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The Inconvenient Bride
Anne McAllister
“Why fight it? It’s what we both want. Unless you only believe in one-night stands?”
“Of course not!”
“Then maybe you’re a chicken.”
Her eyes flashed. “I’m never a chicken!”
“No?” Dominic challenged softly. “Then prove it.”
For a long moment she didn’t move. Then something changed. The corners of her mouth turned up in a smile that set his heart pounding. And quite deliberately Sierra reached out and snagged his tie from where he’d tossed it on the chair.
She ran it through her fingers as she stepped forward to meet him. And his heart slammed against his chest as she whispered, “How nice of you to remember I had a use for this.”
ANNE MCALLISTER was born in California. She spent long lazy summers daydreaming on local beaches and studying surfers, swimmers and volleyball players in an effort to find the perfect hero. She finally did—not on the beach, but in the university library where she was working. She, her husband and their four children have since moved to the Midwest. She taught, copyedited, capped deodorant bottles and ghostwrote sermons before turning to her first love, writing romance fiction.
The Inconvenient Bride
Anne McAllister
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Thanks to Jane Dolter and April Collier for helping Sierra do all that hair!
And for Ann Leslie Tuttle, who is everything an editor should be: helpful, wise, patient and encouraging—especially when it wasn’t even her book!
For Jack and Judy, Happy 30th!
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ONE
“YOUR father on line one.”
They were the words Dominic Wolfe least wanted to hear.
He sighed and shut his eyes. It had already been a hellish morning.
He liked a brisk walk to his office. The mile trek downtown from his Fifth Avenue apartment was ordinarily exactly what he needed to compose his thoughts, run over his mental list of to-do’s and psyche himself up to tackle the day.
Today he’d got drenched halfway there. The “early morning shower” predicted by the weather service had become an eight a.m. cloudburst instead. And by the time Dominic had decided it was more than a sprinkle, taxis had become nonexistent.
He’d arrived, damp and annoyed, to a message that the president of the company with whom he was negotiating a buyout had chosen this moment to rethink his options. While he was trying to sort that out, a supplier in Japan sent a fax saying the shipment would be delayed. His secretary, Shyla, was morning sick, pale and wan and gasping, although trying to mask it with ruthless efficiency.
And Marjorie—the woman he’d been quite sure would never want more from him than his presence in her bed—had just banged the receiver in his ear after delivering an ultimatum: if he wanted to see the inside of her bedroom again, she expected an engagement ring.
And now the old man was on line one?
Dominic did not want to talk to the old man.
“Did you hear me, Dominic?” His secretary, Shyla, interpreted his silence for distraction, not reluctance. “He said it was urgent.”
It was always urgent now that his father was no longer running things.
Douglas Wolfe had far too much time on his hands since he’d retired. He’d gone merrily off to Florida eighteen months ago, telling Dominic he intended to catch up on his reading, fishing and all the other things his years at the top of corporate America had never permitted him to do.
Shuffleboard, Dominic had thought. He’d expected his father to fish and read, to play games and eat Egg McMuffins with his friends.
Instead the old man had spent his every waking moment researching new strategies for the company he was no longer running and attempting to assure its future. That meant he was determined to find the woman who would tempt Dominic to leave bachelorhood behind.
It wasn’t going to happen.
Dominic had told him that. They’d been over it a hundred times. More.
Douglas had tried his hand at matchmaking once before. He’d found Dominic a fiancée a dozen years ago. Carin had been absolutely perfect. Young, sweet, gorgeous, and the daughter of one of Wolfe Enterprises’ biggest suppliers. Dominic had been young, handsome, ambitious, and naive. He’d thought marriages like that worked out.
He’d never expected Carin to jilt him.
But she had. He’d been left standing at their Bahamas hideaway with a ring, a red face and two hundred intrigued wedding guests, but no bride.
He sure as hell wasn’t letting the old man have another shot.
For a dozen years, Douglas had lain low, had let Dominic revel in easy bachelordom. But retirement had apparently pricked his need to meddle again. For the past eighteen months, he’d showed up with a woman every month for Dominic to “look over.”
Dominic had assumed it was biological—some sort of urge to become a grandfather that hit men when they turned sixty-five. Thus he’d expected the old man to let up when his youngest brother Rhys had, just this past Christmas, inadvertently provided their father with twins.
But it hadn’t mattered. It was May now, and in the past five months Douglas had appeared with one woman after another—each as precise and tailored and businesslike as Dominic himself.
They wouldn’t have sex, they’d have mergers, he’d told the old man after the last one. There was no way on earth he would ever consider someone like that!
“Well, what do you want?” Douglas had sputtered.
“To be left alone,” Dominic growled and banged down the phone.
He had been for the past three weeks. He’d hoped his father had got the message at last. Now the old man was on line one.
Dominic punched the button and barked into the phone. “What?”
“And a lovely fine morning to you, too,” his father’s cheerful voice boomed in his ear.
“Not lovely here. It’s raining like hell.” Dominic scowled out the floor-to-ceiling windows of his office onto the gray damp dismal world beyond.
“I’ll tell Evelyn to pack my umbrella and rubber boots.”
“Pack—? Why?” Dominic sat up straight, his fingers strangling his Mont Blanc pen.
His earlier vague sense of foreboding was presently slamming him right between the eyes. Why should his father’s housekeeper be packing Douglas’s umbrella and rubber boots, unless—
“I’m having dinner with Tommy Hargrove this evening. Been talking to him about maybe coming on board. So Viveca and I are catching the noon flight to New York and—”
“Whoa. Stop. Tommy Hargrove is not coming on board.”
If they’d been through this once, they’d been through it a thousand times. Tommy Hargrove’s small company might once have been a possible acquisition. It was no longer. “Wolfe Enterprises isn’t in the market for a small outdated communications firm. And who the hell is Viveca?”
“Tommy and I are old friends.” Douglas ignored the last question, going on smoothly, “We go back a long way, since before you were in diapers, young man.”
Whenever Dominic became “young man” it meant Douglas was meddling again.
“And,” his father went on, “it is not a foregone conclusion that Tommy’s company isn’t just what we need.”
“Yes,” Dominic said, his voice pure steel. “It is.”
“We’ll see,” Douglas said enigmatically.
“We won’t—”
“It is possible,” Douglas went on as if Dominic hadn’t begun to speak, “that I could agree with you. If you and Viveca…”
Dominic slammed his pen down on the solid teak desk.
“Haven’t I spoken of Viveca?” Douglas was all mild innocence.
“No,” Dominic said through his teeth.
“Ah. Well, she’s why I called actually,” Douglas said with determined good cheer. “Lovely girl. Stunning, really. Pauline Moore’s daughter. You remember Pauline. Miss America pageant. Mensa. Phi Beta Kappa. Ran into Pauline and her daughter at the club on Monday. Pauline introduced us. Wondered if I didn’t have a son about her age. Of course she meant Rhys. Viveca’s much younger than you. Gorgeous girl. Long blond hair. Brilliant. Witty. Charming. Did I tell you she’s getting a Ph.D. in art history. She—” Douglas was gearing up for a long discussion of Viveca Moore’s best qualities.
“Cut to the chase,” Dominic said wearily.
“Marry her,” Douglas said flatly.
“What!”
“You heard me. Get married. To her. You need to get married. To have children. To carry on the line. Marry Viveca,” Douglas said, “and I’ll tell Tommy we’ve taken another direction.”
“I’ll tell Tommy we’ve taken another direction and I won’t have to marry her.”
There was a second’s silence. “Then I’ll tell the board I don’t support you.”
It was as if all of Manhattan had ground to a halt. For one long moment there wasn’t a sound, beyond the pounding of his own blood in Dominic’s ears.
And then he said with a calmness he didn’t begin to feel, “Is that a threat?”
“Of course it’s not a threat,” Douglas blustered. “It’s a damn promise, boy. You’re not getting any younger. You’re thirty-six years old! You should have got over that nonsense with Carol—”
“Carin.”
“Carol, Carin—whatever her name was—years ago! It’s like riding a horse, lad! If you fall off you don’t run away and lick your wounds, you damned well get back on again.”
“Marry the next woman down the pike, you mean?” Dominic was amazed his voice sounded so mild. He felt like the top of his head was about to come off.
“Of course not. Not just any woman! But there’s plenty of damn fine gals around. You’ve had a dozen years to find one and you haven’t done it!”
“Maybe I don’t want to.”
“Nonsense!” Douglas didn’t even consider that. “You need to. For the business if not for yourself. People trust a married man. He seems responsible, reliable. They’ve given you the benefit of the doubt for years. But you’re walking the edge now. Besides,” Douglas changed his tack, “you’ve got the makings of a fine family man. A fine father.”
“Like you?” Dominic’s voice was scathing, but his father didn’t even notice.
“Chip off the old block,” Douglas agreed without missing a beat. “That’s why I know you’ll like Viveca.”
“I don’t want—”
“You don’t know what you want anymore! I bring you a redhead, you want a blonde. I bring you a homemaker, you want a Ph.D. I bring you a—”
“I want you to stop bringing me women!”
“I will.”
“When?”
“After tonight. After you meet Viveca. You won’t want another woman after Viveca! She’s everything you want. A blonde. A homemaker with a Ph.D.! And—”
“And if I don’t marry her you’re going to go to the board with a vote of no confidence,” Dominic said through his teeth.
There was a split second’s hesitation. Then Douglas said, “You’re damn right.”
Dominic understood that split second. It was the point-of-no-return. It was the jumping off spot. The last chance to turn back.
Douglas hadn’t turned back.
“Viveca and I will be in the city this evening,” he said firmly. “Join us—and Tommy—for dinner at Le Sabre’s. At eight.”
“I’ve got—”
“At eight, Dominic.”
The phone crashed down in his ear.
Dominic stared at it. Then he set it slowly back in its cradle. He tilted back in his chair and shoved it round so that he sat staring at the rain coursing down his window on the world. He drummed his fingers lightly on the arms of his chair and considered his options.
He supposed idly that he should have spiked his father’s guns before now. He should have put his foot down years ago, should have said, “Back off,” both in terms of the company and in terms of his life.
He hadn’t because he’d spent his life admiring his father. He’d admired the old man’s determination, his tenacity, his fierce, indomitable will. He’d grown up wanting to be just like him.
He’d dug in and endured the “from the ground up” apprenticeship that his father had deemed necessary for taking over the business. He’d got his hands dirty. He’d worked days and nights, holidays and weekends. He’d done everything that was ever asked of him—and he’d done it well.
A dozen years ago he’d even let the old man pick his bride because he understood why his father wanted ties between his company and Carin’s family’s. It had been good business sense, and he’d liked Carin—what he knew of her. He’d been sure he would have made a good husband.
It was Carin who had run. Not him.
And when she had, leaving him hurt and humiliated beyond belief, still Dominic had believed in the theory behind his father’s actions.
Even now—God help him—he believed Douglas was right. In business married men did seem more trustworthy. More predictable. Less like loners or loose cannons. Some of the CEOs in other corporations he’d done business with recently had implied as much. They’d suggested that he bring his wife to various functions and had lifted a brow just a little when he’d said he didn’t have one.
He imagined his father was right, too, that this Viveca, whoever she was, would be the consummate corporate wife. Blonde. Brilliant. Bloodless. Charming. Capable. Clever. The perfect accessory for a CEO to wear on his arm.
Dominic shut his eyes for a minute and saw the future. Saw himself and the bloodless blonde his father had chosen for him.
He opened his eyes and stared out the window at the streaming rain.
It was warm inside, cold out there. The windows were fogging up, reminding him of other foggy windows, of a night out of time—of steam and sex and a woman who wasn’t bloodless at all.
And he felt his body harden now at the mere memory of her—and of that night.
For the past three months he’d been doing his damnedest to forget.
He’d been trying since February to pretend it never happened, Then, because he couldn’t manage that, he’d tried to convince himself that it would never happen again.
He didn’t believe it ever could.
Sex like they’d had that night was a once in a lifetime thing. It had to be. He’d certainly never had it before—or since.
It certainly hadn’t happened with Marjorie.
What if—
He tried not to pursue that thought. He couldn’t help himself.
What if it hadn’t been a fluke? What if they could do it again? And again?
His mouth went dry. His palms got damp. A very unprofessional, unbusinesslike reaction was taking place in his fine worsted charcoal wool trousers. He tugged at his grey-and-burgundy striped tie. It was the same tie…the one she had…
He sucked air.
Then he shoved himself out of his chair, stalked across the room and flung open the door to the outer office.
Shyla held out the phone to him. “Dominic, Mr. Shiguru on line two and Ms. Beecher has been on hold—”
“Not now.” He didn’t even break stride as he grabbed his raincoat and headed for the door.
“Dominic! Where are you going?”
“To get a wife.”
Sierra should have known it was going to be one of those days.
The moment she opened her eyes to see the rain pounding down the tulips in the window box on her fire escape, she should have closed them again and pulled the covers over her head.
Instead she’d pasted on one of her eternal-optimist smiles and told herself how good the rain was for the flowers. She refused to think how bad it was for hair.
Her mistake.
Of course it was bad for hair. It was also bad for tempers and taxis and terminally temperamental clients with the artistic vision of brain-dead walruses, not to mention for photographers whose babies had been teething all night and models with naturally curly locks.
No, it was not a good day.
Sierra did not expect every day to be stress-free. But the bitch-quotient in Finn MacCauley’s studio this morning was threatening to blow Manhattan right off the map.
“Hurry up,” Finn was saying for the fiftieth time that hour. “Move it! Move it! Move it! Do you know how many damn dresses we’ve still got left to shoot?”
Sierra didn’t know. She didn’t care.
The dresses weren’t her problem. Her problem was the hair.
Sleek hair. Piled hair. Severe shellacked hair.
“She’s frizzing again!” Ballou, the temperamental client pointed at Alison, the goddess from the Bronx. “Look at her!” He grabbed fistfuls of Alison’s long wildly curling hair straight out from her head and yelled at Sierra, “She can’t frizz! She has to be sleek! Make her sleek!”
It would be easier to make a porcupine bald. Sierra sighed. “Hang on. Let me put on some more gel. Just a little gel.”
“Sierra, for Pete’s sake!” Finn was tearing his own hair. “Let’s go. Stop messing with her and get the hell out of the way.”
“I just need—”
“Sleek,” Ballou insisted. “Smooth. Straight as a die.” He made up and down knifing motions with his hands.
Then why did you ask for a model with naturally curly hair? Sierra wanted to scream.
“I’m frizzing, too!” Delilah, the other model, complained.
“And not the blue. I don’t like her in the blue,” Ballou decided, scrutinizing the dress Alison had just put on. “Let’s try the yellow.”
“I can’t wear yellow!” the model objected. “I look dead in yellow.”
“You’re going to be dead in yellow,” Finn said, “if you don’t shut up. We have thirty of these damn things to get finished and we’ve only done six! Sierra! Let’s go!”
They went. The models stood patiently while Sierra slicked them down again. Ballou fussed and fumed and fretted and changed his mind and Finn griped and growled and cussed and shot.
And all the while Sierra tried to stay up-beat because after all, she told herself, in the greater course of the universe what difference did it make?
It was rain. A yellow dress or a blue one. Curly hair. Frizzy hair. Straight hair. What difference did it make?
It didn’t.
Not like Frankie.
That was really what made it a lousy day—thinking about Frankie.
Frankie Bartelli was going to die.
Sierra hated to even think that. Her mind rebelled at the thought. Her emotions rejected it furiously. But for all her rebellion and all her rejection, it was going to happen—unless he got a kidney transplant—and soon.
Sure, some people lived a long time with kidney problems. Some people did just fine on dialysis for years and years.
But they weren’t Frankie, who for the last few months had been fading right before Sierra’s eyes.
They weren’t eight years old, either, with their whole lives ahead of them.
They didn’t dream about climbing mountains and going fishing and playing baseball. They didn’t draw the niftiest spaceships or the scariest green monsters or detailed plans for the “best tree house in the world.”
They didn’t love Star Trek and root beer floats and double cheese pizza. They didn’t have big brown eyes and sooty dark lashes and a cowlick that even Sierra’s most determined hair gel couldn’t subdue for long. They didn’t have the world’s croakiest laugh and a grin that melted you where you stood.
Or maybe they did.
Sierra didn’t know. She didn’t know about anyone—except Frankie.
He and his mother Pam had been Sierra’s neighbors since she’d moved into half of the third floor of a four-story walk-up in the Village three years ago.
Frankie had been a lot healthier-looking then. A lot stronger. And Pam hadn’t had that hunted, haunted look in her dark brown eyes.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she’d said, her voice cracking when she’d first told Sierra what the doctors had told her.
To Sierra it was simple. “If he needs a transplant, we’ll get him a transplant,” she had vowed.
But Pam, desperate but realistic, had shaken her head in despair. “The hospital wants two hundred, fifty thousand dollars up front before they’ll even agree to put him on the list.”
It seemed like highway robbery to Sierra. Extortion. Every vile thing she could think of. Just because Pam was a self-employed illustrator whose insurance coverage had managed to fall through some crack, that was no reason for them to deny Frankie.
And she said so hotly and furiously more than once.
But they had denied him. Just this morning Pam had repeated it. “They won’t even see him unless I come up with a quarter of a million dollars.”
Sierra had almost twenty thousand in savings. Sometimes it seemed like a lot. But compared to what Frankie needed, it was a pittance. Even if she begged on the streets she didn’t think she could come up with as much as Pam needed. But she wasn’t ready to admit defeat.
“I’ll think of something,” she’d vowed and squeezed Pammie’s hands. “Don’t worry.”
But if she had told Pammie not to, Sierra worried herself. All morning long, she’d worried. But she hadn’t come up with any ideas at all.
“Okay. Let’s go. Long necks, ladies. Lots of chin. Gimme lots of chin.” Finn started moving again, shooting as he did so. “Don’t block each other, for God’s sake. Move, Alison.”
Alison moved—right into one of the reflectors. It fell over with a crash.
Ballou dropped the half dozen dresses in his arms. “Oh, no! Ohmigod!” He scrabbled for them. “They’ll get creased! Sierra, help!”
“Damn!” Finn’s face turned red. “Sierra, get the reflector.”
“I’m frizzing again,” Alison wailed. “Sierra! Do something!”
And just when Sierra thought the day couldn’t possibly get any worse, the studio door banged open and in strode Dominic Wolfe.
Strong, Finn’s lady-marine-drill-sergeant office manager came hurrying, hard on his heels. “Excuse me, sir! Sir! You can’t go in there!”
But Strong didn’t know Dominic Wolfe.
“The Hotshot With The Cool Head,” the Times business pages had headlined him just last week in an in-depth profile of the hard-driving, hard-working CEO of Wolfe Enterprises that they’d called “an old-fashioned business with a new-fashioned future.”
What they meant was that under his guidance, Wolfe Enterprises, a communications company had moved from radio and television right into the newest electronic and digital media without a glitch.
“Because Dominic Wolfe knows what he wants,” the article had said. “And what Dominic wants, Dominic gets.”
And that, Sierra could have told them, was the honest-to-God truth.
Strong might have been no more than an angry mosquito as she buzzed after him.
Sierra watched in morbid astonished fascination, aware that her heart was kicking over in her chest. She hadn’t seen Dominic Wolfe since her sister Mariah married his brother Rhys three months ago.
She had very carefully not seen him since that time—just as he had very carefully not seen her.
She had done her damnedest to forget him.
And she’d certainly never expected him to turn up in the middle of Finn MacCauley’s studio, heading straight toward her.
But before he reached her, Finn stepped between them. “Wolfe?” He looked perplexed, obviously wondering what his friend Rhys’s high-powered CEO brother was doing here.
They all wondered—the annoyed Strong, the slack-jawed Ballou, the starry-eyed models, the makeup artist—and Sierra.
Especially Sierra.
Since he’d pushed his way through the door, he hadn’t taken his eyes off her. And whatever amazing electricity had begun sizzling between them the first time they’d met when she’d stormed into his office last summer, demanding the whereabouts of his brother, was still sizzling all these months later—even though they denied it, assuaged it, tried to ignore it.
Now she stepped round Finn and looked up into Dominic’s ice-chip eyes. “What do you want?”
“I want you to marry me,” Dominic said.
He didn’t care that she looked poleaxed or that Finn looked murderous or that everyone else seemed to think he’d just escaped from bedlam.
He repeated the words. “Marry me,” in case she wanted to pretend she hadn’t heard them.
“Marry…you?”
It was the first time he’d seen Sierra Kelly slack-jawed. But at least she’d finally found her voice. And privately Dominic was satisfied that he’d actually succeeded in shocking her.
“That’s what I said.” He grinned now, daring her.
And, because she was Sierra, she tipped her sock-it-to-me chin right straight at him and dared him right back. “You’d have to pay me a million bucks!”
“Half a million.”
“What!” She went beyond slack-jawed, straight to flabbergasted. “Be serious.”
“I am serious.” He grabbed her arm and dragged her out into the reception area where half a dozen pairs of prying eyes couldn’t oversee and an equal number of ears couldn’t overhear. “You want a half a million bucks, fine.”
“But—” she started to protest, then looked at him narrowly, suspiciously. “Why?”
“Because.”
She laughed. “Because? Oh, there’s a reason. This from the man the Times calls �focused, decisive, a man who knows his own mind.’”
Dominic snorted. “One reporter’s impression.”
“Backed up by pretty solid evidence,” Sierra said. “So, I repeat, why do you want to marry me?”
He rubbed a hand over his hair, still damp from the rain and admitted, “I don’t.”
Sierra’s hazel eyes flashed. She folded her arms across her Day-Glo orange rib-topped chest, but not before he’d noted the faintest outline of her nipples. He felt a stirring in his groin.
“Well, then?” Sierra eyed him narrowly. She tapped the toe of her boot.
Dominic gritted his teeth. “I need to get married.”
“I thought only women needed to get married.”
Damn her smart mouth! He could feel heat climbing up his neck. “It’s time I got married. CEOs look more responsible when they’re married.”
“You’re marrying me to look responsible?”
“I’m marrying to shut my old man up! I want him to get the hell out of my life! I want him to stop trying to find me a wife. I want him to get his claws out of me and out of the company and stay the hell down in Florida playing shuffleboard where he belongs!”
“Like you would be content to play shuffleboard.”
Dominic blinked. “What?”
Sierra rolled her eyes. “You wouldn’t want to spend your life playing shuffleboard. And you’re just like him.”
“The hell I—well, so what if I am!” Dominic scowled and kneaded the taut muscles at the back of his neck. Then he found his rationale. “He’d do the same damn thing I’m doing then. He’d do things his own way.”
“He’d marry me?” Sierra said skeptically. “He’d marry a woman with magenta hair?”
“It’s not magenta,” Dominic muttered, giving her tousled locks a quick assessing glance. “It’s purple.”
Actually it was more of a magenta, now that she mentioned it. A very vivid magenta and not easily ignored, unless you looked the other way, which was what he tried to do. But his eyes kept coming back to it with a certain morbid fascination.
But morbid fascination, to be honest, was a good part of Sierra’s appeal. Maybe not the only part, but it would serve the old man right when Dominic introduced Sierra as his wife. He could see what he’d driven his eldest son to!
“Purple, magenta,” Sierra brushed his quibble off. She was still looking at him as if he’d lost his mind. “I’m thinking maybe green next week. I did it green for St. Patrick’s,” she told him with a grin.
She was baiting him and he knew it. “So, what do you say?” he persisted.
“I think you’re insane.”
“Probably.” He waited.
“You’re actually serious?”
“I’m serious.”
Still she hesitated. She nibbled on her lower lip. Dominic remembered nibbling on that lip. He remembered the taste of her—hadn’t been able to forget the taste of her! He smothered a groan.
“Sierra?” he said impatiently.
“Half a million?”
It was the last thing he’d figured she would say. Sierra Kelly—the nearest thing to a free spirit he knew—was not a money-grubber. At least he hadn’t imagined that she was. He frowned at her, but she didn’t back down. And he had gone too far to back down now himself.
Besides, a half a million to get the old man off his back permanently was a bargain.
He shrugged irritably. “Half a million.”
“Now? You’ll give it to me now?”
“You want to stop at a bank on the way to the courthouse?” He was halfway between sarcasm and disbelief.
But Sierra nodded gravely. “Yes. Please.”
He stared at her, wondering what went on inside her magenta-colored head. But he was annoyed enough, and reckless enough at the moment, not to care. “It’s a deal,” he said. “For half a million bucks you’ll marry me this afternoon.”
Sierra only hesitated a second. “Yes.”
Any minute now, Sierra figured, she’d wake up.
She’d yawn and stretch and open her eyes to stare at the cracked ceiling above her narrow futon bed. And she would laugh at the craziness of her dreams.
Marry Dominic Wolfe?
Sierra had had some weird dreams in her lifetime, but never one as weird as that. She blinked as she spritzed Alison’s hair. She rolled her shoulders and shook her head, trying to wake up. Surely it was time for the alarm to ring!
“What’s the matter with you?” Dominic demanded.
The matter was that she was awake.
He lifted his arm and shot back his cuff to glance at his watch. “We need to get moving.”
“Can’t,” Sierra said. “Not yet. I have work to do. A job. A commitment,” she explained when she realized that he wouldn’t think her job was worth bothering about. He understood commitments at least.
His jaw tightened, and she thought he would object. But finally he nodded. “Then do it. Let’s get this show on the road.”
And as Sierra stood there, mouth ajar, he pitched in and got things going.
No, that didn’t describe it. He didn’t pitch in. He commandeered. He took one look around and decided what needed to be done.
“You,” he said to Alison, “Stop sniveling and get dressed. You, too,” he said to Delilah. “And get your fingers out of your hair.”
To a stupefied Ballou, he said, “Stop standing around like a moron. Get those dresses out and ready. Shake them out. Have the next one ready as soon as Finn finishes.”
To Finn he said, “We need to be done by two. And we’ll need witnesses. Sierra and I are getting married. Have her—” he jerked his head toward Strong “—call Izzy.”
Finn stared, poleaxed, first at Dominic, then at Sierra. “You’re going to marry him?” He sounded as disbelieving as Sierra felt.
But there were some things Finn didn’t know about. Like the chemistry that had been bubbling between her and Dominic for months. Like the night after Mariah and Rhys’s wedding. Like the most sizzling sex she’d ever experienced. Like the fact that she hadn’t been able to forget the man she’d shared it with even though she knew she should, even though she’d tried. Like Frankie.
Especially Frankie.
“I’m going to marry him, yes.” She nodded her head.
If Finn considered arguing, a long look into her eyes apparently made him decide not to. “Right,” he said. “Two it is.”
“We can’t,” Ballou protested.
“No way,” cried the models.
At five of two they were done.
“Let’s go.” Dominic was tapping his foot as she packed up the tackle box in which she carried her gear. Then she grabbed her jacket, stuffed her arms in it, and picked up the tackle box, hugging it against her chest.
“Where are you going with that?” Dominic demanded.
“It goes where I go,” Sierra said stubbornly. She looked down at his briefcase. “Like yours.”
He sighed mightily. “Fine. Come on.”
“What about a license?” she asked as he spirited her down the elevator.
“We’ll get one.”
“What about a waiting period?” She was sure there must be one.
“Normally twenty-four hours,” Dominic said. “I can get us an exception.” He was dragging her out the door, through the rain, and into the hired car waiting at the curb.
“This is insane, you know that, don’t you?” she muttered, scrambling in ahead of him. The windows were steamed. She remembered other windows…
“Yes.” Dominic climbed in beside her. He was so close she could feel the heat from his body, remembered how very hot that body could be…
“You’ll regret it tomorrow,” she said with an edge of desperation to her voice.
“Very likely.” He banged the door shut behind him.
“I’ll regret it tomorrow.” She clutched the tackle box like it was a life preserver in a storm-swept sea.
“Without a doubt.” Then he turned to face her squarely, and she saw a wild, reckless look in Dominic Wolfe’s normally cool blue eyes. Hot ice. That was what it made her think of. It was a look Sierra remembered seeing only once before—on the wildest, craziest night of her life.
“So you have to decide—are you in or not?”
For three months she’d tried to forget that night. She hadn’t forgotten.
From the glitter in his eyes, she knew Dominic hadn’t, either.
Marrying Dominic was insane.
She would regret it. So would he.
They had nothing but sex between them. Primal attraction. Animal hunger. Lust. A four-letter word that started with L, but hardly the right one on which to base a marriage. But what was the use of being a gambler if you never threw the dice.
They went to the bank.
He got her a check. Made them print it out, spelled out her name. “Sierra Kelly Wolfe,” he said, “because you will be when you cash it.” And he thrust it into her hand.
He didn’t ask what she was going to do with it. He didn’t seem to even care. “Satisfied?” he asked as she stared at it, counting the zeroes.
Sierra, trying not to gape, nodded dumbly. “Yes.”
“Good.” He steered her out of the bank and bundled her back into the car. “City hall,” he told the driver.
Sierra hadn’t been to city hall since she’d applied for her cosmetology license. She was amazed to find they got their marriage license in the same room. She didn’t mention this amazing bit of news to Dominic. He wasn’t listening.
He was arranging their wedding.
He gave the clerk information. Then it was her turn. She gave the answers by rote, filled in the forms, signed where she was told. If she’d doubted his ability to arrange an exception to the waiting period, she didn’t doubt for long.
He called a friend, who called a friend. In a matter of minutes it was arranged that someone called Judge Willis would perform the ceremony in his chambers.
“Almost there,” Dominic said, and taking her arm once more, he hauled her toward the door. “I’ll call Finn. Tell him and Izzy where to meet us.”
“You don’t want to call Rhys?”
Dominic had been best man at Rhys and Mariah’s wedding. Sierra had been Mariah’s maid of honor.
In the act of opening the door, Dominic stopped and arched a brow. “Do you want to call Mariah?”
Never in a million years! Mariah was sane and sensible. She would throw herself in front of a speeding train before she would let Sierra do something as stupid as marry her brother-in-law on the spur of the moment.
“Didn’t think so.” Dominic pulled out a cell phone, checked his organizer, and punched in Finn’s number. “Finn? All set,” he said without preamble. “Meet us in Judge Willis’s chambers at five.”
He rattled off the directions, then grabbed Sierra’s arm again. “It’s not in this building. Let’s go.”
It was two streets over, five flights up, down two long corridors. Dominic’s legs were a lot longer than hers, and Sierra was panting by the time they arrived. Finn and Izzy and all four of their kids arrived moments later.
“What the—?” Dominic looked aghast at the sight of nine-year-old twins, Pansy and Tansy, three-year-old Rip and baby Crash. He turned his gaze on Finn’s wife, Izzy, his look both accusing and appalled.
Izzy didn’t give him a chance to object. She poked her umbrella at him. “You want me to get a baby-sitter, you have to give me more than ten minutes’ notice.”
Then she turned her eyes toward Sierra. “Are you crazy?” she demanded. To be marrying Dominic, she meant.
It was a question anyone knowing them would ask, and Sierra knew it. She shrugged. “Probably.”
It wasn’t the answer Izzy was looking for. Scowling, she turned back to Dominic. “Are you coercing her?”
“I am not.” His expression went from appalled to offended.
“Then why—”
Finn redirected the umbrella tip away from Dominic’s midsection. “I don’t think that’s our business, Iz,” he said to his wife quietly.
“But—”
“You don’t have to worry about her,” Dominic said firmly. “I’m not going to beat her. I’m not going to mistreat her. I’m not going to tie her up and dye her hair brown. I’m just going to marry her.”
Izzy didn’t look happy—or convinced.
But before she could argue, the door to the judge’s chambers opened just then and a pointy-chinned woman looked down her nose and said, “His Honor will see you now.”
Dominic cast one more despairing glance at the assembled group and ushered them all in. He introduced himself, Finn and his wife, then drew Sierra forward.
His Honor took one look at her and his eyes bulged. His jaw flapped. His gaze went straight to Dominic. “I misunderstood. I thought when Harvey called, he said you wanted to get married…”
“I do.”
Sierra felt Dominic’s arm come around her as he hauled her close, just in case there was any question in the judge’s mind about who the intended bride was.
The judge’s eyebrows hiked halfway up his bald head. But at the sight of Dominic’s fingers tightening on her shoulder and his steely glare, His Honor nodded his head. “Very well. Come in.”
Dominic and Sierra went in. Trailing behind them were a pair of saucer-eyed red-headed twins, then Finn with Rip on his shoulders, and Izzy who carried a wriggling Crash.
The pointy-chinned woman let out an audible sigh, shut the door and left them to it.
The ceremony itself was an anticlimax.
The judge mumbled something about the power vested in him by the State of New York. Then he read lines out of a book.
Dominic repeated them.
Then the judge looked at Sierra and read more lines. She repeated them every time he paused and looked at her.
They were lines she’d heard a hundred times. Richer. Poorer. Sickness. Health. Nothing about obeying, thank God. She didn’t think she could ever obey anyone. Not even Dominic.
Especially not Dominic!
She slanted a glance at the man standing so stiffly beside her in his two-thousand-dollar tailored suit and his hand-made Italian shoes. She caught just a glimpse of the edge of his subdued gray-and-burgundy striped tie. It was the same tie…
“…till death do you part?”
Sierra jerked her mind away from his tie—the tie that had started it all. She gathered herself together, recollected the solemnity of the occasion and dutifully stared straight ahead. Behind her one of the twins sighed. Rip gave a little hop. Crash gurgled. Finn and Izzy sucked in their breaths.
The judge looked at her over the top of his glasses. She smiled back at him. He cocked his head and looked at her expectantly.
Beside her, Dominic cleared his throat. She glanced over at him. He gave her a speaking look, the sort she was sure he gave underlings right before he put them through the paper shredder.
Sierra gave him one right back.
A muscle in his jaw twitched. His fingers strangled hers. He nudged her clunky boot with his polished black dress shoe. “Well, damn it, do you?” he muttered through his teeth.
Sierra blinked. “Do I what?”
“Take him for your lawful wedded husband, young lady?” the judge said impatiently.
Sierra suddenly realized they’d been waiting for her. “Oh!” she said, then gave them all a blinding smile. “Sure. Why not?”
CHAPTER TWO
SURE. WHY NOT?
As if it were that easy.
It wasn’t—as Dominic well knew. He’d tried it once twelve years ago, and had regretted it ever since.
He’d had nightmares for years about that disastrous day—that sunny June morning in the Bahamas when he’d been left at the altar in front of two hundred avidly curious onlookers.
He knew he could never do it again. Knew he couldn’t face a huge production, a mob of people, a bride he had to count on, a wedding he had to wait for.
Well, he hadn’t had to wait for this one.
He’d accomplished the whole thing, start to finish, engagement to ceremony, in a matter of hours.
And now he was married.
To a purple-haired woman with raccoon eye-shadow eyes.
What had he done?
The words reverberated in his head almost as insistently as Sierra’s bright, “Sure. Why not?” But he glanced at his watch and knew he didn’t really have time to think about it now.
Finn kissed the bride. “How about we take you out for a champagne toast?”
“Sure,” Izzy seconded. “It’s the least we can do on such short notice.”
“Great!” Sierra said brightly.
But Dominic shook his head. “Thanks, but we can’t. Another time. We’ve got to meet my father for dinner.”
And with a quick handshake and a few more words of thanks, he spirited Sierra away.
“What do you mean, we’re meeting your father?” she protested as he steered her toward the elevator. “Your father’s in town and you didn’t even invite him?”
“You think he’d have stood there with his mouth shut, then wished us well?”
Sierra opened her mouth, then shut it again.
Dominic nodded grimly. He’d made his point. She’d met his father when her sister had married his brother. She’d had a glimpse of Douglas then. Not much, but he was fairly sure his trying to commandeer the wedding party and drive them to the reception in his Lincoln Town Car instead of the cars they’d arranged had made an impression.
They rode down in the elevator in silence. Sierra staring at the doors, Dominic at the top of her purple head.
What had he done?
He’d got married, that was all. Exactly what the old man had wanted.
But to Sierra Kelly, of all people!
Sierra Kelly with her purple hair and her Day-Glo spandex, with her clunky boots and ribbed black leggings. Yes, but, as he well knew, that wasn’t all she had. She also had mile-long legs and kissable lips and a wicked teasing tongue. She made his blood sizzle and the windows steam.
He’d met a million more suitable women, but he’d never met one who’d set him on fire—except Sierra. He’d never met one he’d wanted to go to bed with more.
Or again.
He could have taken or left any one of the others. But not her.
They’d made wild passionate desperate love one night three months ago. He’d been reliving it every night since.
Half an hour ago he’d married her—to be a sober reliable married man, to put an end to his father’s meddling—but mostly so tonight they could set the world on fire again.
But they had to get through dinner with his father first.
He tucked her into the same hired car and got in after her. Outside, rain slashed against the window. Horns honked as the driver cut into the traffic and began the journey uptown. The faint warmth of the spring afternoon had all but dissipated now. And against the far door Sierra seemed to be shivering inside her denim jacket.
“Are you cold?” Dominic asked.
She shook her head fiercely. “I’m fine.” She wrapped her arms around her damned tackle box and sat hugging it like it was some great plastic shield. For an instant she glanced his way long enough to shoot him a quick flippant smile, then stared straight ahead again.
He still thought she looked like she was shaking.
So if she wasn’t cold, was she nervous? Sierra? Not likely!
He doubted she’d ever been nervous in her life. He studied her out of the corner of his eye—her purple hair, her stubborn chin, her pert nose, her raccoon eyes. He fished in his pocket and thrust a clean handkerchief at her.
“Here. Wipe your face. You’ve got eye gunk all down your cheeks.”
Sierra looked startled. Then, “Thank you so much,” she said with false politeness, making him wonder if she’d rather appear in public looking like a raccoon.
But she snatched the handkerchief out of his hand and pressed the button to roll down the window.
“Hey, what are you doing?”
She thrust his handkerchief outside into the rain. “Unless you’d rather I spit in it?”
Dominic flushed. “Of course not.”
“I didn’t think so.” When she decided the handkerchief was sufficiently damp, she put the window back up and scrubbed at her cheeks. It took two more dousings of the handkerchief, followed by so much scrubbing he thought she’d rub the skin off her cheeks.
Finally she quit and turned to look at him. “Satisfied?”
Now she just looked like a prizefighter with two black eyes. Dominic didn’t say so, though. Apparently his silence said it for him.
Sierra shrugged. “Well, let’s just hope I get a chance to stop in the ladies’ room before your father arrives.” She stuffed his handkerchief in the pocket of her jacket, then folded her arms around the tackle box again.
She looked young and innocent—even in her purple-haired insouciance—and he wondered if he ought to coach her so she wouldn’t feel out of place.
But, of course, she would be out of place—it was part of the reason he’d married her, after all. He felt a twinge of guilt and promptly smothered it.
No one had made her say yes!
Besides, there was no point in telling her how to behave or how to act. If he tried she’d bite his head off, he was sure. And anyway, her very presence, looking as she did, was her act.
Still, he couldn’t quite leave it there.
“Do you need anything?” he asked her. It seemed like the least he could do. “A briefing?”
She looked at him, incredulous. “To meet your father?”
“Never mind,” he said, feeling like a fool. “Well, fine. If there’s nothing you need—” he picked up his briefcase, set it on his lap and opened it “—I’ve got work to do.”
She was married.
To Dominic Wolfe.
It would have been funny if it hadn’t been so real. If he hadn’t been sitting less than a foot away from her in his suit that probably cost more than two months’ rent on her apartment. If he hadn’t had his nose stuck in papers that Sierra was sure had to do with a merger that would allow him control of more wealth than the average small country.
Had she lost her mind?
Apparently. Never very much given to second guessing herself, even Sierra couldn’t refrain from second guessing this.
What on earth had possessed her? Why had she said yes to Dominic’s outlandish proposal?
She knew he didn’t love her.
Most of the time he barely acted as if he even liked her!
Except in bed.
In bed they were dynamite. In bed things happened that Sierra wouldn’t have believed could ever happen—especially between Dominic and herself.
Out of bed, though, she feared they had nothing in common at all.
He was using her against his father. He’d admitted as much.
Well, she was using him to help Frankie, she reminded herself. And she hadn’t even admitted that.
Not that he would care. He wouldn’t even ask. He’d just cut the check.
Her husband. Dominic Wolfe!
“Someday,” her mother used to warn her, “you’re going to bite off more than you can chew, missy.”
“Someday, kiddo,” her far more blunt farmer father used to say, “you’re going to leap without thinking and land headfirst in the manure pile.” Only he hadn’t said manure pile. He’d been a little more graphic.
That was about where Sierra felt she’d landed right now.
She shivered inside her jacket and considered opening the door and throwing herself out into traffic. With luck she’d be squashed by a passing taxi.
With her luck, she’d be knocked over by a bicycle messenger and Dominic would simply peel her off the pavement, mop her off and trundle her away to meet with his father.
God.
It was as close to a prayer as Sierra had been in a while. She was not big on praying. It wasn’t that she didn’t believe in God. Or prayer. She did. But for the weak and the downtrodden and the desperate.
Not for herself. And definitely not when it came to asking for things. Asking was for people who couldn’t help themselves.
Sierra had always been sure she could.
Until now.
What on earth was she going to do now?
She shot a quick glance at the man sitting next to her. He had his briefcase open on his lap and was running his pen down a column of figures. His pen probably cost more than the rent on her apartment!
But it wasn’t just about money. It was about style. About values. About their whole very different approaches to life.
Like this restaurant they were heading toward.
She didn’t dare hope that Dominic was taking her to an uptown diner or a groovy little club for his little tête-à -tête with daddy.
No, it was bound to be one of those stuffy obnoxious places, all wood-paneling and hunt club prints of dogs with dead birds in their mouths. A muffled elegant place where the maître d’ would look down his ski-jump of a nose and seat her behind a potted palm—if he even deigned to seat her at all.
What if they didn’t even let her in?
A momentary shaft of humiliation and panic stabbed her in the gut before she realized that of course they would let her in.
She was going to be on the arm of Dominic Wolfe. He’d cow them and loom over them and pass them fifty bucks on the side and they might look askance, but they’d let her in.
And then they’d spill soup in her lap.
Or expect that she’d do it herself.
She started to bite her thumbnail, then jammed her hand into the pocket of her jacket. She was not going to bite her nails in front of Dominic. It was why she painted them wild and outrageous colors in the first place—so she’d remember not to bite them.
She wasn’t going to betray by the slightest flicker that her heart was in her throat and that her stomach was in knots.
No, sir. She wasn’t.
She’d learned long ago that fear got you nowhere. Her older sister Mariah had taught her that back when Sierra was only seven years old.
In those days her biggest terror had been water. When she was four, Terry Graff had knocked her into the swimming pool. She’d swallowed half of it before her father had fished her out. For the next three years she hadn’t stuck a toe in.
While all the other kids had laughed and splashed and swam and played, she’d stood quaking on the side, watching. Then some of the bigger kids had realized she was afraid—and instead of leaving her alone, they’d dragged her in.
She’d gone kicking and screaming and flailing and floundering. She’d made a complete fool of herself before Mariah had run at them with a stick and scared them off. When she’d dragged Sierra, shaking and crying back out, she’d said the seven most important words anyone had ever told her.
“You can’t let them see you’re afraid.”
Sierra had done her damnedest never to let anyone see her fears ever since.
She’d spent her life making sure she got over them. And, if she had to say so herself, she’d done a bang-up job. She’d outgrown her early panics. She’d discovered the world was a pretty dandy place.
But every once in a while she felt like that little girl on the poolside. But she wasn’t going to show it. She was going to march right up to the restaurant and, even if she resembled a Day-Glo raccoon, she was going to look them straight in the eye and never bat a lash.
Dominic might well be sorry he’d asked her to be his bride.
But he’d never feel sorry for her.
She’d see to that!
The maître d’ was agog.
His normally impassive features became positively animated at the sight of Dominic and his guest. For a split second his eyes gawped. But then he schooled his features, stiffened his spine and assumed an expression of something that might best be described as “determined indifference.”
As well it might be, Dominic thought. If he was willing to pay Le Sabre’s exorbitant prices, he ought to able to bring his damn dog to dinner if he so chose!
Gripping Sierra firmly by the arm, he smiled at the maître d’. “Good evening, Flaubert. Has my father arrived?”
Flaubert fixed a thin smile on his face. “He has, Mr. Wolfe. He and the lady and the other gentleman arrived a few moments ago. They’ve already been seated. I understood you were to be four for dinner?” One brow lifted, but he determinedly did not look at Sierra.
Dominic’s back stiffened. “There’s been a change in plans.”
For a split second the maître d’ seemed about to argue. Then his mouth pressed into a tight line and beckoned a waiter. The man scurried to his side. At Flaubert’s whispered words, he shot an astonished gaze in their direction, then nodded and hurried toward the dining room.
“It will take just a moment.” Flaubert paused. Once more his gaze skated right over Sierra to focus on Dominic. “Would the…young lady…like to…check her coat and er…?” He eyed the tackle box with distaste.
“I’ll keep it, thanks,” Sierra said before Dominic could open his mouth.
But it was as if she hadn’t spoken. Flaubert continued to look at Dominic for an answer.
Dominic’s teeth came together and he put an arm around her shoulders. “We will check the box. I think it might get in the way in the dining room, don’t you?” He looked to Sierra for a nod which, after a moment’s stubbornness, he got. Then he turned back to the maître d’. “My wife will keep her coat, thank you.”
Flaubert’s jaw sagged as Dominic had been sure it would.
Stepping around him, Dominic handed over the box to the woman behind at the cloak room. Then, pocketing the token she gave him, he steered Sierra into the dining room.
His father, Tommy Hargrove and a sleek blond woman were no longer sitting at the table his father regularly claimed. Instead they were sitting behind a potted palm, looking discomfitted and annoyed as a waiter finished laying an extra place setting and stepped away.
A sound something akin to a smothered snigger emanated from Sierra.
Dominic looked down at her. “Something funny?”
She flashed a grin. “The palm tree. I knew they’d have a palm tree.”
And that they’d put you behind it, he finished for her. A corner of his own mouth twisted and his fingers tightened on her arm. “Screw ’em,” he muttered and was instantly rewarded when Sierra grinned again.
Just then Douglas spotted them, and Dominic had the pleasure of seeing the old man’s jaw rival Flaubert’s. Almost instantly, though, it snapped shut again and Douglas took a deep breath as he rose to his feet. His gaze fixed on Dominic and his hard blue eyes glittered. It was belied by his smooth tone.
“How nice that you’ve brought a guest to join us. I don’t believe we’ve met?” He, at least, was facing Sierra head-on. In fact he stared straight into the magenta and the Day-Glo peeking out from behind the denim and didn’t even blink. Dominic was impressed.
“We have, actually,” Sierra said cheerfully, offering her hand. “I’m Sierra Kelly. Mariah’s sister. My hair was blonde for the wedding,” she added, presumably by way of explaining why he might not have recognized her.
“Oh!” Douglas’s relief was palpable as he took her hand and shook it heartily. “Yes! Oh my, yes. Of course. I do recognize you now. The, um, purple threw me for a moment. My son Rhys’s wife’s little sister!” he explained to Tommy and the blonde who had to be Viveca.
Dominic smiled and corrected this misconception. “Mariah’s little sister,” he agreed. “And my wife.”
He had to give his father credit.
By barely more than a flicker of a muscle in his jaw and a sudden paleness around his mouth, did Douglas betray that Dominic’s arrival with a wife in tow was even unexpected, much less a shock.
Instead he kissed Sierra’s cheek and introduced them both to Viveca Moore.
She was exactly as his father described her—blonde, brilliant, and sophisticated. The perfect accessory.
A far cry from the woman whom an hour ago he’d made his wife.
Dominic never knew if Viveca had any idea she was supposed to be his date this evening. Douglas took hold of her hand and said smoothly that he was sorry they hadn’t been able to make the wedding, and then called for a bottle of champagne.
“To toast you both,” he said, the glitter in his hard blue eyes the only sign that he was less than pleased.
Champagne, Dominic remembered with a qualm, had been his and Sierra’s downfall at Rhys and Mariah’s wedding.
It was the champagne that had made them reckless, that had fanned the flames of desire that had been raging between them since the day they’d met. It was the champagne that had made them challenge each other, that had tipped them over the edge and sent them to that hotel room to slake their desperate desire.
“I don’t know—” he began.
But Sierra said brightly, “What a lovely idea.” Then she explained, “We’ve been in such a hurry all day, we didn’t have time to toast our marriage earlier with our friends.” She turned her gaze on Dominic and he saw the challenge in her eyes.
“Then we must do it now,” Douglas said firmly. He gave Dominic a hard smile and, when the waiter arrived, poured and passed out glasses of champagne. Then he raised his own, first to Sierra, then to Dominic.
“To my son,” he said, “and his new wife. May you share a long, long, long life together.”
If he’d said one more “long” Dominic would have throttled him. As it was, he noted there was no wish for happiness. He wondered if Sierra noticed.
Her eyes were laughing as she touched her glass to his. “And a happy one,” she said.
Their glasses clinked.
“Hear, hear!” cried Tommy Hargrove.
“We wish you great happiness,” Viveca said with etiquette book politeness. “Don’t we, Douglas?”
“Yes, of course,” Douglas said hastily. “Indeed we do.” He poured more champagne, then looked at his son. “Dominic, don’t you have a toast for your bride?”
Dominic raised his glass to the challenge, first to his father, then to his wife. “To Sierra,” he said gravely, “who has made me the happiest of men.”
He meant it as a slap at his father. As a bit of veiled sarcasm. But as he drank, Dominic realized that, in some small way, it was the truth.
For one steamy night three months ago, Sierra had made him happier than he’d ever been in his life.
She’d made him silly and hungry and passionate. She’d made him forget mergers and balance sheets and the rat race he called his life. She’d made him laugh and tease and wrestle and grow sweaty and desperate and, finally, fulfilled.
He hadn’t forgotten.
It was, after all, why he’d asked her to marry him. But he wasn’t fool enough to expect it to last.
Outside of bed, they had nothing in common. Inside it, for one night at least, they’d had bliss.
“To Sierra,” he said firmly. “My wife.”
They drank staring into each other’s eyes. Hers were no longer laughing, he noticed. They were shiny, as if they held tears. But that was ridiculous. Sierra never cried! She wasn’t the type. And she would certainly not get soppy about a marriage like theirs.
“I have a toast,” Tommy said suddenly.
Everyone turned to look at the snowy-haired old man as he raised his glass and looked at Dominic over the top of it. “This was a spur of the moment affair, I trust?”
Dominic stiffened, but Sierra laced her fingers through his and nodded. “Yes. Dominic swept me off my feet.”
“Ah.” Tommy beamed at her.
Douglas fixed Dominic with a glare. But Tommy didn’t notice. He was nodding enthusiastically. “Thought so.” He raised his glass higher. “Just like Bernice and I. Sometimes,” he said with a sweet sad smile, “the best things happen on the spur of the moment. Bernice—God rest her soul—and I knew each other only a week when we eloped.” His voice wavered a little and he paused to collect himself. Then, eyes brimming, he murmured, “Fifty-three years. We were married fifty-three years. The best fifty-three years any man could have.” His hand shook briefly, but then he drew a breath and it steadied.
Dominic had known Tommy Hargrove his whole life. He’d known Bernice who’d died last year. He supposed he’d never thought about them as young and impetuous. Tommy was a tough-as-nails old man. Bernice had been his dutiful wife—always there with a smile or a gentle laugh. Now Dominic remembered those smiles, remembered how often they’d been directed at Tommy. He looked at the old man with new and wondering eyes.
“To the surprises in life,” Tommy said with a smile. He touched each of their glasses.
“Thank you,” Sierra said to him. Then she turned to Dominic and clinked her glass against his. There was a stubborn tilt to her chin and a fierce gleam in those bright blue eyes.
“To us,” she said. “And the next fifty-three years.”
In high school Sierra had played Alice in Alice in Wonderland. She’d fallen down the rabbit hole, chatted with Humpty Dumpty, been spoken down to by a caterpillar, had tea with the Mad Hatter and the March Hare, and had been chased through the forest by a pack of cards while the red queen had screamed, “Off with her head!”
That all seemed downright normal compared to the dinner she’d just survived.
She sank into the back seat of the taxi, clutching her tackle box, and shut her eyes. She was dimly aware that Dominic had climbed in beside her and was speaking to the driver. As the car begin to move, she heard Dominic sigh as he settled back next to her. She kept her eyes shut and waited for him to speak. But he didn’t say a word.
Maybe he was as tired as she was.
Acting did that to her. Drained her. Left her limp and exhausted. Playing Alice back in high school had wrung her out.
This had been harder. Lots harder. That she’d rehearsed for. This had been complete improvisation. And while she thought she’d acquitted herself well enough, she was still exhausted. She just wanted to go home and go to bed.
She didn’t open her eyes until the taxi stopped.
“We’re here,” Dominic said.
Sierra hauled herself up and blinked as she looked around. Then she jerked upright and her eyes went wide. “Where? This isn’t my place!”
“Of course not. It’s mine.’ Dominic was handing the driver some money and opening the door. “Come on.”
But Sierra couldn’t. She stayed right where she was. “I’m not going to your place!”
Out of the car, he bent down to stare at her. “You’re not—Why not?” He looked white-faced and furious.
“Because I’m not! I never agreed to—”
“You agreed to marry me. You did marry me.” His voice was icy.
“I know, but—”
“Marriage implies cohabitation,” he reminded her. He was gritting his teeth.
“Not…not necessarily.” It was one thing to have mad passionate sex with Dominic. It was entirely another to get sucked up into his apartment, his world, his life! She folded her arms across her chest. “I’m not getting out,” she told the taxi driver. “I need to go downtown.”
“The hell you do!” Dominic protested.
But Sierra ignored him and gave the driver her address.
“You can’t—!”
The driver flipped on the meter, then glanced at Dominic. “Mister, you gotta shut the door.”
“No. I don’t. She’s not—!”
“Yes, I am. Now. Drive,” Sierra commanded the driver. “Go on!”
“No!” Dominic resolutely held the door open, not moving an inch.
The driver looked from one to the other of them, annoyed. “I got a business here.”
“So take me—”
“No!”
“D’youse two suppose youse could maybe settle this somewhere else?” the taxi driver said plaintively.
“Yes,” Dominic said.
“No,” Sierra said.
Their gazes locked. They glared.
“Please!” the taxi driver implored them.
Sierra clutched her box and didn’t budge.
Finally Dominic flung himself back into the cab and slammed the door “Fine. Take us to her place.” He challenged Sierra to contradict him. “We’ll stay there.”
“You can’t stay here!” Sierra said for the umpteenth time as Dominic followed her up the narrow stairway to her flat.
“You refused to stay at my place,” he reminded her. It was getting hard to breathe, and not from the three-floor climb. Rather it was a result of being on eye level with Sierra’s curvy bottom the whole way up. Her denim mini-skirt barely seemed to cover it. And it didn’t matter that the rest of her was discreetly covered in black ribbed leggings, Dominic had a good imagination.
And a good memory.
At last Sierra stopped in front of a tall metal door. She fitted a key into a lock, undid it, moved on to another one, undid that, then unlocked a third, and pushed open the door. “It doesn’t mean you had to come here.”
“Apparently it does, if I want to spend my wedding night with my bride.” He followed on her heels, suspecting that she would shut the door on him if he gave her half a chance.
Apparently the thought had occurred to her, because the color was high in her cheeks and she aimed a disgusted look in his direction when he shut the door himself and leaned against it, arms folded across his chest, smiling at her.
She set down her tackle box and stood glaring at him from the other end of the tiny room. “Well, you can’t. Not here. It’s not big enough.” She waved an arm and practically hit one of the walls. “There’s no room.”
Dominic shrugged indifferently. “It was your choice.”
“It was not my choice! I didn’t invite you here.”
“But you refused to come home with me,” he said reasonably.
“I don’t need to come home with you! I went to dinner with you! I shocked your father for you. I stopped Viveca from marrying you. What more do you want?”
“Fifty-three years.”
“What!”
Dominic raked a hand through his hair. He shoved away from the wall, wanting to pace, to move, but there was no room. “Nothing!” he muttered. “Never mind. You’re the one who said it.”
“Tommy’s the one who said it.”
“And who raised her glass in toast?”
“Would you rather I’d said, �Oh, how about six months?’ Your father would really have taken us seriously then.”
“How the hell is he going to take it seriously if you won’t come home with me?”
She wrapped her arms across her breasts. “He doesn’t have to know that.”
“Of course he’ll know! He’s probably got someone tailing after the cab right now, just watching. I’m surprised he didn’t demand to see the license.”
Actually Douglas would never do any such thing—not in public anyway. He wouldn’t want to admit that Dominic had bested him. “He expects us to be together. I’m staying.” He began to loosen his tie.
“Stop that!”
“What?”
“Undressing!”
“You’ve seen me with my tie undone,” Dominic reminded her mockingly as he yanked it off, tossed it on the chair, then undid the top button of his starched white shirt. “You did very creative things with my tie, as I recall.” Things that, remembered, could still send shivers straight to his groin.
Sierra turned bright red. “That was then!”
“And now we’re married” He arched a brow. “Do you only have sex with single men?”
“I’ve never had sex with a married one!”
“It’s allowed,” he told her. “When you’re married to him.”
He finished unbuttoning his shirt and stripped it off, then tugged his T-shirt over his head. The chill in the room was a shock to his heated flesh. He wanted to go to her and wrap her in his arms.
But all the while she watched him like a fawn caught in headlights. Swell, she was going to turn into Bambi. Sierra, of all people. Who’d have guessed?
Dominic’s hand went to his belt. She sucked in a breath. He glared at her, annoyed. “Are you going to pretend this isn’t why you said yes?” he asked.
She blinked rapidly, then swallowed, and he thought for a moment she would deny wanting him at all. But finally she gave a jerky nod. “Only partly.”
“Right.” His jaw tightened. “There was the check, too. The little matter of half a million bucks.”
She scowled. “The money had nothing—well, almost nothing—to do with it,” she told him defiantly.
He would have liked to ask what the hell she intended to do with half a million dollars, but right now it wasn’t important. He didn’t care. He wanted another more important answer. “Fine. Then why fight it? It’s what we want. What we both want. Unless you only believe in one-night stands?”
“Of course not!”
“Then maybe you’re a chicken.”
Her eyes flashed. “I’m never a chicken!”
“No?” Dominic challenged softly. “Then prove it.”
For a long moment she didn’t move. Then something changed. A gleam came into her eyes, a gleam he remembered once before. The corners of her mouth turned up in a smile that set his heart to pounding. And quite deliberately Sierra reached out and snagged his tie from where he’d tossed it on the chair.
She ran it through her fingers as she stepped forward to meet him. And his heart slammed against his chest as she whispered, “How nice of you to remember I had a use for this.”
They should have gone to his place.
They wouldn’t have to smash together on her hard narrow futon. At Dominic’s they could no doubt wallow in sybaritic luxury in Dominic’s bed.
But she hadn’t been able to do it. Not then.
So she consoled herself that even if they had they wouldn’t have noticed.
Once it was clear that neither of them had got the other out of their system during that one night in a Kansas motel—it didn’t matter where they were.
The awareness, the attraction, the chemistry—everything!—between them simply sizzled!
Something about Dominic brought out parts of Sierra she’d never even guessed were there. Something about his power made her want to challenge him. Something about his starchy conservative demeanor she wanted to muss. And his control—his iron-clad control!—she just couldn’t rest until she made it snap.
And she’d made it snap!
She’d moved in on him like a tigress stalking her prey. Circling, smiling, watching him from beneath lowered lids, Sierra had moved closer, turned, stepped and backed him into the futon. Then she’d looped the tie around his nape and slid it back and forth. Silk and skin. Hot damp skin.
She saw him take a quick sharp breath.
She smiled. She gave the tie a tug and drew him toward her, so close she could almost feel his heart pounding against his chest, so close the heat of her breath ruffled the hair that curled there. She touched one flat male nipple with her tongue.
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