The Millionaires' Club: Ryan, Alex and Darin: Breathless for the Bachelor

She smiled at herself and her silliness all the while covertly assessing her impromptu dinner partner. She’d been leaving her volunteer shift at the hospital when she’d run into him in the parking lot, introduced herself and asked him if he’d like to join her for dinner.

She’d been pretty proud of herself. She’d been cool, confident, not overly friendly…and he’d very graciously accepted her offer. Eagerly accepted her offer, even.

And now here they were. She shot a covert glance at him over the top of her menu. Nathan Beldon wasn’t what you’d call blatantly handsome—not like Travis or Ryan with their in-your-face, drop-dead-gorgeous good looks. His was more of a classic, polished appeal. His brown eyes weren’t flirty and warm like theirs; his were far more serious. Not that that was a bad thing, just different from what she was used to.

He was also very tall. Ryan was tall—an even six feet—but Nathan was perhaps a couple of inches taller. She liked that, she decided. At five-nine, she liked to sometimes feel a little delicate, liked to look up into a pair of interested eyes. And Nathan’s dark eyes were definitely showing some interest.

He wasn’t built like Ry, either. While Ry was all muscle and sinew and athletic grace, Nathan Beldon was on the slim side and moved with a refined elegance that made her wonder what it would be like to dance with him. Could she be Ginger to his Fred?

Could it be she’d been watching too many old, classic movies? Again she grinned at herself and all these sappy romantic notions.

“Next time,” Nathan said, his cultured voice so softly hopeful it dragged her away from her musings, “we’ll go to Claire’s…or am I assuming too much?”

She smiled, pleased. “No…you’re not assuming too much at all. I’d…like that very much.”

She also very much liked the way his perfectly styled hair—so dark brown it was almost black—completed the tall dark and handsome look, even if his hair was a little finer, a little thinner than Ry’s, which was a thick, lush sable and always looked as if he’d just run his hands through it in frustration.

“As a matter of fact,” she added, catching and hating herself for comparing Nathan to Ryan for about the hundredth time since she’d run into Nathan at the hospital earlier, “Claire’s is one of my favorite spots.”

Royal’s quaint and classy French restaurant was noted for its romantic ambiance and excellent wines. An invitation to Claire’s came with a wealth of implied possibilities.

“Then we definitely have something else to look forward to,” Nathan said with another one of those smiles that promised more than a casual cup of coffee after a romantic evening.

“Yes,” she said, determined to focus on him and the attention he was giving her and banish Ryan from her mind, “we definitely do.”

“Hey, folks.”

Carrie smiled up at Sheila who appeared with a carafe of coffee and her order pad. “Hey, Sheila.”

“What would you like?” Nathan asked without acknowledging the waitress.

Sheila was one of Carrie’s favorite people in the whole world. The bubble-gum-blowing, forty-something waitress was blousy and blatantly sexual in her too-tight uniform and bold makeup. She was also forthright and funny and her cat-and-mouse come-ons to Manny, who flirted and teased with everyone but who, Carrie suspected, secretly had it bad for Sheila, cracked her up.

“Have you met Sheila?” Carrie interjected, deciding Nathan hadn’t actually meant to be impolite, but instead was simply feeling the weight of “new person in town” syndrome and still felt a little uncomfortable with the locals. “She’s an institution at the Royal Diner.”

“Sweetie, I’m an institution in Texas,” Sheila informed her with her best Mae West moue. “How you doin’, Doc?” she added as Nathan slowly lifted his gaze from the menu.

“A…pleasure, I’m sure,” he managed, looking uncomfortable even as he forced a smile that Carrie strongly suspected was for her benefit.

Determined to be generous and assume his actions were shy, not snobbish, Carrie folded her menu and smiled up at Sheila. “I’ll have the soup. And a small salad.”

“Ranch on the side, right?”

“You got it.”

“And for you, Doc?” Sheila asked.

His shoulders stiffened slightly then relaxed. As Carrie watched, wondering if perhaps he was a little snobbish after all, he folded his menu, looked at Sheila and manufactured a smile. “I’ll try the sirloin. Medium rare.”

“Comes with a baked spud and a side of ’slaw.”

“Fine,” he said and, dismissing her, redirected his gaze at Carrie.

She’d just decided she’d imagined Nathan’s discomfort when the last voice in the entire free world that she wanted to hear boomed into the confined space she’d carved out for her and Nathan.

“Fine with me, too, sweet cheeks. I’ll have what he’s having.”

Carrie froze at the sound of Ryan Evan’s voice.

With a barely suppressed groan, she looked up to see him standing there—all-American good looks, all-Texas brass, all rough-hewn charisma geared up to charm the socks off the world in general and Sheila in particular.

His cheeks were ruddy from the chill of the wind and the cool February night. His shearling coat was open at his throat, his hat tugged low over his brow, beneath which his brown eyes danced with intelligence and a blatantly flirtatious sparkle. Every woman with a beating heart had to have felt it stall, then catch at the mouthwatering picture he made standing there…pure animal magnetism, rough-and-tumble cowboy grace.

“Hello, you handsome devil,” Sheila cooed.

“You made up your mind to marry me yet?” Ry teased with a grin as he dropped a kiss on Sheila’s cheek.

“Darlin’,” Sheila drawled, “if I thought you could keep up with me, we’d negotiate, but I’m a realist, not a dreamer…unlike you, who can only dream of what you’re missing out on.”

“What a woman.” Ry chuckled as Sheila walked away with their orders and, despite Carrie’s death grip on the tabletop and her obvious intention to stay firmly put on the outside edge of the booth seat, he nudged her aside and squeezed onto the bench beside her.

He smelled of the chilly evening and of leather and everything familiar yet illusive, and she hated him in that moment almost as much as she’d always loved him for his unconscious ability to send her into awareness overload.

He turned his gaze first to Nathan, who, Carrie noticed from the corner of her eye, appeared to be sliding toward a slow boil over Ry’s unwelcome intrusion.

“Well, now,” Ryan said, all aw-shucks grin and innocent eyes as he turned to her, “isn’t this nice? Never dreamed I’d find some dinner company tonight. Y’all don’t mind do you?” he barreled on as if Carrie wasn’t giving him the evil eye and singeing him with silent messages to “git while the gittin’ was still good.”

“Great,” he said before she could open her mouth, and turned that good-ol’-boy grin on Nathan. “Evans. Ryan Evans.” He extended his hand across the booth top. “Nelson Beldon, right?”

“Nathan. Dr. Nathan Beldon,” Nathan corrected him stiffly, and because he’d been left with no choice, he met Ry’s hand across the gray Formica.

“Doc,” Ry said with a nodding smile while he exerted, in Carrie’s opinion, just a little too much enthusiasm in an extended handshake that finally ended with a small grimace of pain on Nathan’s face.

God, she thought on a long sigh. Did that really just happen? Did Ry just try to outmuscle Nathan? If she didn’t know better, she’d think he was pulling a junkyard-dog stunt and marking his territory. Which, of course, was as ridiculous a notion as the one she’d bought into for the past fourteen years.

“What are you doing here, Ryan?” she asked through a clenched jaw and totally false smile as she fought with everything in her to ignore the way his muscled thigh felt pressed against hers. It was solid and hard and hot.

“Same thing you are, Carrie-bear. Refueling. So—” he turned his attention away from her and back to Nathan as she quietly slid out of physical contact range “—how are you finding Royal, Nolan?”

“Nathan,” Carrie corrected him with a hard stare. “His name is Nathan.”

Another country boy grin. “Nolan. Nathan. Sorry, pal. So…you’re a vet, right?”

Carrie closed her eyes and counted to ten as fire flooded her cheeks. She was about to clarify, yet again, when Nathan handled it.

“Physician. OB/GYN, actually. And you? It would appear by your outfit that you’d be a cowboy, correct?”

Her eyes flew open. She grinned. Whoa. Score one for the doc.

Okay. Maybe score half a point, she decided, when she saw a vein bulge out on Nathan’s forehead.

Beside her, though, Ry’s grin just got broader, making it apparent who was still getting the best of whom.

The evening quickly went downhill from there.

“Just what, in the name of everything sane, did you think you were doing?” Carrie demanded as she watched Nathan walk out of the diner, his shoulders stiff.

Beside her, polishing off the last of his dinner, Ryan paused with his fork midair. “What are you talking about, darlin’?”

It was the last straw. She slugged him.

“Ouch.” He rubbed his biceps, grimaced. “That hurt.”

“It couldn’t possibly have hurt enough,” she groused and, crossing her arms over her breasts, slumped back in the booth seat.

He pretended to study her with a concerned frown. “Oh. Oh,” he repeated, as if the bricks she’d have dearly loved to drop on his thick head had finally landed dead center. “I interrupted something, didn’t I?”

She tilted her head, narrowed her eyes. “Gosh…ya think?”

He had the good sense to finally look guilty. So guilty that she almost felt sorry for him. Almost.

“I think I hate you.”

He became quiet before setting down his fork and drawing a deep breath. “So…umm…you think this guy might be special?”

She gave a weary snort and made herself ignore the feel of his warm callused fingers as he lifted a hand to her face to tuck her hair behind her ear. “Well, I’ll probably never know now, will I? Not after that dog-and-pony show you put on tonight.”

She could feel his warm-brown eyes on her but refused to look at him. Finally he dropped his hand.

“Hate to break it to you, sunshine,” he said, “but if he scares off that easily, he’s not only not special, he hasn’t got what it takes to breathe the same air you do.”

Carrie crossed her arms on the booth tabletop, dropped her forehead to rest there and expelled an exasperated sigh. “All I wanted was dinner and a chance to get to know him. Was that too much to ask?”

Ry looked down at her riot of shiny red hair, at the weary slump of her shoulders and felt a curl of real guilt coil in his belly. He lifted a hand, let it hover over her slim back before finally giving in to the urge and letting it settle there. When she didn’t object, he gently rubbed. She was so slight. The flesh and bone and delicate muscle beneath her kelly-green sweater was warm and resilient.

He only meant to soothe her and assuage a little of his guilt. Instead, as his palm skated over what was obviously the clasp of her bra, he got lost in a fantasy that filled his mind way too often lately.

Would her bra be black, he wondered. Would it match her panties? The thought of seeing her in nothing but black silk and fragile lace warmed by her skin and peeled away by his hands had him swallowing hard. And yet he couldn’t make himself stop.

He could see himself tunneling his hands up and under that sweater, unfastening her bra, drawing her back against him and filling his palms with her breasts. He could imagine the heat of her, the weight, the giving softness surrounding the hard spears of her nipples pressing against his palm while his other hand slipped down across her ribs, and lower, lingering on her slim hip before his fingers skimmed past her belly, under her panties and found the silky heat of her.

The length of his erection pressed against his fly.

Again. Because of her. Trav’s little sister.

He let out a heavy breath. Withdrew his hand. Gave himself a mental head slap.

“How about some pie?” he asked in a voice that barely sounded like his own.

She lifted her head, looked at him.

Her hair was slightly mussed. Her cheek had a little crease from the pressure of her face pressed against her sweater sleeve. It’s what she would look like in the morning, he realized. After he’d made love to her all night. Sleepy and sated and…Whoops, the heat in her eyes was anger not passion, and burst him out of his little sensual haze like a pin pricking a balloon.

“Pie? That’s how you fix what you did just now?”

In spite of himself and his guilt and his arousal, he grinned. “Used to do the trick,” he said hopefully.

“Yeah. When I was twelve.”

“Takes a little more than pie to make you feel good now, is that it, bear?”

The moment he said it, he regretted it. Because it conjured a dozen thoughts about ways he’d like to make her feel good. Starting with her mouth, working slowly down from there. Oh, yeah. He’d make her feel good. He’d make them both feel good.

“What it takes,” she said, dragging her hair back from her face, “is a little…just a little…respect for my feelings.”

“I respect you, sweetie. I’m just not sure Nelson does.”

“Nathan,” she said with fire in her eyes. “His name is Nathan, and I don’t really care what you think of him, do you understand?

“Now, move,” she ordered in a mercurial shift from down-and-out to down-and-dirty mad. “And for future reference,” she added when he let her out of the booth, deciding he’d better make way or confront the wrath of a royally ticked-off redhead, “I don’t want to see your face in my face the next time I’m faced with Nathan’s face…is that clear?”

“I…um…”

“Good!”

Not good, Ry thought as he watched her storm out of the diner.

“When you gonna do something about that?” Sheila asked, sidling over to the booth and slapping his dinner check into his hand.

“Do something about what?” he asked, absently digging into his hip pocket for his wallet, his eyes still on Carrie’s sweet little backside as she sashayed at a fast, hot clip out the door.

“About that case you’ve got on her…about the case she’s got on you.”

He whipped his head around. Opened his mouth. Closed it. Cleared his throat.

“Yeah…it’s that obvious,” Sheila said, answering his unasked question with a “you poor bumbling buffoon” shake of her head before she walked away.

It crossed his mind to deny it…but he knew he’d only be digging a deeper hole. Like a six-foot-deep hole that Trav would dump him in to bury the body if he ever found out Ry had the hots—and possibly a whole lot more—for his little sister.

“Ain’t this just a fine kettle of catfish,” he mumbled as he tossed some bills on the booth top and resettled his hat. The best thing he could do for himself was stay away from her, and the only thing Trav wanted him to do was ride herd.

Lust or loyalty. Pared down to those two words, there could only be one choice. He headed for the door and hoped he had the strength of character to choose the right one.

Damn Ryan Evans. And damn this stupid cow town. He’d been trying to figure an angle to get to Carrie Whelan for days and when he finally found the opportunity, Evans had cut him off at the knees.

Seething with rage and still smelling of that row-rent greasy-spoon diner, he let himself into the apart ment he’d rented last month on the west end of Royal. He stormed straight for his bedroom, angrily tossing his keys on the top of the bureau. With jerky motions that relayed the extent of his rage over Evans’s interference, he unbuttoned his shirt and yanked it out of his trousers.

“You’re home early.”

He whipped his head toward the bed where a very blond, very naked woman lay beneath the sheets, smiling at him.

He closed his eyes, swore. “What are you doing here?”

“Ooo. Testy tonight, are we? What’s the matter, darling? Didn’t your little tryst with sweet Carrie Whelan go as well as you’d planned?”

“I told you,” he snapped, ignoring her sarcasm and stepping out of his pants, “we have to be careful. As far as anyone knows, you’re my nurse. Nothing more. And you sure as hell shouldn’t be here.”

“I was careful,” she said with a pout and a come-hither look that drained some of his anger and stirred his lust. “No one saw me come in. And you’re glad I’m here. Admit it. For heaven’s sake, don’t be such a poop. It’s been days since we’ve spent any…quality time together,” she added with a suggestive smile. “I’ve missed you.”

He gave her a hard stare, considered throwing her out with an admonishment to stay out until he told her it was safe, but then she peeled back the covers and opened her arms. Her body was as lush as her cheery red lips. With a toss of her head, her long mane of platinum-blond hair fell enticingly over her shoulders.

“You don’t really want me to go…do you Roman?”

He let out a deep breath, crossed to the bed. “How many times have I told you not to call me by my real name?”

“All right. All right.” Now it was her voice that was filled with impatience. Her pale blue eyes that heated to electric flame. “Nathan. I know the drill. You’ve reminded me often enough. As long as we’re stuck in this dust trap, you’re Dr. Nathan Beldon, not Dr. Roman Birkenfeld, and I’m nurse Mary Campbell, not Marci Carson. Now…you don’t really want me to go, do you…Nathan?”

His gaze raked her body. No. He didn’t want her to go. At least not for another hour or so. He still needed her to play out this scam. And he needed to work off some of his tension with Nurse “Good-body.”

He hadn’t been thinking straight lately. He needed his wits about him. He needed to regroup and refocus and marshal his thoughts, reassess his plan. Forget about what he’d done to the real Dr. Nathan Beldon whose identity he’d stolen…quit worrying about being found out. Even if the Dallas PD found Beldon’s body—and he’d made sure they wouldn’t—the police wouldn’t be able to pin the murder on him. He wasn’t stupid. He hadn’t gotten where he was by being stupid.

All he needed to do was keep it together so he could get to Natalie Perez. The bitch. She was the one who’d screwed things up. She’d gotten wise to his black-market baby ring and skipped with both her baby and his money—money he’d been hoarding from baby sales for months so he could pay off the loan sharks who’d covered his Atlantic City gambling debts. He was as good as dead if he didn’t get the baby and the money back. Thanks to Natalie Perez, he’d been roughed up good and his life had been threatened—with the promise that they would not let him die easily if he didn’t make good on his loan. Soon.

He swiped a damp palm over his jaw. He had to get to that baby. And he had to recover the half million she’d stolen from him so he could get the monkey off his back.

So, no. He didn’t want the woman warming his bed to leave. He wanted some relief from all this pressure. Keeping up the sham of his false ID, constantly being on guard against the loan sharks catching up with him, figuring out angles to get out from under…it was taking a toll. He wasn’t sleeping. He’d lost weight.

“Come on, baby,” Marci purred, and lay back on the pillow. “I’ll make you feel better.”

Yeah, he thought. She was a regular Florence Nightingale…and he was in need of a healing hand.

He crossed over to the bed and stretched out on top of her. He’d worry about Carrie Whelan in the morning. Stupid little do-gooder. She was an easy mark—ripe for the picking. She was as naive as a baby and already halfway in love with him. She was only a means to an end—totally expendable. Everyone in this little cow town was easy to fool…including the hospital board. They hadn’t even questioned the Texas medical credentials he’d lifted from Beldon’s office. Stupid yokels. It had been so easy to infiltrate the medical community and gain hospital privileges. He’d simply approached the chief of staff and stated he was interested in participating in their physician’s exchange program. The administrator, who just happened to have been looking for a replacement for a doctor who had recently moved out of state, had been happy as a damn clam to take him on.

Everything was fine. He was in control. All he had to do was stick with the plan and use Carrie Whelan to get to Travis Whelan, who was his most direct route to Natalie Perez.

And once he got to Natalie…she’d pay. He’d make her pay dearly for what she’d done to him. He’d make them all pay. No one bested Roman Birkenfeld. Not his sanctimonious brother and holier-than-thou sister, not his parents, whom he could never please.

Well, he was pleasing himself now. And he wasn’t going to let a woman—one woman, Natalie Perez—bring him down.

Four

Carrie couldn’t believe it. Nathan had actually called her again—the very next day—and he’d asked her to go out with him that same night. His aggressiveness was exciting and flattering, and she was going for it.

She picked up the bottle of pricey and very sexy perfume her friend, Stephanie Firth, had given her for Christmas a couple of months ago. With what she felt was an act of daring, she spritzed it across the tops of her breasts. Then she took one final look at herself in the mirror.

The dress was new. It was also black and short and body hugging and cut low enough to show an incredible amount of cleavage.

Resisting the urge to tug the hem down a little closer to her knees and the square-cut bodice a little closer to her chin—in both cases many, many, many inches closer—she slipped into four-inch stiletto heels. The sexy shoes, all slim straps and sleek black Italian leather, were another extravagance. It wasn’t often she could even wear heels on a date for fear of towering over the guy.

“Let’s face it…it isn’t often you get to go on a date, period, thank you very much, Travis,” she muttered, then forced herself to steer away from any negative energy—and away from any thoughts of how Ryan might react to the way she looked. He’d probably tell her to put on a sweater.

Well, tonight wasn’t about pleasing Ryan. Tonight was her night. Hers and Nathan’s. Stephanie was the only one who even knew about their dinner date. Ry showing up at the Royal Diner the other night was just a little too coincidental. She wasn’t taking any chance of her brother or Ry sabotaging her evening with some misguided notion that she wasn’t capable of making her own choices.

With a sweep of siren-red lipstick that matched her nails and assurances that she was simply being sophisticated, not obvious, she grabbed her coat and headed for the door. She had no intention of keeping Nathan waiting. He’d had a devil of a time carving out a few hours from his schedule at the hospital—that’s why they were meeting at Claire’s instead of him picking her up. That was fine by her. It would give her a chance to make an entrance.

She wanted to knock the doctor’s socks off. If this outfit didn’t do it, she didn’t know what would. And when the little voice niggling away at the back of her mind tried to tell her she might be making a mistake, that she might be leaping a little too fast, that he might be pushing a little too hard, she made a conscious decision to ignore it.

She was a big girl. She’d always been a good judge of character. Nathan Beldon’s character was just fine. So was his smile. He wasn’t Ry. But for once and for always, Ry wasn’t interested. And Nolan… She stopped herself, horrified, and cursed Ry under her breath. Nathan not Nolan. Nathan was interested. Very interested. And she and her little black dress were going to make sure he stayed that way.

The wine, Carrie thought, was perfect. The candlelight was romantic and Nelson— She mentally slapped herself over her repeated mental block when it came to Nathan’s name and made a promise to slap Ryan, too, the next time she saw him, for planting the seed that refused to die.