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enjoying our evening. Tell me more stories from your RAF days.”
    Geoff leaned back in his chair and took a sip of his wine. Letting this go would be so easy to do. It might be the gentlemanly thing to do. But he was more interested in being real than anything else. He wanted to know the girl behind the image. He wanted to be more to Amelia than every other man she’d gone out with. He wanted to know the real woman, and just now, he’d had a glimpse of her and he couldn’t go back.
    “I do want to know,” he said quietly. “My family is complicated as well. I know that it’s not always easy to balance our own lives and still take care of familial duties.”
    “You’ve just made it sound as if we have more in common than just our scandalous births?”
    “We have a lot in common, love. We already know that from the time we spent in Botswana.”
    “I guess we do.”
    She cut a piece of her filet mignon and took a delicate bite. He waited, hoping that if he gave her some space and showed her he could be patient, she’d let him in, even if just a little.
    After a few moments she put her fork down and leaned in close again. “I’m not sure I can talk about it. I don’t like to.”
    “Just tell me what’s troubling you,” he said. “You can trust me.” He needed to know what was on her mind. It hadn’t taken him very long to figure out that Amelia was everything he’d hoped she’d be and more. She was smart and sassy and so damn sexy that he’d had a hard time keeping his mind on the conversation. Until now. She was in pain—he could see it. And he wanted to be the one to help her.
    “I have to find a way to convince the board of directors at Munroe Hotels to keep my brother in his position as chairman. And I have no idea how to do it without throwing myself into running the company full time.”
    He was surprised. He’d expected her answer to be something else. Anything else, really, except this.
    “Do you know anything about running the chain?” he asked.
    “Plenty. I’ve done it before. But with my responsibilities at the Munroe Foundation, it’s too much work to do both.”
    “And your brother?”
    “He’s not…well, simply put, he’s not a man like you, Geoff.”
    What kind of man did she think he was?
    “In what way?” he asked.
    “He has never put family and his responsibilities before himself, and I have the feeling he never will,” she said. “The thing I have to decide is if I’m going to keep covering for him, or let him sink and let my father’s dream of keeping the hotel in our family die.”
     
    Amelia knew she was saying too much. But there was something in Geoff’s beautiful, stormy blue eyes, something in the way he held himself and the way he leaned in when she talked, that invited intimacy and made her want to tell him all her secrets.
    And that was dangerous.
    She didn’t mind sharing about Auggie and the Munroe Hotel chain, but there were other secrets that she knew she’d have to be careful to protect. Secrets that would be very damaging to her if Geoff didn’t prove to be the man she was starting to believe him to be.
    She doubted he had any idea that she held an MBA from Harvard, since she’d gotten her degree under her mother’s maiden name to keep the paparazzi from following her there. Or that he had any clue that she’d been the one to run the chain in the late nineties since Auggie was the figurehead then. She’d kept her name off everything while her brother was in and out of rehab. Those were the type of tidbits she’d been careful to keep out of the public domain. She’d found that if anyone saw beyond the party-girl image she’d carefully cultivatedthey were confused, and often expected things from her she simply couldn’t give.
    “Why are you trying to save your brother’s skin?” he asked. “Isn’t he older?”
    This was a mark of the man that Geoff was, she thought. That he saw her as a little sister and therefore someone who should be