Bound by the Millionaire's Ring

by Dani Collins

  It didn’t even bother her that they were working. They went into the company offices most days, at least for a few hours, then she ran to the site with him, smiled for photo ops, or stood by while he courted local officials at cocktail parties.

  Ramon was as popular as ever with the paparazzi, having raced in São Paulo, but the animosity toward her was dying down so the attention felt quite friendly. She supposed people were beginning to believe it really was true love that had motivated him to quit racing. He certainly gave that impression, acting attentive, playing the part of enamored fiancé very convincingly when they were in public.

  Heck, she was falling for it. She told herself it was nothing more than a revival of her old crush, this time more of a sexual infatuation, but she couldn’t help feeling connected to him and he made it seem like it was reciprocated.

  Because he wasn’t putting on a show. At least, she didn’t think he was. He was every bit as thoughtful and charming in private as he was for an audience. They retreated to his penthouse as often as they could, where he lavished her with attention. Whether they drank coffee in robes as they overlooked the ocean, or drank wine under the stars in his jet tub, his bare foot might seek hers, or he might pull her to sit with her back against his front. It was seduction, but at a slow pace. They made love constantly, but he was just as prone to maintaining physical contact afterward as before and during. He said sweet and sexy things, but they talked about other things, too. They debated world events and types of music and theater versus film. They bantered and rolled their eyes at each other and sent each other cheeky texts.

  And then, when they had been scheduled to leave two days ago, he had said, “Why don’t we stay and do the final coffee reception with the team. The view is something everyone should see if they’ve come all the way to Rio.”

  It had meant another night of lovemaking, another day of feeling like a spoiled bride on her honeymoon because he wanted her to experience something he knew she would like.

  Now she stood at the rail of Páo de Açúcar, Sugarloaf Mountain, and the view was amazing. She looked back on the cable car that had brought their team up. Wispy clouds decorated an intense blue sky, and far into the distance Rio de Janeiro sprawled in a river of concrete gray through the valleys between high, green-coated peaks. A lazy line of sandy beach drew a border between the land and the green-blue water that stretched endlessly into the horizon.

  She felt as though she stood on the top of the world.

  She loved him for extending their stay and bringing her up here. For wanting to spend more time with her. For making her feel like she was loved back.

  She loved him.

  Oh, no.

  As she took in the dizzying view from what felt like the top of the world, fingers clinging to the rail, everything fell away below her. It was nothing but down, down, down.

  Which was how far she had fallen for Ramon. Not a crush this time. The real thing. The most devastating kind of love. The all-in, heart-surrendered kind of love.

  Oh, no.

  Ramon’s warm hand settled beneath her clipped hair, finding the crook of her shoulder at the back of her neck. “Good thinking—”

  She knew immediately it was him, but was so deep in thought, instantly so fearful of him finding out, she reacted with a flinch and a startled gasp.

  He gave her a little frown. “I only wanted to say it was good thinking to arrange this as a thank-you. They’re all taking selfies and posting to social media, exactly the sort of excitement we want to convey. Are you all right? You’re pale.”

  “Vertigo.” She turned away from the view of paradise, stomach still plummeting into the abyss. “That was the idea when I suggested it,” she murmured, feeling like that day he had proposed to her in front of the cameras was a million years ago. So much had changed, yet nothing had. “I didn’t expect to be here enjoying it with them, though.”

  “I’m glad you are. Here, I brought you one.”

  Was he glad to be with her? Or had she been conjuring happiness all week, wanting to believe in a mirage?

  She accepted the mug he held and watched him pick up one he’d set on the rail. She sipped, needing the rush of sugar and caffeine to help her get a grip on her composure.

  “I don’t know if I’ll be able to go back to my French press after this.”

  “I only drink cafezinho when I’m here. It doesn’t taste right anywhere else.”

  “Ah. Well, since this is our last day, and I probably won’t be back, I’ll have to appreciate this last taste, won’t I?”

  A beat of silence followed. She went over her words in her head, wondering if he heard the parallel. How much longer would she enjoy him and then never taste him again?

  “I was thinking about extending our stay again. Would you like that?” He squinted into the view. A muscle pulsed in his jaw. “You haven’t seen the statue.”

  Christ the Redeemer, he meant.

  Her pulse skipped and she was windmilling her arms over the gorge again, anxious to latch on to what sounded like feelings of being equally enamored on his side.

  “That’s up to you, isn’t it?” She stung as she said it. She had completely handed him the keys to their relationship. He steered it. He decided how far they went. Now she really did feel sick and heavy, the ground rushing up at her.

  She opened her mouth, not sure what to say, how to recover, when an unusually loud jangle brought his hand to his chest pocket and a fierce, terrifying look to his face.

  “What—?”

  “That’s the emergency ringtone.” His hand slid to her upper arm and he drew her toward a quiet space away from the edge, where they had a semblance of privacy while he flicked through his phone.

  His teeth bared. “Every. Damn. Time.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “The prince of Elazar has Trella.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  RAMON COULDN’T BELIEVE he’d let himself become so distracted. Lingering an extra two days was bad enough, but he’d been on the brink of adding to that shirking of responsibility. He was furious with himself.

  In silence, he got them back to the penthouse, where they gathered their things for the flight he’d just moved up. They would take off the minute they could get themselves to the tarmac.

  He packed light at the best of times and had been coming and going from this penthouse for twenty-four months. He was ready in minutes, but Isidora had managed to imprint herself all over the place. A pair of shoes here, a lipstick there.

  As he moved around, picking up various items, he tried not to think of his participation in littering them about. He had pulled that hair clip from her tidy daytime chignon as she had shyly taken him in her mouth. That scarf on the end table had made a loose figure eight around his wrists as she straddled him and playfully took control for an erotic hour. He had even left a pair of her silk cheekies in the pocket of his suit, when she had let him bend her over his desk the other day at the office. They had fought groaning aloud so they wouldn’t be heard and he had to bite back a mixture of frustration and renewed desire now.

  This had to stop.

  He found the scrap of lace in the jacket in the closet and threw everything he’d collected into the open suitcase.

  “Thanks.” Her mouth quirked and she blushed self-consciously, turning away to gather tubes and small color palettes off the dresser to put into a cosmetic bag. “Were you able to reach Trella?”

  “No.” Trella had given Henri her security code herself and seemed to be staying with the prince voluntarily, but she was having an attack, according to Gili.

  Isidora glanced at him. “Is Angelique going to her?”

  “No. And she shouldn’t have to. She’s the queen of Zhamair. I’m the one who should be on hand for that.”

  Isidora paused in pulling the drawstring on a shoe bag. Her lashes swept low across cheekbones that darkened with color.

  “Am I being blamed for that?” She threw the bag into the suitcase and clo
sed it.

  “Not directly.”

  “Ah.” She smiled flatly as she reached to zip the case. “I’m the enabler.”

  “I shouldn’t have let my libido do my thinking. I know better.”

  She breathed out sharply, as if she’d taken a hit to the solar plexus. “Look, I know you’re upset, but—”

  “You don’t know. This is why I will never have a woman in my life. This—” He motioned to the space between and around them, the crackling physical connection that had been so enthralling he had ignored the world outside it. “This ends now.”

  Her head went back, taking it on the chin with a flare of shock in her gray eyes.

  He braced himself for an argument. Wheedling. Some kind of resistance.

  She only offered a slow blink of acceptance, and somehow that was worse.

  “Bueno,” she said softly and turned to lift her case off the bed.

  He was so shocked, he didn’t move. He listened as she took it to the door herself, the rolling wheels loud across the ceramic tiles. When he finally moved to join her at the door, his joints felt stiff, words jammed sideways in his throat.

  The silence wasn’t an angry one, but it blistered as they traveled with their security detail to the airport and boarded his private plane.

  He told himself not to dwell on whether he had stepped on her feelings. She understood. She had gone into this with her eyes open. His fixation on her was the root of his problem right now. He shouldn’t have started their affair.

  The flight was twelve hours. They both dozed in their seats rather than moving into the state room, as they’d done on the way over. No lovemaking this time.

  As they touched down in Paris, Ramon arranged for Isidora to be taken to his apartment while he continued to Elazar alone. He didn’t ask her if she minded. Her reaction was a quiet “Please call me if there’s anything I can do.”

  There wasn’t. He saw her off the plane, then carried on to see his sister, aware of the empty seat beside him. Isidora’s presence had been strangely calming, he realized. She hadn’t intruded overtly. She didn’t pretend to understand the monsters in his emotional closet. No one except those as deeply affected by his past really understood that part of him, but Isidora had still been sincere in her concern. She had been a quiet light, keeping him from losing himself to the dark scenarios exploding in his mind.

  Those grim thoughts threatened to overtake him as he arrived at the palace in Lirona, the capital of Elazar, where he had to wait thirty minutes for security clearance. It was another twenty before someone escorted him to a private suite, where his sister was curled on the end of a sofa, looking like hell.

  Failure coalesced in a metallic taste on his tongue.

  “Why are you here?”

  That took him aback. He studied the ravages of a bad attack. Her cheeks were hollow beneath swollen eyelids. Her lips were chapped where she tended to lick and chew them as she waited out her symptoms. She wore a thick, man’s cardigan over a pair of loose silk pants and ballet slippers. She always retained a cloak of insecurity and low body temperature after coming down from the worst of it. She hugged her arms tight across herself, seeming pale and slight despite the bump at her middle.

  “What do you mean, ‘why am I here’? I’m here to get you.”

  “I told you not to come.”

  “You told Henri and Gili not to come.”

  “Well, I didn’t expect you to drop everything, did I? You were in South America, screwing your brains out with Izzy.”

  He balked at having his affair with Isidora described in such base terms, and was shocked enough by Trella knowing they had been sleeping together to ask “You talked to her? When?”

  “I didn’t. Gili said she thought something was going on between you two and you just fell for the oldest trick in the book. Seriously? How could you?”

  He pinched the bridge of his nose. “I just traveled twenty hours to come save you.” That’s why his wits were so dull. It had nothing to do with a strange, gnawing ache that kept marking the absence of that sliver of light he needed like fire needed air. “You don’t get to make me into the bad guy here.”

  “No.” She jabbed the air with a finger. “You keep saying you’re doing me a favor with this engagement of yours, but if you want to sleep with Izzy, that’s on you. Don’t claim it’s something you’re doing to benefit me.”

  “Look, what happens between me and Isidora is our business. Why don’t you tell me what’s going on here?” He waved his hand at the elegant parlor. It was a very well-appointed prison tower.

  “How many times do I have to say this? What’s going on is my business, not yours. At least I’m not taking advantage of Xavier’s feelings. I’m doing the opposite of nursing false expectations. What are you letting Isidora believe?”

  “Stow it,” he growled. “I don’t answer to you.”

  “Oh, you do. For some crazy reason Isidora has decided she would die for us, which none of us deserve, and you think that gives you license to sleep with her and break her heart?”

  “I’m not breaking her heart.” His memory flashed with the look in her eye as they left Rio, the slam of emotion that she had hidden by turning her back on him. Again.

  The pit of his stomach grew heavy. He had pushed her away because he felt guilty. He couldn’t have her and be what his family needed. The push-pull had made him snap.

  But she had known they weren’t going to last forever. She hadn’t invested her heart in him. Not again.

  Had she?

  “No, you broke it a long time ago,” Trella accused. “She never said how. She has never once said a word against you to me, because that’s who she is, but I know you did something.”

  “That was a misunderstanding.” He sliced the air with his hand, ashamed when he thought back on how he had treated her. “We sorted it out.”

  “Isidora is a good person. She’s kind. You don’t get to hurt my friend and say it’s my fault. Quit leading her on. Quit—”

  “Shut up, Bella.”

  “You shut up.”

  “No, you shut up—”

  The door flew open. A man of about his own age strode in. His commanding air would have made him the crown prince of Elazar even if Ramon hadn’t recognized his blond hair and red sash beneath a tailored business suit. Three guards entered behind him.

  “Leave quietly or I’ll have you removed.”

  Ramon snorted, hands on his hips, heart pumping hard enough with agitation to want to accept the rougher side of that ultimatum.

  “Don’t.” Trella’s weight landed against him and she looped her arms tightly around his middle, protective for once, not clinging with fear. “I was saying things he didn’t want to hear. We almost never manage to speak in a civil tone, do we? It’s not our way.” She dug her chin into the place above his heart as she batted a sugar-sweet look up at him. “But we love each other dearly, under all the cussing and yelling. Don’t we?”

  Her wrinkle-nosed grin infuriated him, but the vestiges of an emotional storm still haunted her eyes. He wanted to hug her and yell at her to quit making his life difficult, same as always.

  He looped his arm around her and squeezed gently, mindful of his unborn niece or nephew. “Who would I fight with if I didn’t have you? Gili? She cries.”

  “Henri? He lectures. I guess we agree on one thing.” She gave him another hug, then drew back, expression solemn. “Sometimes I need you, Ramon. All those times you showed up when I called makes it possible for me to work through this on my own now. I know that you will come if I ask. That means everything.” Her brow lowered to a dark, stern line. “But until I ask, you have to butt out.”

  He dropped his arm and held up his hands. “Bueno.”

  “And be nicer to Iz—”

  “No.” He held up a finger. “Butting out goes both ways. And you will introduce me to your host.” Her keeper?

  Ramon shared a perfectly civilized meal with his sister and Prince Xavier. He to
uched base with his family, texted Isidora, then slept off some of his jet lag in a room with an exalted past-occupant list that went back four hundred years. By the time he was leaving, Isidora still hadn’t replied.

  He probably deserved that, but it bothered him, especially when Trella said, “The palace is handling my PR from now on. Whatever stunts you pull with Izzy could do more damage than good. Tone it down.”

  He left in a state of discontent, ears ringing with the knowledge his primary reason for cornering Isidora into their fake engagement was gone.

  He tried calling her twice more while he was in transit, but she declined to pick up.

  Quit leading her on.

  Had he been? He hadn’t let himself examine too closely what they were doing, which wasn’t unlike him. He didn’t deconstruct the good things in his life. He enjoyed them until they reached their natural end.

  Enjoyed didn’t come close to his state of mind while he’d been with Isidora, though. Yes, the sex was out-of-this-world, but there had been something enormously relaxing about being in a relationship recognized by outsiders as inviolate. The pretty birds of prey who’d circled all his life had kept their distance. The weight of boring small talk at parties was cut in half. She made him look better than he was and when they were alone, she was equally witty, stimulating his intellect, keeping him on his toes.

  She had known it was temporary, he reminded himself. But his chest felt tight. Had he let things become too intimate? Had his drawing it out made it seem likely to become permanent?

  Maybe it was better he had scorned her again.

  Another searing pain went through him, resisting that truth. If he needed convincing, however, the sick feeling that had accosted him when Trella’s alarm had gone off was it. He hated being so vulnerable. He didn’t want to feel so worried for yet another human being.

  It was stressful enough that she was refusing to answer his calls.

  He checked her security report, but everything was listed as normal. Even the social-media reports had calmed down as his fans began fixating on when their wedding date would be announced and whether they would produce twins, as Henri had.