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

“He’s not for you, Carrie.”

Her mouth dropped open at his outrageous assumption that he knew what was good for her. “That is not for you to decide!” she countered, frustration fueling the conviction in her words.

She closed her eyes and covered her face with her closed fists on a growl. “Why can’t you just leave me alone?”

There were tears in her eyes when she dropped her hands. “You don’t want me…so why can’t you just leave me alone?”

Oh, God.

Oh, God, oh, God. She couldn’t believe she’d said that. You don’t want me. Mortified, she turned her back to him.

Oh, man, Ry thought, his heart breaking at the defeated set of her slim shoulders.

Didn’t want her? He suppressed a groan. If only.

Look at her. She was beautiful, intelligent, caring and compassionate…and passionate as all get-out. And right now she was trembling with such an enticing mix of anger and vulnerability he ached with wanting her.

He gently cupped her shoulders and turned her back around to face him. And felt a current of longing and lust shoot through his blood like a freight train.

What sane man wouldn’t want her? What flesh-and-blood man couldn’t help but want to take her in his arms and kiss away the tear that escaped and tracked down her cheek? What man with an ounce of testosterone in his DNA wouldn’t kill to feel the fire of her passion?

He was all of those men…and out of control to boot. Suddenly he couldn’t stop himself. With his hands wrapped around her upper arms, he drew her slowly toward him, watching the emotions shift across her face as his left leg wedged between hers, and her full breasts pressed against his chest.

Her eyes shimmered with a mist of unshed tears…and a stunned and needy anticipation. And just that fast he was a goner.

There wasn’t a force in the world at that moment strong enough to keep him from lowering his head, touching his lips to hers and losing himself in her giving heat and surrendering sigh.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. The words hammered out from the part of his brain that was still functioning. But function gave way to feeling as he sank into the kiss, opening his mouth over hers, coaxing her lips apart, slipping his tongue inside and diving headlong into heaven.

Sweet.

Lord above, she was so sweet. And sassy and sexy as she rose up on tiptoe, wrapped her arms around his neck and plastered her long, lush body against him like she was a blanket and he was an unmade bed and, heaven help him…he had to stop this now.

But he couldn’t. He just couldn’t.

It was too good. She was too…everything. Sensual, shy, wanton, wanting. And it made him want, too—like he’d never wanted in his life.

Against everything that was right, he took. He filled his hands with her tight, tidy behind, lifted and pressed her up and against his erection with a groan that left no question what he wanted and needed for both of them.

He didn’t know how it happened, but the next thing he knew he had her backed up against a wall. Her hands had tangled in his hair, knocking his hat to the floor, and their kiss just kept uncovering deeper levels of sensation while his hands tunneled up under her sweater and found bare skin. Silky. Hot. And not nearly enough.

He wanted her naked. He wanted inside of her. He wanted his mouth on her breast, his tongue between her legs. In zero-point-five seconds, she’d taken him from protector to plunderer and there wasn’t a single message his rational brain was sending to his libido that was powerful enough to break through the fog of arousal.

So this was spontaneous combustion.

So this was chemistry squared.

So this was…not going to happen.

The blood flow finally rerouted back to his brain and cognizant thought made a comeback. With a growl of frustration he lifted his head, sucked in air.

And looked at the face he’d just ravaged.

Her lips were wet and swollen and so pretty and pink; her eyes were glazed, her lush lashes fluttering slowly as if she, too, was trying to get her bearings and figure out what had just happened.

Insanity. That’s what had happened. Some cosmic blip had flashed across his radar screen and short-circuited his brain, hot-wiring him straight into sensual overload.

He wanted nothing more than to dive back in and kiss her again, strip off her clothes, lay her down on the closest horizontal surface and take this to the next level.

And when her soft sigh and desperately whispered “Ry, please…make love to me,” drifted through his mind like a drug, he almost…almost…did it.

But this was Carrie.

Little Carrie-bear.

Trav’s kid sister.

Trav’s virgin kid sister.

The truth hit him like a bucket of ice water. This couldn’t happen. And damn if it hadn’t just almost happened in the worst—and best—possible way.

Very carefully, very deliberately, he forced himself to pull away from her, drop his hands and take a step backward.

Damning himself for his lack of control, he stared into her glazed eyes and struggled with the words to set this right.

Only, there were no words to make it right. What he’d done was inexcusable. What he’d wanted—what he still wanted—was not what she needed.

Angry with himself, even a little angry with her for not having the instincts to protect herself from the likes of him or a predator like Beldon, he made an instant decision on how this had to be handled.

It wasn’t going to be pretty. It wasn’t going to be nice. But it would be effective. And it was necessary.

Carrie swayed on her feet and might have toppled like a tower of children’s blocks if the wall at her back hadn’t steadied her.

Oh, my.

Oh my, oh my, oh my.

So that’s what all the fuss was about. That feeling of…of being lost, of being found, of discovering for the first time a yearning so strong it made her knees weak. A desire so intense it made every muscle in her body clench and melt like butter, simultaneously. Helpless longing, endless need…everything she’d been hoping to experience with Nathan.

Everything she’d always known she’d find with Ry.

Make love to me.

She’d barely thought the words and then she’d heard herself saying them out loud.

And then she’d felt him pull away.

And now…now he was glaring at her…like some brooding grizzly. Like someone who didn’t even like her, let alone want her.

The passion she’d felt in his kiss had shifted to anger. And she didn’t understand.

“Ry?”

“So…do you understand now what happens when you don’t behave yourself?”

She blinked, chilled to the bone suddenly, where only moments ago she’d felt nothing but heat. She clutched her arms around herself, his anger slicing through the last of her longing and heightening her feeling of vulnerability. “Behave myself?”

He gave her a stern stare and bent to snag his hat from the floor. “You just got a lesson, little girl…I hope you learned it well.”

“A lesson?” She didn’t understand. She didn’t understand any of this. “What…what are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about what happens when a woman teases a man beyond reason.”

He brushed some imaginary dust from the brim of his hat, then settled it jerkily on his head. “I saw the way you let Beldon kiss you in the park. I saw the way you let him put his hands all over you.”

For what felt like an eternity, all she could do was stare. She opened her mouth. Closed it. Then finally found her voice. “What does Nathan have to do with what just happened between us?”

He shook his head, then smiled…the picture of tolerant benevolence. “Sweetie…that’s what I’m trying to tell you. Nothing happened between us but a little adult-education class.”

She felt as if she’d just walked into a theater in the middle of a movie—a horror movie or a foreign movie—French with German subtitles. “Adult education?”

“Exactly. Honey, I just taught you that if that had been Beldon instead of me—someone who cares about you—you’d be flat on your back and compromised by now.”

Time stopped while her mind wrestled with his reaction and his words until finally she pulled it all together.

He hadn’t kissed her because he wanted her. He’d kissed her because he thought she needed protection from herself when it came to the opposite sex and he needed to show her the error of her ways. He’d kissed her because he thought she hadn’t behaved appropriately with Nathan and if he hadn’t intervened, she might have ended up, God forbid, compromised.

An incredulous laugh pushed out from somewhere in the vicinity of her horribly bruised pride. “Compromised? Was that really the word you used?”

She laughed again, covered her face with her hands, then on a deep breath let them drop. She glared at him. “What Victorian tome did you pull that out of?”

He actually flinched and turned a shade of red she’d never seen on him before. To cover his discomfort, he shook his finger at her. “Beldon wouldn’t have stopped like I did.”

“So…let me get this in perspective. You kissed me and backed me up against the wall to scare me straight, is that it?”

“Damn right I did. And I hope it worked. If you have an ounce of sense in you, you’ll think twice before you—”

“Before I what?” She cut him off, her anger firing with a vengeance. “Before I go out and throw myself at another man’s feet and beg him to deflower me? Now, there’s a word for you. You can probably find it right next to compromise.”

She sucked in a ragged breath. Dragged her hands through her hair. How pathetic was she? How pathetic was she to actually have thought he had kissed her because he’d wanted her? Because he’d been as excited and aroused and as in love with her as she was with him?

Well. He was right about one thing. She’d definitely learned a lesson: Trust her intellect not her heart. Her head had known weeks ago that she had to give up on him. It was her heart that hadn’t been on board with the plan.

Well, it was on board now…bruised and bleeding, but on board. And one shot at this kind of humiliation was all he was going to get at her.

“Get. Out,” she ordered, walked to the door on shaky legs and opened it wide.

“Oh, now, bear,” he began in that condescending, cajoling voice that made her want to grind her teeth…preferably into some very tender part of his body that created immeasurable pain. “Don’t get all huffy. You know this was for your own good.”

“I do know,” she said with all the sweetness of vinegar and the sincerity of Jerry Springer, as he stepped out the doorway and onto her front stoop, “and I thank you so very much for presuming to know what’s best for me.”

She watched his face as tolerance transitioned to suspicion. “That was um…sarcasm, right?”

“So you do have some functioning brain cells,” she ground out through a nasty smile, then whipped the door shut in his face.

Ry heard her throw the dead bolt. Heard her snarl of rage. Heard her give in to the tears.

He hung his head, closed his eyes, laid his closed fist against the door…and almost begged her to let him back in.

He wanted to hold her…to tell her the truth. That he was stupid crazy about her. That he hadn’t meant to hurt her…that he actually had damn few functioning brain cells left when it came to her or he never would have kissed her in the first place then bumbled out that lamebrain, dull-witted excuse to cover up his mistake.

“Hell, Shamu could have come up with a better story to make sure she didn’t read the truth in that kiss. No offense, buddy,” he told the dog, who gave him a soulful look when he climbed behind the wheel.

And what was the truth in that kiss? The honest truth, he asked himself grimly.

He slumped back in the driver’s seat. The truth was that the moment he’d touched his lips to hers he’d stopped thinking of her as little Carrie-bear. She’d become a woman in his arms. A woman whose response had sizzled with instant arousal…and fueled his libido to flash point.

Hell. He was still aroused…his damn hands were shaking.

He wrapped his fingers around the steering wheel to steady them, then stared through the windshield at…nothing.

And came up with nothing.

There was no good answer to the what-ifs that, despite the futility of the situation, had been rattling around in his head since he’d kissed her. Yet they were still forming. What if he had made love to her? What if she wasn’t Trav’s sister? What if she wasn’t off-limits because of it…because of a hundred other reasons that didn’t add up to what she needed him to be?

He felt as low as the cracked asphalt beneath the wheels of his four-by-four as he turned the key, shifted into Drive and pulled slowly away from her house. Damn Trav for putting him in this position. Damn Beldon for putting the moves on her. And damn the sleepless nights he’d spent agonizing about the possibility of another man making love to her for the first time. And all the times after that.

A fist curled in his gut at the thought. He knew he couldn’t be that man. He’d known it for years. Carrie had always had a crush on him. For her sake he’d always done his darnedest to discourage it. Truthfully, he’d figured she would grow out of it…eventually. Her response just now said she hadn’t.

He drummed his thumbs on the steering wheel as he headed across town for the Cattleman’s Club and the bar, where a tall cold one wouldn’t substitute for what he wanted but would give him something to do with his hands—and his mouth—other than kiss the one woman he had no business kissing.

He’d never quite understood why she was attracted to him anyway…had always assumed it might have had something to do with his rodeo background. Women seemed to go for rodeo riders, and Lord knew he’d had his share of fun with the ladies over the years. But he didn’t see himself as any prime catch—certainly, he wasn’t good enough for Carrie.

Yeah, he could take care of her financially. He was loaded, but that was an accident of heritage, not any great doing on his part. His granddaddy had struck it rich in oil and his daddy had kept up the tradition in real estate. But she didn’t need his money, anyway. Trav had seen to it that she’d never want for anything.

Besides, he’d learned a long time ago that money didn’t make a man…not the kind of man Carrie needed to make her happy. She needed someone who wanted to settle down. And that just wasn’t him. He wasn’t cut out for home and hearth and sharing at the end of the day.

At least he didn’t think he was, but he figured it was telling that he’d never held on to a relationship with a woman long enough to find out. And that was telling in itself. If he was into commitment, it seemed he’d have tried it on for size by now. He wasn’t sure he’d be any good at it…or answering to anyone but himself.

He was content alone, if not darn right hunkered in on the Dusty E since his folks had retired from ranching and resettled in Palm Beach. He was happy raising cattle and riding the range with Shamu and setting off on sporadic TCC missions. He liked the solitude—along with the occasional night with a pretty, attentive woman. Although, lately the only pretty woman who came to mind was the woman he’d just left crying.

He’d probably make her cry a lot if he gave in and made love to her. And that was something he just didn’t want to do. Carrie deserved an anchor she could stake a future on…and he was still floating with the currents.

Bottom line, she needed someone better than a busted-up former rodeo star who had tried to get into the marines when Travis had but couldn’t pass the physical because of all the injuries he’d gotten riding broncs on the high school rodeo circuit.

She needed a guy who would take care of her and protect her from the trouble she was bound to get into if left to her own devices. Beldon being a case in point.

And then there was Trav. Trav was Ry’s best friend. If he started something with Carrie, he’d end up losing Trav’s friendship—not to mention there was the possibility of getting his block knocked off, and he liked it fine where it was, thank you very much.

He pulled into the TCC parking lot, resolved, if not enthusiastic, about why their first kiss had to be their last.

But damn, did he hate hurting her.

And damn, did he still want that woman.

Six

Carrie stared at her tear-swollen face in her bathroom mirror. Considered writing a big red L for loser in the middle of her forehead in lipstick.

But then she got mad.

She did not cry. She was not a weeping Wilda, and hated that she’d been reduced to tears by Ryan Evans.

Well, she’d shed her last tear over him.

And she was finished letting him interfere with her life and her plans… on any level.

So what if his kiss had melted her bones.

And, oh, Lord above, had it melted them.

Her knees got weak and she got a muzzy feeling in her tummy all over again just thinking about it.

And then she got mad all over again.

For a moment—one long, blissful, hot, mindless moment—she’d thought Ry was kissing her because he wanted her. His kiss had been a lie. All he was doing was teaching her a lesson, doing his duty—his cursed brotherly duty—and warning her away from Nathan Beldon. She was furious that he’d had the gall to accuse her of being a tease. Hurt that he would think of her that way.

So what if his kiss had made her blood boil. He wasn’t offering her a darn thing but grief. Nathan… Nathan had been sending all kinds of signals that he was offering more. And Ry Evans or no Ry Evans, she owed it to herself to find out exactly how much more.

She pressed ice-cold water to her eyes, repaired her makeup, then ran a brush through her hair. Quickly exchanging her dark blue sweater for a Val-entine-red silk blouse, she grabbed her car keys, and headed for Nathan’s apartment across town. It was still early evening. It was still Valentine’s Day. And she was not going to spend the rest of the night alone. She was going to go to Nathan, apologize again and make it impossible for him not to take her to bed.

Roman Birkenfeld stood, reached for his trousers and tugged them on. Behind him Marci lay sprawled and spent in the middle of his rumpled bed. There was a bruise on her left cheek he couldn’t muster enough conscience to be sorry about. He hadn’t asked her to come over here. It wasn’t his fault she’d been a handy outlet for his fury when he’d returned from the park, his pants soaked with champagne and smeared with caviar.

It was Evans’s fault. The interfering, clod-kicking yokel had crossed a line tonight. No one humiliated Roman Birkenfeld. He felt the rage boil up in his blood all over again, just thinking about how the slow-talking and slow-witted Texan had managed to thwart yet another attempt to get to Natalie Perez through Carrie Whelan.

He’d almost had her. Almost gotten her to take him home, when Evan’s filthy mutt had attacked him.

Seething with building fury, he stalked into the living room, snagged his cell phone and dialed.

“Give me a report,” he ordered when Jason Carter answered the phone. “And you’d better have something good to tell me about my money.”

He waited with growing impatience as Carter, one of the muscle men he’d hired to help him track down the money, handed the phone to Tommy Stokes.

“Nothing new, boss,” Stokes said stoically when he came on the line. “We know one of those Cattleman’s Club guys who’s been protecting Perez took the money to their prissy rich man’s club, but we haven’t figured out a way to get to it.”

“You break into the damn place, is how you do it,” he barked back, at the end of his tolerance with the entire situation. “How hard can it be to get past a few prissy—wasn’t that your word—cowboys?”

“You said you wanted to keep it low-key,” Stokes said defensively.

“We’re past low-key, you moron. I need that money. And I need it yesterday. Now, find it and bring it to me or your miserable lives aren’t going to be worth living.”

He punched the end key before Stokes could utter a response, then tossed the phone angrily against the wall. Damn Natalie Perez. Everything had started unraveling when she’d gotten wise to his black-market baby ring.

He raked his hands roughly through his hair, forced a calming breath. And told himself he wasn’t coming unglued. He was still in control. It hadn’t been his fault that he’d fallen so far behind in his payments to the Atlantic City boys. He’d just had a streak of bad luck at the casinos. That’s why he’d started the baby theft in the first place, to pay off his gambling debts.

“Okay. Don’t think about that now,” he told himself aloud. “Think positive. Stokes and Carter will get the money.” The half million in the diaper bag represented all of his hard work—the cumulative amount from the sale of several babies over several months. Once he recovered it, he’d get the heat off his back… and then he’d make a few people pay. Natalie Perez would be first; Ryan Evans, however, was rising to the top of his short list like a bullet.

He was pacing the room, thinking of ways to deal with him when his doorbell rang. He was so lost in thought he didn’t even think. He just opened the door.

And stared straight into Carrie Whelan’s anxious face.

“Nathan,” she said hesitantly. “Can… can I come in?”

Before he could stop her, she shouldered around him and into the apartment.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, her hands clenched together in front of her. “It was horrible… what Ryan did. I came to… well… to tell you that if you still want to spend the night with me—”

Her voice trailed off as her eyes strayed, then opened wide and held on a spot just beyond his shoulder.

He knew without turning around what—or who—she saw. He turned, looked over his shoulder and saw Marci standing in the doorway, wearing only his shirt and a catlike smile of triumph.

“Whoops,” Marci said with a laugh and disappeared back into the bedroom.

He drew a deep breath and turned back to Carrie who looked as if someone had just gut punched her.

“Carrie… I can explain,” he said quickly, confident he could put a spin on this that the gullible little ingenue would buy.

“Not necessary,” she said stiffly, and turned for the door.

He snagged her arm, angry all over again, at Marci, at this stupid little doe-eyed girl and the time and effort he’d had to put into winning her over. “Please,” he said, sounding appropriately desperate. “Let me explain. It’s not what you think.”

“Nothing,” she said with a pathetic lift of her chin, “ever is.” Then she practically ran out the door.

Seething, he damned her rotten timing and his bad luck for getting caught in a little recreational sex. And then he turned back to the bedroom… blood in his eyes.

Carrie’s hands trembled as she raced across the parking lot and punched her keyless remote to unlock her car.

Eyes wide, blinking back tears of humiliation, she peeled out of the lot and onto Hanover Street.

And then she just drove.

Wanting to deny what she’d just seen… even considering turning around and letting Nathan make his explanation.

And then she got a clue.

There was no explaining… no matter that Nathan had snagged her arm and begged her to let him.

What was there to explain? He’d just gotten out of bed. With his nurse… Mary somebody. Maid… Mary. Made… Mary. A hysterical laugh burst out. Mary made quite a statement standing there in nothing but her bed-mussed hair and Nathan’s rumpled shirt.

“What, do I have a sign on my back, or something?” she asked skyward. “Humiliate me. Lie to me. Fool me. I love the abuse. Pile it on. I can take it.”