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The Inconvenient Bride
“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
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.
