"This sounds like a mystery to me. Why would he come find you and then not want to see you again? What was the conversation like while you were heading upstate?"
"Monosyllabic."
"You or him?"
"Him. I spent most of my time worried he was going to kill me and leave me on the side of the road."
Jordan sat back in her seat and chuckled. "Don't be silly, Nina. Wealthy people don't kill people. They hire people to do that."
Rolling my eyes, I mumbled, "Funny. I'll keep that in mind if I ever see anyone who might look like his butler or driver near here."
"Seriously, though. What do you plan to do about him? You obviously like him."
Even though Jordan knew me as well as anyone in the world, I didn't want to admit what I planned to do. It's not like I could coincidentally show up where he spent his time. We lived in two different worlds, and I likely couldn't afford the cover charge to get into that life. What I could do was click around online and find out about him.
Some might call that stalking. She'd likely call it stalking. I liked to think of it as research for my fantasies.
"There's nothing to do about him. We'll stay in our separate areas of the world and that's that."
"Oh, that's so tragic and romantic! It's like that Julie Roberts movie where she's like Cinderella. What's that movie?"
"Holy shit, Jordan! Pretty Woman? I'm not some poor prostitute in fuck-me boots!"
She waved my protests off and walked toward the kitchen with her glass to refill her drink. "You know what I mean. Two people from two different worlds. It's so romantic."
"Like Romeo and Juliet," I yelled toward her.
She peeked her head out of the kitchen doorway. "Now who's being scary? Romeo and Juliet? You do remember from high school that they both die at the end, right?"
Nodding, I chuckled. "Yeah. This is no more like Pretty Woman than Romeo and Juliet. Whatever it was, it isn't anymore."
I ran my fingers over Page Six in the seat next to me. Before Jordan returned, I quickly pulled the newspaper out and stuffed the folded page into my shorts. "I need to get going. Can't spend all Sunday lying around."
Jordan smiled another sympathetic smile as I walked past her. "Okay. Hey, Justin and I are going to be hanging out at The Last Drop Tuesday night. Want to come?"
My spidey senses told me this was a setup. A dating setup in the making. "You and Justin and your third wheel? Or will there be a fourth?"
Her look turned sheepish. "I think you might like him, Nina. Alex is pretty good looking, has a good job, and he doesn't seem like a loser."
"A ringing endorsement if I ever heard one," I joked and continued walking. "I'll think about it."
"At least it'll be a night out. We'll have a few drinks, shoot some pool, and maybe have a few laughs," she yelled as I closed my bedroom door behind me.
I sat down on my bed and opened my laptop, content to spend my afternoon looking up information on Tristan. While my computer turned on, I examined the picture of him with his girl du jour at some gala. His face was expressionless and he seemed more like a statue of himself than the real thing. The woman, however, looked like she was thrilled to be there with him, clinging to his arm and smiling a huge, toothy grin for the camera.
Raising the picture to look at it more closely, I studied it for any sign of the person who'd smiled and laughed as he'd driven to the middle of nowhere the night before. He didn't seem to exist in this person.
Setting the paper aside, I typed my first words into the search bar. "Tristan Stone." I figured I might as well start with the obvious and go from there. It didn't take long to see that Jordan had been right. The pictures I saw showed him with a different woman every time, but he was the same cold figure in each one. The soulful brown eyes that had looked at me were nowhere to be found. Neither was the genuine smile that he'd so freely given, even if it had seemed like he was laughing at me more times than not.
Once I'd looked at enough pictures of him to truly make me feel like a stalker, I began reading and found out the real details on him. He'd inherited his father's luxury hotels along with other businesses that included an internet startup company and some company that had to do with real estate.