The Inconvenient Bride Read online

  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 d
esperation 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.