by Dani Collins
She was getting married to a man she would have preferred to like a little less than she did, even if that sounded more than a bit twisted. She was getting married without either of her best friends present. At the thought of Amy and Bea, her throat filled up.
The feel of the delicate silk under her fingers gave her something to anchor herself with, instead of focusing on the looping thoughts inside her head.
“He’s really a catch, you know,” Angelina Lansang continued her chatter without missing a beat. “Everyone that knows Dev is going to go crazy to discover he’s secretly got hitched. The press, the media...” The tall woman laughed, a little bit inanely. As if this was the best thing about Dev getting married.
Do any of them actually know him? Clare wanted to ask. Do they know that he’s kind and far more complex than any interview or article could ever capture?
But Clare didn’t say anything of the sort, because sweet as Angelina had been during the time it had taken to sail to the island, she couldn’t betray the fact that this was a fake wedding.
For a few, fleeting seconds, Angelina considered Clare thoughtfully before smiling again. “I hope you’re ready for all the attention you’re going to get, my dear.” Clare resolutely kept her mouth closed.
* * *
Not only did she not know Angelina well enough, she didn’t trust her own thoughts. Several days of pondering this every which way hadn’t untangled her thoughts any better.
Since the other woman was waiting for a response, Clare smiled. “I can’t thank you enough for everything, Angelina.”
Angelina nodded, and returned her smile.
Ever since Clare and Dev had met up with Derek and Angelina the following day in Rio and he’d introduced Clare as his fiancée, asking them to join them at his villa and witness the ceremony, Angelina had completely changed her attitude. Not that Clare wasn’t grateful.
It was, after all, thanks to Angelina’s insistence that Dev had reluctantly agreed to Clare shopping for a suitable bridal outfit before leaving Rio. Not that Clare couldn’t have fought that particular battle herself.
Even if the agreement between them was that this wedding was nothing but a mutually beneficial arrangement, she’d had no intention of marrying him wearing a trouser suit more suitable for business than pleasure.
Even if it was a designer suit.
It had been while they were having that discussion that Clare had finally lost the battle of pretending that this wedding mattered as little to her as it did to him.
Yes, this was a convenient arrangement that would benefit both of them. But it didn’t mean that she couldn’t feel some sentiment. That she could treat it as just any other normal day.
The wedding was only a technicality. She had silently recited that fact so often, it was as if it were her life’s mantra. But looking at herself in the mirror, dressed as a bride, Clare knew no mantra was going to work on her.
Foolish or not, naive or not, she’d always dreamed of this day.
Because she was marrying Dev, Clare didn’t even have to build her castles on the empty promises of a charming man who was all glitter and no substance. And it was this fact that kept tripping her up.
“You look beautiful.” The surprise in Angelina’s tone brought Clare back to the present.
She knew it didn’t really matter how beautiful she looked. This marriage was only temporary and there would no doubt be countless other, far more beautiful women in Dev’s life after she’d exited it. The thought darkened her mood, the pit of her stomach suddenly hollow. And that, in turn, flipped her mood back again. She was determined never to operate out of fear or loneliness ever again.
So what if she and Dev weren’t going to promise to love each other for the rest of their lives? So what if their marriage came with a short shelf life?
She liked the man she was going to marry. She also very much liked what he was capable of doing to her with one playful glance from those twinkling eyes, with those clever fingers and with those sculpted lips. She wasn’t going to pretend that she could be all matter-of-fact and cold about this. This was no fantasy she had concocted while waiting to escape from under the indifferent roof of her aunt.
This was her life.
Clare adjusted her hair and stared again at her reflection in the mirror. The dress was classy and elegant, but sexy enough as it clung to her curves. Her skillfully styled hair helped highlight her features. Her lipstick—a vibrant red—made her mouth look full and pouty.
She looked beautiful, she was getting married and she had the serious hots for her husband-to-be.
As she turned to leave the room, Clare told herself it was okay that this wedding felt real to her. It was the most real thing that had ever happened to her. And she was going to make the most of it.
* * *
“It’s just a PR ploy,” he’d said when his best friend had asked him what the hell he was playing at the night before his wedding.
“Like hell it is,” Derek had said with a deep laugh. “You’re in deep trouble, my man.”
Now, as Dev watched his intended walk toward him in his airy Caribbean villa, he felt Derek’s words reverberate within his chest.
Clare looked nothing like some cheap participant in a PR ploy and everything like deep trouble poured into an enticingly petite frame. Just for him.
She looked stunning and elegant and beautiful in a cream-colored dress. Far too much like a real bride with her smile glowing and her eyes bright and generally radiating a serene kind of joy.
It reached Dev like a wave of emotion, intent on pulling him under.
He’d never given marriage much thought, except for knowing that it wasn’t for him. He’d been far too busy building an empire.
But as he stood there, waiting for Clare to reach him, “PR ploy” felt like the most inadequate nonsense he’d ever uttered.
“You’re in so much trouble, man,” Derek whispered again with a pat on his shoulder.
Whatever retort he wanted to throw back at his friend died as Clare reached him. As he looked into the blue eyes of the woman he’d promised himself he’d look after. He hadn’t, when he’d originally suggested the idea to her, thought to paint himself in the role of her hero.
For a long time, even into his adulthood, thinking himself as anything more than a failure had been hard. Even gaining Derek’s friendship at military school and then discovering his talent for swimming, he’d struggled to see himself as anything but a disappointment to everyone around him.
Old patterns were hard to break.
It was only after he’d made his first million that Dev had felt a sense of achievement. Which was all kinds of messed up, he knew. Equating wealth and fame and power with self-worth was going down the same poisonous line of thinking Papa had employed when he’d scoured layers of Dev’s self-esteem as a child with his harsh words.
You’ll amount to nothing if you continue like this.
And the harshest cut of all: Your mama’s lucky to have gone before she saw you like this.
By the time he’d realized that he’d started measuring himself by the same toxic yardstick as his father had done, it was too late to change. Plus, Dev had never been a hypocrite. He had enjoyed all the fame and wealth and power that his achievements and success had brought him.
Meeting Derek—who was six foot six and had weighed three hundred pounds as a sixteen-year-old, who was constantly viewed as a threat just because of his size and skin color while in actuality, the gentle giant possessed a heart of gold—had taught Dev a lot about how to manage people’s perceptions.
So Dev knew there was a good reason Derek was calling him on his nonsense about his marriage being a PR ploy.
But it was saving his reputation too, he reminded himself. This was letting up pressure on him, his family, his company and hopefully salvaging Athleta’s reputati
on. They would both simply walk away from this in a few months with their problems solved. He hadn’t told Clare yet, but he’d already had his security chief make contact with the mobster to start negotiations to try to pay off her debt.
This would be yet another satisfying business arrangement with a few pleasures thrown in as enjoyable extras. And he knew it wasn’t just him thinking about sex.
But, as he glanced at the woman now standing beside him, Dev kept hearing Derek’s sarcastic laughter inside his head.
Deep trouble, man...
It wasn’t that her simple but stunning dress made her skin shimmer. It wasn’t that she was holding a beautiful bouquet of lilies of the valley as a bride usually did. It wasn’t even the platinum ring she’d produced in contrast to the plain gold band he’d selected at her suggestion.
It was the look in her blue eyes.
She didn’t look at him as if this was a business arrangement. Or as if she was putting on an act. She simply looked as if she were gloriously happy to be marrying him. In that easy, let’s-turn-Dev’s-world-upside-down way that only she had.
From the first moment they’d met at that charity gala, she had seen him.
Him. Only him.
Dev Kohli. Not the shallow playboy, not the ruthless billionaire, not the studly stud as she’d called him, but just him.
It didn’t matter that he hadn’t given her what she’d asked for. It seemed as if she’d taken a part of him anyway, even without his permission.
As they stood there saying their vows, culminating with him bending his head and taking her mouth in a kiss that sealed her fate with his—at least temporarily—Dev had the uneasy feeling that he’d gone a step too far with this marriage. That he’d tangled himself into something he didn’t quite understand.
Because no kiss had ever shaken him to his core like this one did.
Sweet and familiar, her lips molded to his in the exact way he needed them to. Her body pressed against his with that wide-open generosity of hers, her heart thudding against his own.
She felt like she belonged to him. In a way nothing and no one else ever had.
And, as he pulled away from her perceptive gaze, and laughed at some joke that Angelina cracked, his heart beating faster and faster, Dev wondered how he was going to fight it. How he was going to maintain any kind of distance when all he wanted was to steal her away for himself.
How he was going to walk away from her when all this was over.
CHAPTER TEN
“ARE YOU DRUNK?”
Dev looked up from the open book in his lap he’d been flicking through for the last hour. The letters and words jumped and leaped on the page. Even more so than usual since his concentration was shot to hell.
He simply stared at Clare for a few seconds. Wondering if she was the cause or the means of escape from this torture.
She was standing with her back against the door to his bedroom. On the inside, he clarified for himself. The high walls and ceilings of his villa and all the skylights he’d had his architect install meant she was bathed in moonlight. Her freshly washed hair shone, and her eyes glittered with bright curiosity and something else as they swept over his naked chest.
Desire...and she didn’t bother hiding it.
Awareness slammed through Dev.
She was his wife and he was her husband. He’d figured that a piece of paper with their signatures on it didn’t really stand for much in the greater scheme of things. But he’d found that it did. He was discovering that maybe he was a traditional man at heart, after all.
A man who believed in marriage and family and all the things Mama had believed lay firmly at the center of human existence. But with that realization also came the acute feeling of inadequacy that he didn’t like. It left a bad taste in his mouth. Reminded him of how he’d struggled with it for too many years. What if he wasn’t any good as a husband?
This discovery about wanting things that he couldn’t have, wouldn’t be any good at, bothered him. After years of being a physically perfect championship-standard athlete and then his unprecedented success in the business world meant he’d forgotten how it felt to be bad at something. As a result, he was in a roaring bad mood. Which was really rare for him.
He shook his head. “No.”
Arms folded against her chest, she rolled her eyes. “Good.”
“What’s good?” he asked, knowing that he was winding her up but enjoying it anyway. They were hitting that rhythm again. Bandying words while heat built around them. This was something he was exceptionally good at.
“Well, to start with, it’s good that Derek and Angelina seem to be getting through this rough patch,” she said.
“Why is that good?”
“It’s clear that you allow very few people into your life. Derek’s happiness matters to you.”
He grunted in response. Really, the last thing he wanted to talk about was Derek and Angelina’s marriage. He didn’t want to talk at all.
He wanted her. Desperately. He wanted to be inside her. He wanted to scratch this itch—as many times as required—and be done with it. He wanted to get rid of this sentimental nonsense that had taken over his head ever since he’d slipped the ring on her finger.
“You’re not in a talking mood,” she said, licking her lips.
“No.”
“If anyone could see us now,” she said, her eyes glinting with challenge, “they’d think I was the feudal lord and you my blushing bride.”
He raised a brow. With each teasing word, she dispelled his dark mood. “And yet you’re the one plastered to the door.” He pushed the duvet down and patted the space next to him on the bed. “Care to try that theory by coming closer?”
Dev found his gaze eating her up, any remaining discontent washed away by curiosity and that simmering hum of desire.
“What the hell are you wearing?” he asked hoarsely.
She raised a rounded shoulder and one thin, almost nonexistent strap fell down. “This was the only thing I could find in the little time I had.”
It was unlike anything Dev had ever seen, outside of maybe a period drama. It was all white and made of fine cotton. But without any ghastly ruffles.
The V-shaped bodice and the floaty hem that barely touched her knees stopped it from being plain. But, unlike silk that would have hugged her petite curves, this nightgown fluttered in the breeze through the open French doors, hinting at the dips and valleys of her body.
“You disappeared from dinner too soon,” she said. “Those were your friends.”
“I had things to look over.”
“You don’t have to run away from me, you know,” she said. A hint of the fragility he’d sometimes seen in her peeked out from beneath the fierce scowl she wore.
“I’ve stopped running away from things that upset me a long time ago.”
“So I’m one of those things, am I?”
He grinned. “If you were a thing I could put in a box so I could stop thinking about it, all of this would be easy. But you’re not, are you? You’re a...”
“What?”
He shrugged.
“I think the word you’re looking for is wife. With an independent mind and a beating heart and a...” She licked her lips and Dev felt a bolt of lust shoot through him. “I decided to let you be for a little while since you looked like you were upset.”
He refused to answer.
Her lower lip trembled. “Regretting this already?”
“Not really,” he said, loath to hurt her. “But you’re right I’m not...in a good mood.”
“Okay, that’s fair enough,” she said, that lost expression receding from her eyes. And Dev knew in that moment what was bothering him so much.
He didn’t want to hurt her. He didn’t want to be the reason the fierce light that was at the heart of Clare was dimini
shed or even extinguished. He didn’t want to be another man that made her think she was less than she was.
She wasn’t that weak, he reminded herself. She’d understood what this arrangement of theirs meant. She’d accepted it.
And yet he couldn’t shed this sense of responsibility he suddenly felt toward her. He turned the gold band on his finger, feeling the solid weight of the metal.
Her gaze flicked to the action and then up to his face. But her expression remained steady. And Dev knew he was just being unreasonable now.
“Do you want me to leave?” she asked.
* * *
It felt as if even the breeze and the world and time itself stood still to witness his answer. He rubbed a hand over his face. “No. I don’t want you to leave, Clare.”
She didn’t quite smile. Her wide mouth softened.
“If I stay, I have some demands of you.”
“Don’t push it, sweetheart,” he growled.
She laughed then. “If I stay, I’m going to want to exercise my marital rights. If you’re not in the mood to accommodate me, or don’t have the energy it requires, you should tell me now.”
He burst out laughing, just as she’d intended. He licked his lower lip, sending a leisurely, thoroughly lascivious look up and down her body.
To his delight, pink crept up her neck and cheeks. “I’m always in the mood for you, Ms. Roberts,” he said with a wicked grin.
She cocked an eyebrow. “You forget that I’m Mrs. Kohli now.”
He fell back against the headboard. Warmth and something else suffused his chest. “That used to be Mama. I haven’t heard that title in a long time.”
Her fingers went to her chest and she bit her lip. “I’m sorry, Dev. I didn’t mean to poke fun at it.”
“Don’t be,” Dev said. This time, the mention of his mother didn’t leave a painful void in its wake. Not here, with the only other woman who saw through his surface qualities. Who’d always looked at him as if he could be more. As if he was more. More than the world thought him to be. More than he thought himself to be. “I have a feeling she’d have liked you.”