Bound by the Millionaire's Ring

by Dani Collins

  She paled as comprehension dawned. Her eyes showed white around her gray irises. One hand came to her mouth and she might have said, “Don’t you dare.”

  “Lo siento, mi amor,” Ramon said with loud pride over the mechanical clicks and pops. “I cannot sneak around any longer, trying to keep this quiet. I love you too much.”

  He couldn’t recall ever saying those words to anyone except his mother and siblings. It felt strange, pulling disturbingly at that inner door he kept so firmly closed. The push-pull gave his voice the appropriate amount of unsteadiness as he continued.

  “You said if I quit racing, you would marry me. So, mi corazón. Now will you make me the happiest man on earth? Our fathers would approve, you know they would.” He added the last as a reminder of where her loyalty should lie.

  He had to give it to her. She had studied well under Bernardo. Her eyes filled with glossy tears and she didn’t try to hide them. Her fingers against her lips trembled. Her other hand was cold when he took it in his, her fingers lax with shock.

  The white fingers against her mouth curled into a fist.

  “Was that yes?” He pretended he had heard a response no one else could and leaped to his feet. As he crushed her to his front, he played up the joyful act as he exclaimed, “She said yes!”

  Then he dug his fingers into her hair, tipped back her head and kissed her.

  She stiffened. Her breasts crushed into his chest as she sucked in a shocked breath.

  He closed his grip on her more firmly, subtly, but implacably. Do this, he urged, but even he had his limits when it came to cold-bloodedly achieving his goals. Rather than force the kiss upon her, he brought all his sensual skill to bear and persuaded her to accept it.

  * * *

  Oh, this rat wasn’t content to threaten her job or break her heart. He had to knock her self-esteem into smithereens. He rocked his mouth across her lips in exactly the way she had fantasized all through her teen years. Confident, hungry, enticing. Like he loved her.

  Exactly as he’d just said he did.

  She couldn’t let his declaration affect her. It was a lie. She wanted to scratch his eyes out for playing with her like this.

  Her own eyes stung, as if they’d been scraped raw behind her eyelids, but her self-control checked out. The besotted girl who had fallen in love so long ago came running out of her room, where she’d been crying into a pillow for five years. She threw herself into Isidora’s body, heart singing with joy. She offered her mouth and drank up the sweet sensations that washed over her as Ramon acted, finally, like he wanted her.

  Everywhere they touched, her skin bloomed with heat. Her bones turned pliant and the betrayal of his putting her on the spot like this evaporated. Her, the girl who had crushed so hard on a boy who was too old for her, the girl who had been ignored, rejected, then brutally passed over for her mother, the girl who had dealt with those horrible feelings of treachery and rebuff... She kissed him back.

  She wasn’t terribly experienced and that was his fault, too. These were the arms she had wanted from the first. These were the lips. This was the man.

  He drew back and she realized he had one possessive hand drawing slow circles on her butt. That’s why flutters of excitement were working up her lower back and into her loins. The fireworks that had been going off behind her closed eyelids were actually flashes. The roar in her ears was excited laughter and cheering. Sly jeering.

  At her expense.

  Oh, this mean bastard of a man. He didn’t even let her go when she pressed her weak arms against his chest and tried to make space to catch her breath.

  His embrace tightened to keep her smeared across his front. All she could do was hide her face by resting her ear against his chest and look toward the back wall—where Etienne stared at her with his lip curled in contempt.

  * * *

  “You—” So many filthy names crowded her tongue as Ramon closed them into his office minutes later that she couldn’t pick one. “How could you?”

  Her chest was tight, her voice fractured. Her entire world was topsy-turvy and it didn’t help that she was in the mirror image of Henri’s office, situated on the other side of a pair of connecting doors to her right. She definitely felt as though she stood on the wrong side of a looking glass.

  Ramon threw off his jacket and slung it over the back of the sofa as he passed the conversation lounge. He dug his ringing phone from the pocket of his pants on his way to his desk in front of the tall windows.

  “I need to take this. Stay here until you can find a suitable glow of delight. You looked like hell as we left. Good thing they only saw the back of you. Hola.”

  “Are you serious?” a woman’s voice said. It sounded like Trella, but she and Angelique sounded very similar.

  Ramon propped the phone against his laptop dock and glared at it. “This is your fault. Say ‘thank you.’”

  Definitely Trella.

  “Why would you do something like that to poor Isidora? She didn’t know it was coming, did she?”

  “Did I take you by surprise, mi amor?” He turned his head to glance at where she stood like a whipped dog, hovering inside the closed door, trying to find her bearings among the cool masculine colors and implacable lines of the décor.

  “Izzy’s with you? I’m so sorry, Izzy.” Trella was one of the few people who could get away with calling her that.

  “It’s fine,” Isidora lied, forcing herself to move until she was close enough to see both Trella and Angelique in the screen, but not so close she joined Ramon in the tiny window. “I should have found a way to defuse those photos before they became more than we could contain. But we’ll need a statement from you. There’s no more avoiding it.”

  “It’s not your fault.” Trella spoke in the same pained tone she had used each time Isidora had tried coaxing her toward a disclosure. “I know I have to cop to eating for two, but I don’t want...”

  To tell the father. That was obvious, since she refused to name him even to her family. They all had a very good idea, however. Isidora had concluded herself that the man in question had to be Prince Xavier of Elazar, who had been photographed kissing “Angelique” earlier this year.

  As Ramon had said himself, Isidora had never had a problem telling the twins apart. She had known straight away that Trella had been caught kissing that particular prince, while Angelique was the twin in the photos with Kasim.

  Did Prince Xavier know which twin he had kissed? That was a question for another day. She imagined Angelique’s fiancé, now King Kasim, must have some opinions on the matter as well, since his intended appeared to have two-timed him. But Angelique had never said a word on the topic. Today, she showed nothing but loving protectiveness as she looped an arm around her sister and gave Trella a comforting hug.

  “Why don’t I walk over right now and we can discuss some angles,” Isidora suggested. She could use an excuse to leave the building and get some air.

  “Pahahaha!” Trella sputtered.

  “You can’t!” Angelique cried at the same time, urgently shaking her head.

  “Why not? Is there something going on at the design house—?”

  “You’re one of us now, moza amiga.” Trella leaned forward as though speaking to a child. “You travel by armored tank and avoid leading the hunters to the door. Seriously, hermano. What were you thinking?”

  “What do you mean?” Isidora asked, even as reality began to sink in. Declaring a fake engagement, putting her on the spot in front of the cameras like that, had been awful, but the greater ramifications began to strike her consciousness.

  No. The explosion of excitement downstairs had been for Ramon. Hadn’t it? The paparazzi wouldn’t think they had found a fresh target in her, would they?

  She had never thought of herself as naive, but suddenly saw herself as the world’s most gullible idiot.

  “Have you talked to your parents?” Angelique asked with concern, voicing what was finally hitting Isidora’s sluggish
brain. “They’re probably getting calls.”

  Her mother.

  Isidora touched her brow. All those years she had spent lying to the world, including to her own father, spinning and downplaying her mother’s affairs so their family wouldn’t be talked about and vilified. Now every single tryst would be dug up. Her mother’s past lovers might even throw their names into the ring of fame, just to have their moment in the spotlight. It didn’t matter that her parents had eventually divorced over Francisca Villanueva’s infidelity. She had cheated on Bernardo Garcia dozens of times and he would be forced to relive all of it. He would be humiliated all over again.

  Isidora flung around to face Ramon. Of all the things he’d done, this was, by far, the worst. “I will never forgive you for this.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  ISIDORA’S MOTHER ANSWERED her call with “Oh, mi cielo. Henri just called. Such thrilling news! You’ve always loved Ramon so much—”

  “Henri called you?” Isidora interrupted, praying her mother’s voice hadn’t carried.

  Ramon was focused on his own phone as it buzzed with incoming texts. “Si,” Ramon said to Isidora. “Henri was watching the press conference. He’s sending a car for your mother now.”

  “Henri is worried reporters will descend on you,” Isidora informed her mother.

  Francisca would definitely say the wrong thing if she knew the engagement was a publicity stunt. Isidora didn’t clear up her mother’s misconception, and just said, “You should pack, Mama. Don’t keep them waiting.”

  “Where is Ramon? I want to give him my love.” It was a twist of the knife her mother had plunged into her heart five years ago.

  Isidora didn’t waste hatred on her own flesh and blood, though. She didn’t even bother speculating why her mother had taken Ramon to her bed when she had known how her daughter felt about him. She had processed long ago that her mother had an illness. An addiction. It looked like a dependence on sex, but it was actually a broken, empty soul starving for love and admiration. She was permanently an abandoned adolescent, like a broken runaway, with the same lack of judgment and gaping emotional needs.

  Isidora would never feed in to that heartache by rejecting or reviling her. She did what she could to protect her. That’s why she held Ramon in such contempt. How could he take advantage of someone so vulnerable?

  “Henri has spoken to both your parents. He’s bringing them to Sus Brazos for a few days while things blow over,” Ramon told her.

  Don’t put them together, Isidora wanted to protest. Her parents were weak-willed where the other was concerned. It always ended the same, with her mother cheating and leaving for another man while her father nursed a freshly shattered heart. The hairline fracture left in Isidora’s heart pulsed with an old ache as she contemplated another round of emotional turmoil.

  “Is that the doorbell, Mama?” Isidora broke in to her mother’s breathy ramblings. “Tell the staff to ask for identification. Call me when you’re settled. Te amo.”

  Isidora ended the call and sent a text to her mother’s housekeeper with the same instruction about checking for identity.

  “So,” Ramon said as their flurry of communication ended and they set aside their phones.

  “Why?” she cried. “Why would you do that?”

  Why had he said he loved her? It made it all the more hurtful. Thorny vines were tangled around her insides, squeezing and prickling. Half of it was self-recrimination. She would love to say she had gone along with it because she was a professional willing to sacrifice herself on the altar of her career. In truth, she had been so stunned, so appalled that he would exploit her old feelings in such a careless manner, she had been struck dumb.

  “You know why. The retirement announcement wasn’t working.”

  “Why me?” It was cruel. Her cheeks and throat and chest still burned, but when had he ever cared about hurting her?

  “Was I supposed to come out as gay and propose to Etienne?” So blithe, shrugging off the damage he’d done. “I admit, that might have created a more effective stir, but maintaining that ruse for any length of time...?”

  “Do you honestly think anyone is going to believe we’re a couple?” She wanted to kill him.

  “That’s up to you, isn’t it? I’m serious about you working on looking more pleased about marrying a Sauveterre. We have an image to maintain,” he added with a disdainful tilt of his lips.

  “Quit making jokes! This isn’t funny.” Her pulse raced like she was being chased through a dark forest by a pack of wolves. “I am not marrying you.”

  “No,” he agreed, the single word dropping her old hopes like china on concrete. “But you will play the part of my fiancée until the attention on our family dies down.”

  “Oh, right. When has that ever happened? No, Ramon. I refuse. Go ahead and fire me for insubordination. Make my day.”

  He folded his arms and leaned his hips on the desk, his expression bored. “Are you done?”

  “Are you implying I’m overreacting?” She was trembling, hands fisted at the ends of her tensed arms, entire body twitching with fight or flight. “You’re ruining my life.”

  “Please,” he scoffed. “This is your job. You’re in front of the cameras all the time, standing next to one of us, making statements that say nothing. It’s more of the same.”

  “It’s not. I’m fine as a Sauveterre minion, but I don’t want to be the main event!”

  “You’re not a minion.” He drew back a little, sending her an annoyed frown. “You’re part of the inner circle. You know that.”

  “Since when?” His siblings might treat her that way, but he certainly didn’t.

  “I wouldn’t have gone down today’s route with anyone else, even if there had been other choices. We trust you. This is obvious by the position you hold. How is this news to you?”

  “You trust me?” She refused to let herself believe it. Wouldn’t allow it to be important. “After what you said this morning about making my life difficult? Or was it miserable? Either way, you’re ticking all the boxes, aren’t you?”

  He didn’t move, but his expression hardened. “Let’s talk about how I really ruined your life, shall we? Clearly we have to get that out of the way before you’ll be able to act like a grown-up.”

  No. She felt her throat flex as it closed around a cry of pain, like an arrow speared into her windpipe. Without a word, she spun and headed for the door.

  A snick sounded as she approached it. Oh, he had not just locked it. She gave the latch a furious wriggle and yanked on the door, but nothing happened. It was oddly frightening. She didn’t fear him exactly, but she was terrified of the feelings he provoked in her. They were always off the scale. And to lock her in and insist she talk about that?

  No. Clammy sweat broke out on her forehead. Her hands and feet went icy cold.

  She spun to see him behind his desk. His hand came away from a panel that he casually closed so the surface of his desk was smooth and unbroken once again.

  “Why are you such a horrible person?”

  “You know why. That is what I’ve been saying.” He spoke in a flat, implacable tone. The fact that he didn’t deny being reprehensible did nothing to reassure her. He moved to the wet bar near the sitting area and pulled out a bottle of anise. “Your preferred spirit, I believe?”

  She didn’t answer, thinking it strange that he would know that. It was a common drink in Spain, though. It was probably a lucky guess. He poured them each a glass.

  “You know our family history, Isidora. You played with my sisters when they had forgotten how. You visited Trella when she imprisoned herself in Sus Brazos. You showed a preference for me when every other girl on the planet couldn’t tell me apart from my brother and didn’t bother to try. Come. Sit.”

  She stayed stubbornly by the locked door, arms folded, face on fire. She stood there and hated him for knowing how infatuated she had been. For talking about it like it was some cute, childish memory. Nostalgia for a
first pet.

  Most of all, she hated him for making her stand here and relive the morning when two of her most painful experiences collided and became an utterly unbearable one.

  He leaned to set her drink on a side table and sipped his own, remaining standing, flinty gaze fixed on her resentful expression.

  “I was flattered, but I couldn’t take you seriously. You were too young.”

  She had known that. Eight years was a big gap and aside from a handful of boyish pursuits, he and his brother had always been beyond their years. Their sister’s kidnapping when they were fifteen had very quickly matured them, then their father’s early death had forced them to take control of an international investment corporation at twenty-one. They had been carrying tremendous responsibility for a decade. In many ways, Ramon was still too old for her.

  “I don’t care that you never wanted to date me.” Lie. She cared. His disinterest had been demoralizing. “What I can’t forgive is that you slept with my mother.”

  “I didn’t sleep with her,” he growled.

  She snorted and looked away, working to keep her face noncommittal while she was dying inside, aching to believe that, but she wasn’t stupid. The fact he would lie to her face about it made it even worse.

  “Did you ask her?” he prompted.

  “No!” As if she wanted details about any of the men her mother slept with, most especially him. “I didn’t have to, did I? The evidence spoke for itself.”

  “The evidence,” he repeated, tone light yet dangerous, increasing her tension.

  “You were half-dressed, wearing a night’s stubble, and the hood of your car was cold. It doesn’t take a forensic scientist to figure out where you spent the night.”

  “I’ve never denied spending the night.”

  “In her bed. Two pillows were used. I looked.”

  “I reclined on her bed while she changed and removed her makeup. We were talking. Nothing happened. We went back downstairs and drank enough that I decided to sleep it off on the sofa. I woke when I heard you come in. I tried to tell you this at your father’s birthday. You walked away.”