Michael’s goal is to have it all. Falling for the boss’s daughter wasn’t part of the plan. But some things are worth the risk, and she was it! Soon Michael is pitted against a man he once considered his mentor and Seine becomes an unwitting pawn in the game of cat and mouse between the two men.

She quickly realizes she’s in the position to end it. She just has to decide which team to play on. Will it be family loyalty or the man who owns her body and soul?

Will she trust the love Behind Blue Eyes?

REVIEW

He never could make clear in his mind his mother’s relationship to Eliot, or to his half-brother. But a part of him understood his father’s obsession with her. She brought out a man’s basic instinct to take care of her and to protect her.

Vincent liked the demure type, especially if she was a lady in public with the instincts of a world-class slut in the bedroom. God save him from the little kitten who craved vanilla sex. He wouldn’t know what to do with her. The only thing nice he wanted in his bed were sheets. It was hard to find a woman with both qualities, not that he was particularly interested in finding one to keep. He was young, rich, and handsome. Except for his damn obsessive-compulsive disorder, he was enjoying his life and intended to maintain it as it currently was: unattached.

He thought about his father’s little paramour. As had always been the case, his father had scored in an area he had only dreamed of.

Yeah! That Eliot, he thought. Now she was the perfect chameleon. The not-so-sweet rendezvous they shared in his mind would make the most hardened dominant male blush. In his mind, Vincent had taken Eliot in every position he could conceive, so now his fantasies of fucking her had become repeats.

Vincent first saw her on television, walking off the plane with his father. The images of her and his father bombarded him for weeks, and the image of her tiny frame was burned in the part of his mind reserved for all things in his life he wanted to forget, but could not. Rather than allowing his mind to feel sympathy for her, he created a sordid x-rated movie starring Eliot, the woman he constantly referred to as his father’s whore.

Although Vincent was able to escape the media and remain pretty much obscure, his mother had not. She was the third piece to the puzzle that made the tabloids swim in profit heaven.

The media had managed to find the most China doll shots of Eliot. She always had a sad, waiflike, clingy, needy look. It was as if she were yelling, “Help me!” While his mother had always been athletic and feisty and strong, Eliot was the opposite. Her photos were of a contradictory woman: sexy as hell with an uncanny mixture of fearfulness and hurt. She was childlike in that you knew she had been hurt somewhere along the way because of those sad, doelike eyes.

Vincent figured those qualities had appealed to his father because at Jonathan’s age, it made him feel needed, vibrant, and young again. The interest in them soon faded in Europe, but American gossips would not let it die. The Biography Channel profiled his father, concentrating more on the five-week period Jonathan and Eliot were together instead of his business brilliance and the life his parents had enjoyed. Sitcoms had story lines patterned around the young girl"old man theme.

That was the main reason he decided to stay in London and call it home. Whenever the buzz surrounding them began to fade, something new would come along"her illness and temporary commitment to EsCare Mental Hospital, the baby, his father’s death, and finally his mother’s death. Now the media was clamoring for information on his half-brother Damien, something he found unacceptable. Damien was the one true innocent in the sordid media drama that their life had became.

Why, the speculation was, had Harriet Rutland left half of her estate valued at twenty million dollars to her late husband’s illegitimate son? The conjecture also included polite innuendo that “that girl” had somehow managed to ingratiate herself into Harriet Rutland’s life and walk away with even more of the Rutland’s riches.

Vincent really hated the stories now circulating about his brother and the newfound interest in Damien. Because of the strong sense of family loyalty Vincent had been raised with, he wanted to squash those stories and protect Damien. He wanted Damien to grow up like him, untouched by the media instead of a freak show like the Kennedy clan or the Onassis girl.

When his mother died and he came back to the States, he had mulled over getting in touch with Eliot and Damien. But at the time, he decided against it. He thought it best under the circumstances that they continue as they always had, through attorneys and accountants.

His mother provided handsomely for Damien, although it had not been necessary. Damien was extremely wealthy from the trust fund their father had created for him. Vincent’s mother’s will stipulated both he and Eliot equally share in decisions affecting the money she left in trust for Damien. Vincent knew Harriet’s goal was to force a bonding relationship between Vincent and his half-brother. But Vincent wasn’t interested in bonding with Damien. He wanted to protect him, but Vincent wasn’t the big-brother type. It would be a cold day in hell before he would watch some little kid play baseball or hockey or whatever little kids did now. Besides, how could he save his brother when he was having a hell of a time trying to save himself? It was easier for Vincent, and in his mind, safer for Damien, if he just stayed away.

So, he avoided thinking about Damien. His attorneys kept him informed of his little brother, but he had never met him. He’d only seen pictures. And there were plenty of those, he discovered, when he retuned to California to handle his mother’s affairs and close up the house after she had died. There were dozens of photos of Damien throughout the house in comparison with the few he saw of himself and his father. There was only one photograph of Eliot, however. It was in a silver frame, and it sat on his mother’s bedside table. It was of Eliot and Damien together.

The photograph was haunting because of Eliot’s pose. Vincent found it disturbing. The lost look in her eyes made Vincent uncomfortable when he first saw it. Her pose was the opposite of his little brother’s. Damien had a huge grin on his face, mugging for the camera, but Eliot’s was subtle, almost forced. The expression on her face reminded him of the typical lost tourist in London. He could spot the “lost tourist look” a mile away. They always had the same expression on their face, not sure of where they were, looking around frantically hoping to find the right person to show them where to go.

It was then that he had really become obsessively envious of his father. The jolt of pure jealousy attacked his very core. She looked so tempting and fragile and hot! If such a thing was possible: a hot chick with sad, baby-doll eyes. Her caramel skin was exotically stimulating to him. Her hair was cut short so nothing distracted from the perfect face she possessed.

He loved women"all colors and shapes and sizes"but he especially loved black women. The way the sun’s rays danced off their skin. The variety of skin tones to choose from was like visiting Baskin-Robbins and sampling the 31 Flavors. He got off on that image alone. They seemed to also have a way of melting at just the right moment which made him feel like God’s gift to them. They would gladly put you on a pedestal and just as quickly kick your ass off when you fucked up. He liked a woman who could fight. And they did it best. He knew he was stereotyping a whole race of women, but he didn’t care. He loved all women"they all had their good points, he just had a preference. He kept that particular photograph of Eliot and Damien, packing the others away. He told himself that he wanted it because of the charming image of Damien, but that was a lie.

He kept it because of her.

EXCERPT

She could drown in those eyes. It was cliché to think it, but his eyes were bluer than the ocean and as mysterious as the sky above. Whenever he looked at her, she felt as though he was looking into her very soul. His eyes were penetrating, deep, sexy, at times distant, but always haunting. His somber and brooding glance intimidated most people, but not Seine. She saw beyond the piercing looks and dominating manner that had become his trademark. Seine saw the shadows of pain and hurt, much like that of a little lost boy. His eyes held a mystery that she was intent on discovering and replacing with a more satisfying one.

Preferably of her.

She had fallen in love with him when she was sixteen. She did not delude herself into thinking that anything would ever come of it. She was smart, and being the smart girl that she was, Seine told herself that it was just a phase, a typical schoolgirl crush. However, as she got older, the feelings did not go away. If anything, they got stronger. Seeing him was the highlight of her trips home from school.

He was what she wanted. The feelings that began as a schoolgirl’s crush transformed with age into a feeling so strong that at times she actually cried because it seemed hopeless that he would return her affection.

As she got older, her feelings matured, and with the love came lust. Big time! Her fantasies were more erotic. He was every sexy hero in every romance novel she had ever read, the beginning and ending of all things big, bad, and dominatingly male. He was Hollywood gorgeous. His six-foot frame was pure perfection. From his broad shoulders and lean yet muscular arms to his perfectly flat mid section, narrow hips, and hard thighs, she wanted him. The man was perfect. His looks and his voice combined made her think of a dark, secluded, sinister, and forbidden place like Romania. His faintly tanned skin made the blackness of his hair all the more dramatic and sexy. His chiseled features and meticulously groomed goatee afforded him an overall bad-ass boy look.

Her best friend, Lynda once said, “Damn! His mother should be proud.” Seine agreed with that statement. Sure, she wanted him in the biblical sense, but she also knew that there was more to him than his good looks. Seine knew that he was more complex of a person than his sexy outward appearance revealed and that there was a lot of barriers to be broken down to reach the real man inside and ultimately gain his trust and his love.

* * * *

She walked into her father’s study, hoping that this time Michael O’Neal, her father’s number one man at Simmons Publishing, would notice her, praying that he would look up from his papers and be struck by the same bolt of lightening that had pierced her heart.

He sat relaxed in the oversized chair facing her father’s desk, his right ankle crossed over his left knee to create a receptacle for his papers. He wore jeans with a perfect crisp crease down the center, a simple black turtleneck, and very expensive black leather Italian shoes. While commenting to her father about the documents they were reviewing, she noted that he enunciated his words deliberately with his deep voice. She loved the sound of his voice.

It was quite unexpected when he glanced up and half smiled at her while she walked past him. Her next movement was so awkward that she nearly tripped. When he reached out quickly to keep her from falling, the spark between them was so electric and surprising that they stood stunned, their gazes locked on one another for a fraction of a second. Then, spellbound, his eyes followed hers as they perused first his lips then slowly moved down his body to the bulge between his legs where they lingered much longer than they should have. She quickly looked up at him and moaned at the look of total captivation that she saw in his eyes. He was looking at her, finally, as she had always wanted him to: as a woman.

She watched the play of emotions on his face and she knew the exact moment that he saw her as someone other than the boss’s daughter. Seine took note of the shadowed look in his eyes and gave Michael a bemused smile.

He arched one eyebrow and pursed his lips as if thinking “Oh Shit! I am so screwed.” Moreover, by the reaction his body was having to simply touching her, holding her so near, his thoughts had to been just as carnal as hers. In that moment, they both regressed to a basic instinct of awareness of the other. The air rushed from her lungs and her legs grew weak. She took a deep breath hoping to calm her nerves. Things had definitely changed! She began to see the light at the end of the tunnel. She felt victorious. It was a beginning. He was interested. It did not matter to her when he cleared his throat and gently pushed her away. The foundation had been laid. She compared it to a master-card moment, priceless, because he continued to stare at her.

“Are you just going to stand there honey?” Lawrence Simmons asked sarcastically, snapping her out of her reverie. She looked at her father who was staring at her with mocking disgust.

Lawrence Simmons gave Seine his ultimate look of disapproval. She hated that look. Seine translated the look to mean that her father was not in the mood to watch his twenty-year-old daughter bumble around and develop brain fever as she always seem to do whenever she was in Michael’s presence. Seine was well aware that half the women at Simmons Publishing lusted after the man and equally well knew that Lawrence despised the fact that his daughter was one of the lovelorn. From the corner of her eye, she saw her father frown and take an exaggerated breath when she had not moved. She stood mindlessly staring up at Michael like a deer caught in the headlights.

Seine bit her lower lip, shifted her gaze between the two men, and watched the silent reprimand that Lawrence was giving Michael, who was unsuccessfully pretending to be oblivious to the ridiculous scene that was unfolding. There was a visible tenseness in Michael’s features but under the scrutiny of her father’s gaze, Michael’s body seemed to be relaxed. Seine knew that the last thing her father wanted and would tolerate was Michael acknowledging Seine’s crush. He had told Seine repeatedly that he had big plans for his only daughter and nowhere in those plans was there room for Michael O’Neal. He had also made it abundantly clear to Michael that Seine was absolutely off limits and was not to be touched.

“Seine!” He said once more, this time breaking thoroughly whatever spell had so trapped her. Seine walked slowly over to her father, positioning herself strategically so that as she leaned over to kiss her father lightly on the cheek, Michael had a very good view of her cleavage. As she righted herself, she asked her father for his American Express Card. Michael shifted slightly in his chair, his eyes captured by hers.