The Inconvenient Bride

by Anne McAllister

  She just wished. And then, sometime during the second episode, Sierra heard a noise in the doorway and turned around to find Dominic standing there.

  “I thought I’d make some popcorn,” he said. “Want some?” he asked Frankie.

  The boy’s eyes shone. “You bet.”

  Star Trek was put on hold while they made popcorn. Then the two of them sat side by side on the sofa, the popcorn bowl between them, engrossed in the video while Sierra and Pam looked at each other and shook their heads.

  When the video ended, Frankie told Dominic how much his apartment looked like a tree house he’d drawn.

  “You draw tree houses?” Dominic asked. And he opened a cabinet and took out a yellowed folder and showed Frankie drawings of house plans and tree house plans he’d drawn as a boy.

  “Oh, cool. Way cool” Frankie exclaimed. “Lookit, Ma. Don’tcha like this one.”

  “I prefer this one,” Dominic said, showing him an even more elaborate one.

  “Oh, wow,” Frankie breathed, looking at Dominic with hero worship in his eyes.

  The bonding, needless to say, was mutual and intense.

  “I thought he was supposed to be a stuck-up jerk,” Pam whispered to Sierra when they left “the boys” to their tree houses and went to the kitchen to make some cocoa.

  Sierra smiled a little wistfully. “He tries to be. Sometimes. He keeps his assets well hidden.”

  “I like him,” Pam said.

  “I do, too.”

  Worse, every day, heaven help her, she fell more deeply in love.

  She saw how hard he worked on the business. It demanded his attention most of the day and half of the night, but he didn’t seem to mind. And while he expected a lot of his employees, he treated them like human beings, too.

  He came home early one night after telling Sierra he’d be late because of a meeting.

  “No meeting?” she’d said, surprised.

  “Canceled it.”

  “Why?”

  “Doakes’s daughter had a dance recital,” he mumbled.

  Sierra’s eyes widened. He’d canceled a business meeting so one of his managers could go to his daughter’s dance recital?

  “We can meet early tomorrow morning,” he’d said gruffly. “The work will get done.”

  “Of course it will,” Sierra said. She moved to kiss him, then stopped. She couldn’t do that unless she was ready to resume intimacies with him. It would be teasing if she did, taunting, tempting. Even if she didn’t mean it to be.

  What she wanted it to mean was that she loved him.

  But she still didn’t think he was ready to hear it.

  He made it difficult to stay aloof, though. Just yesterday he’d called from work right after she got home.

  “I’m going to be late,” he said, and she smiled because in the last few days he’d taken to calling and telling her if he wasn’t going to be there for dinner. “I’ve got to stop by the hospital.”

  Sierra felt an immediate stab of panic. “Why? What happened?”

  “Nothing major. My secretary, Shyla, had her baby this morning, that’s all. But I said I’d stop in to see her. Admire the offspring. Do you think I ought to take it a Yankees’ cap?”

  Dominic and his Yankees. Sierra grinned. “By all means. Gotta start ’em young. Tell her and her husband congratulations. What did they name him?”

  “Deirdre Eileen,” he said. “They had a girl.”

  Probably the only girl to go home with her very own Yankees’ cap, Sierra thought as she hung up the phone and stared out the window, smiling.

  Oh, Dominic! Why are you making this so difficult?

  She wanted a child with him. A child like Dierdre Eileen or Stephen or Lizzie. A child to wear the smallest size Yankees’ cap. To cuddle, to hug and to love. A child with Dominic’s dark hair and deep blue eyes.

  So, go to bed with him, her mind argued.

  There was no question that he wanted her to. He still looked at her with the same hunger. He didn’t say a word. He didn’t have to. She saw it in his gaze.

  But later that evening when he came home, telling her it was as ugly a kid as he’d ever seen, and it was a good thing he’d given it the Yankees’ cap to distract peoples’ attention, she burst out laughing, and they smiled at each other, and the flames of desire rose between them hot and fierce.

  But still she didn’t go to him.

  Because she wanted not just his child, but his love.

  “Your father,” Shyla’s replacement said the next morning, “on line one.”

  Dominic didn’t feel the usual instant clench in his stomach that he normally felt when he heard those words. Douglas had been lying low since the night he’d met his son’s new wife. But Dominic knew better than to hope such reticence would last forever.

  He punched in line one and said with all the good cheer he could muster, “Dad! What’s up? Haven’t heard from you in a while.”

  “I’ve been busy,” Douglas said flatly. “Had a reception to arrange.”

  “Somebody getting married?”

  “You did,” Douglas replied. “So I thought it was only fitting that I give you a wedding bash.”

  A wedding reception for him and Sierra? “We don’t need—”

  “Of course you do.” Douglas’s voice was a smooth tempered steel. “We need to introduce your bride to our friends and colleagues. Don’t we?”

  Dominic felt ill. “It’s not necessary,” he began again.

  But his father cut him off. “Of course it is. Unless you’re ashamed of her?”

  Dominic gritted his teeth. “I’m not ashamed of her!”

  “But you are married to her?” There was a faint desperate note in Douglas’s voice.

  “Of course I’m married to her! What the hell did you think? That I brought her along just to make a point?”

  “You married her to make a point, didn’t you?” Douglas asked mildly.

  Dominic shoved his fingers through his hair. “It’s my business and hers why we got married.” His response was weak, and he knew it. His father’s snort of derision only underscored the fact.

  “You damn fool,” Douglas grated.

  “I’d have been a bigger fool letting you tell me who to marry, how to run my life!”

  “So you married someone entirely inappropriate instead!”

  “Who says she’s inappropriate?” Dominic couldn’t believe how suddenly angry he was.

  “You think she’ll fit right in, do you? No one will even notice when she takes her place on the board of the charity foundation? No one will bat an eyelash at having a purple-haired woman on the hospital committee.”

  “Why should they care what color her hair is if our money is still green?”

  “It’s not them who will care,” Douglas bit out. “It’s the committee!”

  “Too damn bad.”

  “Too damn bad,” Douglas echoed mockingly. “For God’s sake, Dominic!”

  Dominic scowled, knowing exactly what his father meant, and resenting it furiously. Anyone who knew Sierra would know she was worth ten of those women. “They need to look beyond the surface,” he growled. “They need to wake up and realize not everyone in the world dresses the way they do.”

  “And it was your mission in marrying Sierra to teach them that?”

  “Of course not. But—”

  “No, it wasn’t. It was your mission in marrying Sierra to show me up. What I want to know is, did you stop and think how all this was going to affect Sierra?”

  Oh, now he was going to make it seem like Sierra was a victim? Anyone less like a victim Dominic couldn’t imagine. “She didn’t have to say yes!”

  “Why did she?”

  It was like being socked in the gut. A simple mild question that cut straight to the bone. As if Sierra had had no more reason to marry him than Carin—who hadn’t.

  “Go to hell, “he said through his teeth.

  “Sorry,” his father said quickly. “I didn’t mean�
��” He cleared his throat, but didn’t speak.

  What, after all, Dominic wondered, was there left to say?

  But being Douglas, of course, he found something. “I’m giving a reception for you, Dominic. For you and Sierra.”

  “Why? So you can hurt her the way you think she shouldn’t be hurt?” Dominic said bitterly.

  “If you believe that, you’re no son of mine.”

  “Then why?”

  “To show a little family solidarity. She’s your wife. She’s my daughter-in-law. She’s a part of Wolfe’s now.”

  “Lucky her,” Dominic muttered. Then, “Fine,” he said recklessly, “have a reception for us. Invite the whole damn city if you want.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “A RECEPTION?” Sierra beamed at the news. They were walking through Central Park on Sunday afternoon. The sun was shining. People were playing Frisbee and walking dogs and tossing footballs and, according to Sierra, all was right with the world. “How nice of him.”

  Dominic didn’t think it was nice at all.

  For all that the old man had blathered on about family solidarity, Dominic knew the people who would be there—most of whom wouldn’t be family, and a great many of whom would have an opinion about Sierra with her purple hair and her funky clothing—and the opinion wouldn’t be good.

  Personally he didn’t give a rat’s ass what they thought of his wife. But he knew they could freeze a polar bear’s toe-nails in their dismissive, haughty, but very genteel way.

  And he was damned if he was going to let them hurt Sierra.

  The trouble was, he didn’t know how to prevent it, short of telling her to dye her hair brown, paint her fingernails pink, and get a dress from some subdued, sophisticated designer. And if he did that, she’d think he was embarrassed to be seen with her.

  He wasn’t.

  Admittedly, it made him a little self-conscious, knowing that peoples’ heads turned at the sight of the two of them together. They were turning now at the sight of Sierra in her neon pink spandex top, black leather jeans and wide-brimmed floppy hat, walking alongside him in his Brooks Brothers’ khakis and pale blue Oxford-cloth long-sleeved shirt.

  “Mr. Buttondown and the free spirit,” Rhys had called them this morning when they’d had brunch with him and Mariah.

  “They’re good for each other. A balance,” Mariah had said approvingly.

  A balance pretty much summed it up. He was still sleeping at one end of the hall and she was at the other. She talked with him, laughed with him, cooked with him, watched TV with him. But she hadn’t touched him since the night they’d fought. It had been two weeks.

  “When is the reception?” Sierra asked him now. “And where?”

  Douglas had called right before they’d gone out, giving Dominic the final information. He told Sierra now, “This coming Friday. He’s rented a yacht. A dinner cruise down around the tip of Manhattan Island and up the East River, then out by the Statue of Liberty.”

  Sierra looked delighted. “Fantastic. How romantic with the sunset and the city skyline as a backdrop!”

  “And three hundred of the old man’s nearest and dearest friends and associates.”

  Sierra blinked. “Whoa. That’s a lot. But Rhys and Mariah will be there, won’t they?”

  Dominic nodded. “Nathan, too. Dad said he’d told Nath to turn up, and apparently he’s going to.”

  Nathan, the middle brother, was a globe-trotting photographer, the one son who’d eschewed any interest in the family business—or the family, for the most part.

  But apparently when Douglas meant family solidarity, he meant all the family, even if he had to haul them back from the ends of the earth.

  “I’m looking forward to meeting him. Is he anything like you?”

  “More like you. He doesn’t own a suit.”

  “Heaven forbid.” She laughed. “Still, it will be fun, don’t you think?”

  Dominic forced a smile. “Sure. It’ll be great.”

  And if anyone gave her any grief, they’d better hope they could swim!

  Friday evening. 6:00 p.m.

  The moment of truth.

  And as far as Sierra was concerned, definitely one of those Anna and the King of Siam moments. One of those mind-shattering, throat-grabbing, pure panic moments where she’d certainly have whistled a happy tune, if only she could have mustered enough spit.

  They had boarded the yacht half an hour before.

  “Yacht?” she’d said, gaping when she’d first seen it at the Hudson River pier. “It looks more like an ocean liner!”

  Dominic had given her a grave smile. But his expression showed him to be almost as nervous as she felt, though exactly what Dominic had to be nervous about she was sure she didn’t know!

  They were, after all, his friends and his colleagues, his father’s choices from his particular world. Oh, Finn and Izzy and the kids were coming. So were Chloe and Gib and Brendan, and two or three other couples whose names Dominic had got from her, including Sam and Josie Fletcher and their son, Jake. Not to mention, Rhys and Mariah, Dominic’s brother Nathan and, to Sierra’s surprise, her own parents.

  “Of course I invited them,” Douglas had said just minutes before. “It’s only proper.”

  Proper.

  That was what Sierra was worried about.

  Ordinarily she didn’t. Ordinarily she just went her merry way, did what she thought was right, and let the chips fall where they might.

  But “right” wasn’t necessarily the same in the world Dominic often inhabited. And she desperately didn’t want to embarrass him.

  She loved him, regardless of how he felt about her. And while she didn’t think he had any great expectations of marriage—except of course the sex he wasn’t getting at the moment—she didn’t want him to regret marrying her.

  So she was going to try to behave like some finishing school female for the next six hours, even though she thought she might croak.

  She wondered again if she should have dyed her hair. She could have gone brown for the affair. It wouldn’t have killed her. She’d been a blonde, after all, for Mariah’s wedding so as not to shock a hundred impressionable Kansans.

  But that had been for Mariah’s wedding, because Sierra hadn’t wanted to attract attention that should rightly have been her sister’s. It had been right then to fade into the background.

  Somehow, even though it might have made things easier, she couldn’t bring herself to do it here. It would have felt like a copout. It would have seemed, even if only to her, that she wasn’t being true to herself.

  So her hair was still pretty purple—sort of more of a black cherry, actually—and she’d done it sleek and shining, then because they would be outdoors for a good part of it, she wore a broad-brimmed pink hat. Her dress was silk, purples and pinks, short and stunning, sleeveless with a high neckline. Very basic, yet very Sierra. Not as funky as some of her clothes, but not likely to turn up in the next issue of Town and Country, either.

  It made her feel as if she could almost cope.

  “They’re boarding,” Rhys came in to report. The guests, he meant. When they came on board, they would go through a sort of modified reception line, just Sierra and Dominic, her parents and Douglas.

  “So everyone gets to meet the bride,” Douglas said cheerfully. “Won’t take long. Then you can move around and visit with people. Then dinner and dancing. You look wonderful, my dear.” He gave Sierra an encouraging smile and looked as if he actually meant it.

  She smiled back, then put her hand on Dominic’s black tuxedo jacket sleeve and took a deep breath.

  “You all right?” Dominic asked her. He sounded worried.

  “Fine,” Sierra said briskly. She gave him her best whistling-in-the-dark grin, and made up her mind that she was telling the truth.

  No one was rude to her face.

  Of course they were all too proper for that, too well brought up, too genteel. Dominic knew they wouldn’t do anything so impolite
as to say what they were thinking, nor would they be so obvious as to catch a glimpse of the bride, then turn and walk away.

  But sometimes, out of the corner of his eye, he saw people looking askance. The women, of course, more than the men. He heard mutters. The occasional indrawn breath of astonishment followed, naturally, by disapproval.

  He gritted his teeth, smiled politely, said all the appropriate things. And hoped Sierra didn’t hear.

  She gave no sign that she did. She was as warm and friendly and engaging as she always was. She sparkled in public, like a jewel.

  Costume jewelry, Dominic imagined most people would think, looking at her.

  But it wasn’t true. Sierra was as deep and radiant as the finest diamond. Her beauty came from within, not from what she chose to wear.

  “Whatever could he have been thinking?” he heard just then, the voice a carrying whisper almost right behind them. Dominic turned slightly to see one of his mother’s old bridge club members, Sylvia Ponsonby-Merrill, using her driving glasses to take another look at his bride.

  “I really can’t imagine.” This voice was even more familiar. Younger. Mellifluous and carefully cultured. “I’m sure he wasn’t thinking,” she said. It was Marjorie—she who’d demanded an engagement ring in return for her favors—disapproving now in honeyed tones. “Or,” she added with a small laugh, “certainly not with his head!”

  Sierra was speaking to Talitha Thomas, the widow of one of his father’s oldest friends. Talitha was patting her hand and beaming up at her, and Sierra was smiling and clasping the old woman’s hand. She didn’t falter once, but all the same, Dominic was sure she heard the exchange between Sylvia and Marjorie.

  He wondered if either of them could swim.

  Then his father appeared and invited the two of them to admire the sunset from the top deck, and the conversation turned to other topics.

  Sierra went right on talking to Talitha.

  On her behalf, though, Dominic fumed.

  At first it was awful.

  Like the first day of school in kindergarten, when you knew hardly anybody, and no one wanted to know you.