Ensnared (The Accidental Billionaires #1)(6)

It was more of an irritant than fear-inducing.

I hadn’t really had any privacy for the last few months. Somehow, word had leaked to the public about my family’s inheritance, and if I wasn’t fielding men who seemed to be coming out of the woodwork, I was refusing requests from reporters for an interview about how we’d become connected with the rich, powerful Sinclair family on the East Coast.

Aiden and I didn’t talk much as we settled by the pool and did our laps side by side.

I stopped before my brother did, and took a rest.

When he came to a halt, he finally asked, “So who are you dating?”

For some reason, all my brothers thought they were entitled to know every detail of my personal life even though they never shared theirs.

“Nobody,” I said grumpily. “They all just want my money.”

“Obviously all of them don’t. What’s up with Eli Stone?” he questioned as he hefted his muscular body out of my swimming pool and went to dry himself off.

“What do you mean?” I asked as I floated on a small raft in the middle of the pool. The water was heated, and I wasn’t quite ready to get out yet.

“Come on, Jade,” Aiden said. “You had the speaker on when you listened to his message earlier. Are you dating him? The guy makes us look like paupers. You can’t say he’s after your inheritance.”

No, he’s after my body.

Really, Eli’s motives weren’t nearly as repulsive to me anymore. At least he’d been bluntly honest. Unlike other men who had started asking me out only because of my money. However, that didn’t make me any more likely to answer Eli’s phone calls or messages. He made me uncomfortable in ways that I still didn’t quite understand.

Honestly, I’d been surprised to hear Eli’s voice on my messages earlier. For the last several months, he’d been persistent, and he was still calling, even though I’d never answered a single one of his messages over the last five months. But since I hadn’t heard from him for almost a month now, I was pretty sure he’d given up.

Apparently, I was wrong.

And the current message from him had been the same as all the others.

He still wanted me to have dinner with him.

And I still wanted to avoid him, so I hadn’t ever called him back.

I would have thought he’d gotten the unspoken message by now. What guy keeps trying when a woman is ignoring him?

I’d seen Eli once a few months ago. He’d been having dinner with a friend in one of his restaurants in San Diego, and I’d been with all of my family celebrating my sister Brooke’s engagement to a man she’d met while she’d been on the East Coast.

My twin was now married to Liam Sullivan, and she’d chosen to stay in Maine with her new husband.

Eli and I had actually eaten in the same restaurant, just like he’d wanted. We just hadn’t been sitting at the same table.

The accidental meeting had unsettled me, especially when I’d felt him watching me during our family get-together. We hadn’t spoken, but Eli had made it clear that he knew I was there before he’d departed.

Maybe I hadn’t answered any of his messages. But I’d thought about him a lot. I wasn’t sure why, since all he wanted was to get me into his bed, and I didn’t do one-night stands. But the way my body had reacted to him was . . . unusual.

“I’m not dating him,” I confessed to my older brother. “I met him once, and he’s called me several times to ask if I’d do dinner with him. I haven’t even answered his messages.”

“Ouch! That’s cold,” Aiden answered.

If I told my older brother that Eli just wanted to screw me, which I wouldn’t because there was no way I was going to discuss sex with my brother, he wouldn’t have said I was cold. He would have wanted to beat the hell out of Eli Stone.

“I’m just not interested,” I told him as I slid off the raft and climbed out of the pool. “He makes me uncomfortable.”

Aiden flopped on a chaise lounge as he queried, “Is he stalking you? If he is, you know Seth and I can take care of him.”

I rolled my eyes as I finished toweling off my wet body, and then dropped into the lounger beside him. “No guy is going to stalk me.”

Aiden chuckled. “Most likely because you can bust all of their balls.”

My brother was right. I wasn’t exactly the helpless type, and I didn’t need a man. In fact, the majority of guys I’d met did give me a wide berth most of the time. Most of the men I’d met in the past were survivalists, just like me, and even though they might admire my skills, none of them really saw me as a female. They saw me as competition.

“Do you think that’s why nobody really wants to go out with me? Because I don’t need them?” I questioned.

I’d been on a dating hiatus since I’d broken up with the jerk I’d dated in college. The break wasn’t really by choice. I just hadn’t met anybody who showed very much interest in me as a potential date. And I certainly hadn’t met anybody intriguing, unless I wanted to count Eli Stone, which I didn’t.

“Honestly, yes,” Aiden said bluntly. “Some men want to feel like they can contribute something to a relationship with their superior skills. But you don’t want to date somebody like that. If they’re intimidated, they’re fucking insecure. You need somebody who doesn’t need to have their ego stroked constantly, not a primitive survivalist who gets annoyed because you know more than they do about hunting, trapping, foraging, and other survival stuff. You need somebody who admires your strengths instead of being intimidated by them.”