled slowly. “Shit. We’re not just building fucking resorts,” he said with a hint of humor. “You’re building a goddamn network.”
“That’s exactly why I pushed for Jim to join us on this,” I answered.
Wyatt smirked, lifting his glass. “Yeah, what if, for some bizarre reason, this doesn’t appeal to anyone but us?”
I didn’t look up. “It will.”
Colton leaned forward, bracing his hands on the table. “At twenty-five million per villa, minimum, we’re not selling volume. We’re selling access.”
“Scarcity creates demand,” I said flatly. “People in our world want to feel exclusive, one way or the other. Owning a villa on one of our islands will give them just that.”
“And starting with only thirty villas will create demand,” Colton smirked at Spencer. “And demand creates obsession.”
I nodded once because this is the type of shit I understood well. I calculated it well, dreamt it up, created it, and exploded the wealth of my entire company with this knowledge.
The shit I didn’t fucking understand? What didn’t add up in my head?
It was simply that a woman who’d built her entire business around high-net-worth clients had just walked away from mine without blinking.
My offer to hire her should’ve been a fucking dream come true, and yet she treated me as if I were some simpleton upstart elite who didn’t have the first clue about the world I owned.
I sighed too loudly and took another large gulp of bourbon.
I instantly noticed that across from me, Spencer’s gaze sharpened slightly. “Everything okay, man?” he questioned.
“Fine,” I answered.
“Well, at the rate you’ve been drinking that bourbon, I’m starting to wonder what fine really means in your vocabulary.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“You’re distracted,” Wyatt said with a knowing grin. “Let me guess. That event planner turned down your fancy yacht date?”
My eyes snapped to his, sharp. “Drop it.”
He didn’t. Because why would he?
Wyatt leaned forward slightly. “You were…” he glanced at the men’s humorous expressions at the table, “…rejected by said planner?”
Spencer exhaled and took a sip of his scotch. “We’ve all been there,” he said with a tight, dry humor. “The difference is, you can’t let it get into your head.”
A slow breath escaped me as I leaned back in my chair, dragging a hand across my mouth. “This honestly is not relevant to this discussion,” I said.
Wyatt grinned wider. “Oh, it’s relevant because while we’re going over your precious baby of a project, your mind is on her.”
“And the fact that you couldn’t secure one woman for a three-day event,” Colton finished.
“I said drop it.” The edge in my voice dropped a degree colder.
Colton and Wyatt both held my gaze for a second longer, then leaned back, satisfied. Then, of course, there was Spencer, a man I knew wasn’t going to let this go, most likely because the woman was friends with his wife.
“Let me guess. Hawk isn’t used to people walking away from his money,” he said in a quiet voice.
My jaw tightened. “Don’t talk about me as if I’m not sitting right across from you, hermano.”
“I’m just stating fucking facts, man,” he said, smiling against my rigid gaze.
“It’s not just about having someone turn down my money,” I said. “I’m not used to them meaning it when they do.”
The door to the lounge opened without announcement, and Alex Grayson walked in like he owned the building—or at the very least, had considered buying it and decided it wasn’t worth the effort.
My building, of all places, and the ruthless bastard still had a way of walking into any place as if it weren’t good enough for him.
Honestly, it’s what I most admired about the man.
He didn’t waste time on greetings. “My wife reviewed the upper-terrace structures,” he said, setting a folder on the table as he approached. “She flagged load-distribution issues on the cliffside structures.”
Colton straightened immediately, shifting the plans toward him. “In what sections has Breanne seen this?”
Alex flipped the folder open, sliding a marked-up rendering across the table. The markups were clean, precise annotations—exactly what I expected from Bree, which is why she was hired for this project through her and Alex’s architecture firm.
“Here, here, and here,” he said, tapping three villas along the Amalfi layout. “You’re overextending the cantilever. It’ll hold… until it doesn’t.”
“Fuck,” Wyatt said in a low breath. “That would be a hell of a headline.”
Spencer leaned forward, studying the marks. “What’s the solution?”
“We need to reinforce the support structure beneath or scale back the projection,” Alex replied. “Bree prefers reinforcement. It’ll keep the design intact.”
“Of course she does,” Colton muttered, already recalculating in his head.
I nodded once. “Reinforce it, Colt. I’m not compromising the design.”
It had to be the expression on my face and the tone of my voice, because now I had Alex’s attention. His gaze flicked to me. “Is everything okay with you? This is nothing major, but we don’t want any elites waking up at the bottom of the cliff.”
“It’s not the errors your talented wife found,” Wyatt smirked.
“Am I late to some kind of—”
“Nah, your timing’s perfect,” Wyatt continued casually, swirling the drink in his glass. “We were just talking about Titus getting rejected before you came in with the plans Bree rejected.”
Alex looked at me, fighting the urge to join everyone else smiling at the table. “Rejected… you?”
I didn’t respond.
A slow, almost amused smirk tugged at Alex’s mouth as he leaned back, folding his arms. “Who’s the first woman to turn down Titus Hawk’s advances?”
“That super sexy event planner,” Wyatt answered for me.
“Not just any,” Spencer added, tone dry. “The one he wanted to hire for himself. Somehow, he managed to fumble that shit.”
That had Alex’s full attention now.
He let out a quiet breath through his nose and shook his head once. “You offered money?”
“Oh, yeah, three or was it four times her usual amount?” Wyatt barked out a laugh. “He literally threw money at it and still fucked himself somehow.”
“I increased the offer beyond that,” I said flatly.
Alex’s brow lifted slightly. “And?”
“She said no.”
“Why?” Alex answered.
“Seems like that’s the half-a-million-dollar question,” Spence laughed into his drink.
“Try eight hundred and twenty-five thousand,” I said, downing the last of my bourbon.
I leaned forward, resting my forearms on the table, my gaze dropping briefly to the plans before lifting again.
“Why the fuck would an event planner turn down that outrageous amount of money, on top of the notoriety it would bring her for planning one of your events?” Alex asked.
“Simple. She’s booked.”
Wyatt scoffed. “That’s not why.”
Spencer’s voice cut in, quieter now. “Well, you did something to drive her off. Did you try to come on to her?”
“Nope. I expected she would follow up with me the next morning, but I didn’t hear from her for a week… and that was after I reached out.”
“Oh shit,” Colton’s head snapped up, and he laughed. “This is why I told you to let the finance department handle hiring her.”
“I understand that, but I need to work closely with her, gain her trust, and get into the mind of that weasel, Christian Jameston.”
“Is that honestly what this is about?” Alex said, reclining further back in his seat. “Because everyone at this table knows we can backdoor that man’s business and get any information we need. Hell, Jim isn’t this fucking concerned about the man.”
“When I don’t trust a man who declares himself my enemy?” I answered. “I prefer doing everything myself.”
“And at the rate you’re going, chief,” Spencer said, “homeboy is gonna have your business infiltrated before you can even get the planner involved so you can gain her trust.” He said it as if he were revealing the main plot of a story.
“I just handled things wrong with her,” I said. “I’m used to people falling in line and being under my control, and to using money to make my offers that much sweeter for them. This one?” I half laughed. “She turns her nose up at that shit.”
Alex and Wyatt both folded their arms and seemed to be studying me or holding back a one-liner, knowing I was at my limits with this conversation.
“Well, it appears you don’t like to lose control or get your pretty little ass rejected,” Alex said.
“No,” I said evenly. “I don’t.”
“Well, how badly do you need the woman, exactly?” Spencer asked.
“I wouldn’t offer her the money I was offering if I didn’t need her,” I said. “I don’t know why, but I swear to God, I know this woman could get me on the inside of that man’s business.”
“It makes zero fucking sense, actually,” Alex said with a sharp smile.
“I feel like it all started with a good idea,” Wyatt said. “Now it’s something I’m not too sure would even help. I say drop the whole idea. We do what Alex said. We hire men to go in and get the insider bullshit.”
“No,” I said, somehow pissed off that I couldn’t work to secure the woman. “I’m sticking to my original plan.”
“Fuck,” Colton said. “This isn’t just about Titus thinking of an idea that may or may not work—this is his new damn challenge.”
“I swear, hermano,” Wyatt told me, “if you mess up this project because she keeps slamming the door in your face, I’ll personally kick your ass.”
“The ego will fuck you every time,” Alex answered with a laugh.
“She said she’s working an event next weekend,” I said, ignoring the speculation, which, sadly, was pretty much all true. “What event is it that somehow was more important than her being on my yacht for three days?”
“Oh shit,” Spencer said. “We’re going to be at the Laurent Foundation Gala at the Getty Center. It’s for the pediatric neuro and trauma and recovery Evelyn’s been working on for Saint John’s.”
“Does that sound like an event she would work on?” Wyatt asked.
“Yep,” I said, looking at Spencer. “Who has the connection from Saint John’s for that event? I would like to attend and make a donation.”
“An eight hundred and twenty-five-thousand-dollar donation?” Spencer said, running his tongue along his teeth.
Wyatt chuckled. “I guarantee you’ll land that woman with a yes if you donate the funds you were going to use to hire her and put them in her name.”
“Shit,” Alex said. “That’s your redemption angle right there.”
I smiled. “Then that’s exactly what I’ll do.” I rose from the table. “Get me the contact information so I can attend,” I said to Spencer.
“Hell,” Alex said, chuckling, “I know Evelyn Laurent personally. I’ll text her now to ensure you get in. And now? I really think I’d love to be in attendance.”
“To see him get shot down again?” Wyatt laughed.
“All of the above, buddy,” Alex laughed. “Now, where can I get a good steak around this place?”
I left the men to enjoy their dinner and drinks, since the meeting we were here for was over.
I was in no mood to socialize. I was in this bizarre state of mind, where obsession was boiling in my veins, not merely because I didn’t have Catalina Veléz close enough to get information from Jameston for me.
Something in me shifted after our last text, and I did not like that this woman not only didn’t want to plan my events, but she didn’t even fucking want almost a million dollars to do it either.
And that only made me want to figure out what kind of woman could look me dead in the eye and walk away from everything I offered.