The Bride Means Business

by Anne Marie Winston

  Marina rolled her eyes. “‘Rest,’ he says. The baby will be screaming for another feeding by the time I get home. Oh, yeah, I’ll get plenty of rest.”

  Ben took her hand, grinning now. “We’ll see you later,” he said to Jill.

  “I’m leaving now,” she said, seizing the chance to get away from Dax’s presence. “I’ll walk with you.”

  But Dax snagged her hand before she could get away, tightening his fingers around hers until it hurt when she tried to pull free. “You can’t leave yet. We have some reminiscing to do.”

  “Let her go,” said Ben, stepping forward, his jaw jutting aggressively.

  “It’s okay, Ben,” Jillian said hastily. “Dax and I do have some things to discuss.” Her heart had done a back flip at the first touch of his firm, warm skin against hers, and her body quickened in anticipation. She might hate him, but he still had the power to move her physically.

  Trying not to show it, she tested his grip, but he still didn’t let her go. She didn’t want to be touching him, and he knew it. But she wasn’t going to let him intimidate her. She might as well show him right off that she was capable of giving as good as she got, she decided with perverse satisfaction.

  Stepping close, she pressed her body against him, sliding her free hand up his chest to toy with his tie. Even though she had braced herself for the contact, she had to close her eyes to hide the impact of awareness his hard body provoked.

  His eyes widened fractionally. Then they narrowed and his hand loosened around hers. He slipped one arm around her in a familiar manner, his hand resting on the swell of her hip, fingers spread wide to hold her firmly against him. The electric sizzle that surged through her at the contact nearly wiped her mind clean.

  Concentrating, she forced herself to ignore the small explosions of arousal going off in her system, gathering her words and her wits. “Among the things we need to talk about is Piersall Industries—now that we’re the primary stockholders in the company. You two go on.”

  She never took her gaze from Dax’s as she spoke, and though he hid any trace of surprise, she noted the shock in his eyes when she mentioned the business. So he hadn’t known Charles had willed her all of his stock in Piersall. But then, she’d only learned about it this morning, so she’d hoped he hadn’t heard yet.

  She sensed the hesitation in her sister, knew Ben was reluctant to leave her alone with Dax. She also knew Ben’s temper. And the protective streak that was a mile wide. If she didn’t get rid of him, there were liable to be two men throwing punches in a minute. So she kept the frozen smile in place, waiting until, from the corner of her vision, she saw them turn and start away again.

  As soon as they did, she stepped away from Dax, and to her surprise, he let her go. It was a good thing, too. Every inch of her that had been plastered against him was throbbing and she could barely think.

  “You leave my sister out of this,” she said to him in a fierce tone.

  “She really doesn’t remember me, does she?”

  “She doesn’t remember anything from before her accident,” Jillian said. “Lucky girl. I’d trade places with her in a heartbeat.” Before he could speak again, she went on. “Really, Dax, you should have let me know you were coming. I’d have arranged a little party if I’d known. Invited every other loser in town.”

  “You’ve changed,” he said. “The old Jillian was a sweetheart, not a sidewinder.”

  She hated the way he was looking her over, like she was one of the Arabian mares his family had owned when they were growing up. “Of course I’ve changed,” she said briskly, impersonally. She’d die before she’d acknowledge the zing of hurt that verbal arrow produced. “I’m a grown woman with a business and a life to manage.”

  “Kids’ Place.”

  Her shock had to show, and the uneasiness telling her there was trouble ahead flared even higher. “How do you know about my store? I thought you said you just came to town.”

  He smiled, and the deadly anger in his eyes did make her step back this time. “I made it my business to know everything there is to know about you, honey-bunch.”

  “Not everything, since you apparently didn’t know about the stock.”

  “Jill!” A man’s voice called to her and she turned, concentrating on forcing a warm smile into place.

  “How are you, honey?” Roger Wingerd came toward her and briefly embraced her before drawing back. “I’m going to miss Charles. The Lion’s Club’s fund-raising committee was his baby. Nobody else can come close to following in his footsteps.”

  She nodded, her throat tight as an image of Charles, wearing an apron and flipping pancakes at the annual breakfast, popped up. “I know.”

  Beside her, Dax stirred restively, then thrust his hand forward. “Dax Piersall.”

  Roger’s eyes widened as he returned the handshake. “Roger Wingerd.”

  “Roger is the Chief Financial Officer at Piersall,” Jillian told Dax. “He and Charles have worked together for almost seven years. Roger probably knew him better than anyone but Alma.” Better than you, was the unspoken message.

  Roger appeared oblivious to the tension in the air. “Sorry about your loss. Charles was one of a kind.”

  “He certainly was,” Dax muttered under his breath.

  Jillian ignored him, keeping her gaze fixed on Roger. “Are we still on for Thursday night?”

  Roger nodded. “I was hoping so, but I’ll understand if you don’t feel like going out.”

  “By then, I’ll be all right,” she assured him, delighting in the chance to throw her life-style in Dax’s face. “Pick me up—”

  “She’s not free Thursday night. Or any other night.” The deep voice was clearly audible now, cutting off her words.

  Rage rose, practically choking her as she spun to face Dax. “You have no right to interfere in my life. No right at all.”

  But he was looking over her head at Roger and his eyes were telegraphing a primitive message of aggression that belied his sophisticated exterior. If he’d even heard what she’d said, he gave no sign of it. “You can spread the news. Jillian’s permanently out of circulation while I’m in town.”

  Roger cast her one swift, questioning glance and she shook her head emphatically. “He’s hallucinating. Again. I’ll call you—” she threw Dax a murderous look “—once I straighten out Cro-Magnon Man here on a couple of issues.”

  As Roger beat a hasty retreat, she turned on Dax again. “Don’t you ever do that again. As far as I’m concerned, our engagement never existed. I don’t appreciate you intimidating my friends and antagonizing my family.”

  Dax shrugged, his eyes unreadable. “It was kind of fun.”

  “Get out of my life,” she said furiously. “You’ve done it before. You shouldn’t have any trouble remembering how to slink out of town.”

  His jaw tightened as if he was clenching his teeth together, but he glanced at his watch, again as if he hadn’t even heard her, and she had to resist the impulse to ball her fist and deck him. Then he lifted his gaze to hers again. “I’m going to be back in your life for quite a while, honey-bunch. So you’d better get used to it.”

  And before she could respond, he stepped past her and strode away.

  Four hours later, the last of Charles’s and Alma’s mourning friends had left the reception hall at the church. Jillian had urged platters of food on their friends, insisting that she would never be able to use it all. She’d comforted more tearful people than she could count, gone through the equivalent of ten boxes of tissues, and shed her high-heeled shoes under a table somewhere.

  She’d had five offers to get stinking drunk, two concerned friends who offered to stay the night, and one proposition from a slimy guy who’d said he was a friend of Charles’s. The first group was the only one that remotely tempted her.

  Leaving the cleanup effort to the bereavement committee from the church, she drove the few miles home and parked in the driveway of her condo. God, she was tired. Every si
ngle cell in her body felt bruised; she winced at the effort it took to push open the door and get out. In contrast to her aching body, her mind was numb. It was as though she were wrapped in a thick layer of blankets, the heavy fabric insulating her from reality.

  Whatever that was. Reality had taken a vacation the day she got that first frantic phone call from the hysterical housekeeper who had been contacted by the police. There’d been no one else to identify Charles and Alma, and so she’d done it.

  They’d died instantly when a drunken driver had slammed into them head-on. There weren’t many things in her life that could compare to the horrible reality of examining the mangled remains of two people she loved. No, compared to that, even being dumped by a fiancé seemed more bearable somehow.

  Fumbling for her keys in the dark, she stubbed her toe on the step up to her porch and swore. All she wanted to do was to fall into bed and let the world go by for about ten days—

  “Wha—?” She gasped as a shadowed figured rose from the single rocking chair. Her heart roared into double-time, and when she recognized the large shape, it only sped up. “Damn it, Dax, you scared me silly.”

  “Sorry.” He didn’t sound sorry; only amused.

  “Go away.” She skirted him, careful not to get too close as she inserted her key in the lock. “I’m tired. You weren’t invited.”

  “I’m inviting myself. We have a lot to discuss.” He stepped nearer, and she could see his eyes gleaming in the dim light. “Have dinner with me. Tomorrow night. I’ll pick you up at seven.”

  “Only in your dreams, big boy.” She shook her head and tried to hide the quivering in her voice. If he just wouldn’t stand so darn close! “I have plans for tomorrow night. And I’m sure my calendar is full up until, oh, about the year twenty-fifty. Sorry, no time for you.”

  She turned the key and turned her back on him.

  “Your lease for Kids’ Place is up next month.”

  The calm, confident words halted her in mid-motion and she paused. “You did your homework.”

  “Sugar’s is up in November. So is The Cotton Gin’s.”

  So much for trying to be clever. “And that means what, exactly, to me?” she demanded. Sugar’s and The Cotton Gin were two of the other stores in the shopping center where Kids’ Place was located.

  “It means,” said Dax, “that you’re talking to the new owner of the Downington Plaza. The owner who can refuse to renew certain leases if he so chooses.”

  It was too much, coming on the heels of the horrendous day she’d endured, and her battered brain refused to comprehend his meaning. Weakly, she sank into the rocker he’d vacated as the implications of his words sank into her head. He owned her building. And he would refuse to renew her lease. “Why?” she asked quietly, swallowing the note of pain. “Why are you doing this to me? You’ve done enough already—”

  “I’ve done enough?” The words were a volcanic explosion and she shrank back at the rage spewing forth. “What about what you did? How do you think I felt, discovering my fiancée and my only brother were screwing around behind my back? How do you think I felt, coming face to face with the two of you sharing declarations of love in the same bed I’d been in a few hours before?” He leaned down and put both hands on the rocker’s arms, trapping her against the chair back. “Too damn bad for you I came home early that evening, and pretty damn lucky for me. At least I discovered what a little bitch you are before you got a wedding ring on your finger.”

  The silence that crept into the void left behind his words crackled with the remains of his anger. Their faces were inches apart, and she hoped her expression was as hostile as his was. She was too busy controlling her shaking limbs to be sure.

  With a sound of disgust, Dax pushed away from the rocker. Turning his back to her, he leaned an arm against the brick wall, resting his bent head against it.

  And, despite the fear and fury warring inside her, a part of her longed to go to him and rub the tension from his shoulders, smooth the vertical lines that had formed between his brows, rock him until the sorrow in his heart subsided.

  She needed to have her head examined.

  Reaching for the most disdainful voice she could muster, she said, “So let me be sure I have this straight. I go to dinner with you tomorrow night or you throw my business and those of several other innocent people out of their stores?”

  His shoulders straightened. “If that’s what it takes.” He turned to face her, but she couldn’t see his expression in the darkness. “I met with the family attorney after the funeral. He told me Charles did indeed leave you his shares.” There was bitterness in his tone. “Payment for services rendered?”

  She hissed in a breath, grabbed her temper before it got away, and counted to ten. “I have no earthly idea why Charles left that stock to me. It would have gone to Alma if she’d survived him, you know.” Her voice shook unexpectedly as an image of Charles’s practical, soft and gentle little wife appeared in her head.

  There was a tense silence. She could practically feel the rage emanating from him. But all he said was, “Since you’re now a company stockholder, you need to know that Piersall Industries is in trouble.”

  “What do you mean, ‘in trouble’?” She was cautious, wondering what kind of trap this was.

  “In trouble,” he repeated. He stepped out of the deepest shadows and his eyes were deadly serious. “That stock you hold won’t be worth the paper it’s printed on if something isn’t done to turn Piersall around.”

  “Something like what?” She didn’t care about the stock, nor the profits from it; she’d succeeded in making her life comfortable without it so far. But as a businesswoman, the idea of a company closing, putting who knew how many people out of work, was anathema to her. And this was the only link she had now with Charles; she wasn’t ready to toss it aside, even to spite Dax.

  Without answering her question, he said, “Tomorrow night. Seven. Dress is casual.” He stepped over to her door and twisted the key, opening the door before withdrawing the keys and tossing them into her lap. “Go to bed. You look like hell.”

  She couldn’t just sit there and take more of his insults; it had been a long time since she’d allowed any man to get the better of her. “If I look like hell, it’s from having the misfortune to be in the same city with you again.”

  She was still sitting in the rocker when he turned the corner and vanished into the parking lot.

  Two

  She can still wrap you up in more knots than a sailor could, Dax thought. He leaned his head against the back of his seat, putting off the moment of ringing Jillian’s doorbell and seeing the ice in those blue eyes.

  He’d been well-prepared for their first meeting yesterday ...he’d thought. Until she’d sprung her little coup on him. He still couldn’t believe she controlled twenty-three per cent of the company’s voting stock now.

  Ever since he’d received the brief, stilted facsimile telling him Charles was dead, he’d imagined that first meeting with her. Dax had been shocked to his shoes when he’d seen Jillian’s name on the letterhead; he’d almost conditioned himself to stop thinking of home, and of anyone connected to his past.

  Especially her. God, how he’d hated her. It had taken years for him to stop thinking of her every minute, years, and with one damned piece of paper, she was back in his head as if she’d never left. When he’d flown up here from Atlanta, the man he’d hired to investigate her met him at the airport with everything he’d dug up. And as he scanned the doings of Jillian Kerr through the past seven years or so, he’d known he wasn’t going to walk away this time without wringing some answers out of her. Maybe once he knew why she’d agreed to marry him when she’d obviously wanted Charles, maybe then he could finally forget.

  A few more phone calls had put him in exactly the position he wanted, and he’d strolled off to the funeral yesterday feeling pretty pleased with himself and primed for a fight. When he’d made his way through the crowd, he’d been ready to r
ip her to shreds, exactly the way she’d ripped his heart out once.

  Only he hadn’t bargained for the compelling reaction his body and his emotions had experienced when he sat down beside her at the service. He hadn’t gotten a good look at her face right away, and it was just as well. He’d been so fixated on the sight of her slender thighs beneath the short black skirt, and the way she’d kept her legs pasted together, with her long, narrow feet in their elegant, unsuitable shoes cuddled side by side on the ground, that he couldn’t have spoken if he’d had to. Memories had swamped him. He could still see her long, slender body, feel the way she’d yielded beneath him, hear the sweet little whimpers she made when he was touching her.

  It had taken him every minute of the rest of that eulogy to battle the need back into submission, to keep his hands from reaching out and yanking her against him. And then, when she’d stood and he’d looked directly at her for the first time, he’d been poleaxed by her glowing, youthful appearance. The woman was thirty-two years old, for God’s sake. He knew she’d been around the block more times than a kid on a new bike, and yet she still looked fresh as a flower on a dewy morning.

  She’d barely seemed to notice him; he had felt her grief and the determined way she was clinging to control. It only served to enrage him all over again. Apparently, she’d stayed close to Charles all these years; Dax doubted she’d be so emotional if he were the one in that coffin.

  That coffin. Regret halted his tumbling thoughts. Somehow, he’d always assumed he and Charles would speak again some day. Dax could never forgive Jillian, but Charles was another story.

  He, Dax, knew firsthand just how seductive and irresistible she could be. As a hormone-laden kid, he’d been deeply, profoundly jealous of Charles and the special connections his brother had shared with her. Charles and Jillian were thick as thieves, had been since they were old enough to ride their bikes up and down the hill from one house to the other. They touched each other casually, easily, and even though she’d belonged to Dax since their first kiss, she and Charles had some unspoken relationship that didn’t include him. Their closeness had bothered him more than he’d wanted to admit, even to himself.