The Inconvenient Bride (12 page)

But the longer he spent with Sierra, the less he was sure.

In spite of his resolve not to get involved, he spent time with her. The fact was, he liked spending time with her out of bed as well as in.

He liked coming home and eating with her, some nights even cooking with her.

He liked baby-sitting with her at Rhys's and Mariah's.

After they'd eaten, he could have gone back to their apartment. Instead he hung around.

Of course, there was a Yankee game on television and he had started watching it while she heated bottles and got the twins ready for bed.

Then she appeared next to the chair where he was sitting, handed him Stephen and a bottle and said, “Feed him.”

“What? Me?” Dominic felt something vaguely akin to panic and tried to hand the baby back.

But Sierra shook her head. “He needs a little male bonding,” she told him. “Besides, I've only got two arms, and I'm going to be feeding Lizzie. Relax. You're his uncle. He loves you.”

Did he? Was being an uncle all it took? Dominic considered that as he considered the child in his arms.

He wasn't much of an expert on love. He wasn't really sure he believed in it.

Once upon a time he'd thought he did. Before Carin.

After Carin he'd given anything remotely resembling it a wide berth. As devastated as he'd been at Carin's defection, he couldn't imagine leaving himself open to caring again.

But it was hard not to care about a helpless child.

He rubbed a knuckle against Stephen's soft cheek, then
glanced up self-consciously, and felt even more so when he saw Sierra watching him.

She smiled at him. It was a warm smile. Gentle. Intimate. The same soft, satisfied look she had after he'd made love to her. As if they were sharing something special. Just the two of them.

Dominic tried to harden his heart against it. He didn't want this. He didn't!

So what the hell was he doing here?

He didn't have an answer to that.

 

She'd thought she was in love with Dominic before.

It was nothing compared to her love for him now. Every day that she spent with him—even when he was ostensibly trying to avoid her—she found more things about him to admire, to cherish, to love.

And, of course, she still wanted to go to bed with him.

She didn't dare.

Because the more she saw, the more she wanted. She wasn't settling for being a wife in bed only. She wanted the whole enchilada.

It was funny how things had changed.

Her first impression of him had been that he was rich, arrogant and, because he worked on the fifty-third floor, looked down on the rest of the world. She'd been determined to bring him down a peg. He'd been surprised, then intrigued, by her attitude toward him.

“Do most people bow and scrape?” she'd asked him once.

“The men touch their forelocks, the women curtsy,” he'd replied, never cracking a smile.

She hadn't thought he was kidding at first. Then she'd realized he was playing to her prejudices, having her on.

The metaphorical gloves came off. They sparred with
each other first verbally, then, in Kansas after the wedding, sexually.

The battle lines were drawn.

Sierra had met her match.

She loved that. She loved his determination, his fierceness, his dedication to his work. She loved his dry sense of humor, his sharp wit. She loved his way with Stephen and Lizzie, tentative, gentle and unquestionably loving.

She loved him.

She hated that he didn't want to love her, that he thought her only value was in his bed.

She was determined he would learn otherwise. And she actually thought he might be.

He'd come with her to baby-sit, hadn't he?

And though he often came home late and disappeared to work in his study in the evening, some nights he brought home dinner so she wouldn't have to cook. And always he helped clean up after.

“My mother said boys should do their share,” he told her.

“Three cheers for your mother,” Sierra replied. “I wish I'd known her.”

He told her about his mother and father, about what life had been like for the three Wolfe brothers growing up on Long Island as boys. As the oldest, Dominic had always been the leader, the responsible one, the one most like his father, and destined to follow in Douglas's footsteps from the moment he was born.

His mother had provided some necessary balance. But after her death, his father had held sway. And what was good for the business, had been good for Dominic.

But he never complained. He thrived on it just as his father had.

It made her try to explain her need to keep working to
him. He still didn't see the need for her to do it, but he actually seemed to listen when she tried to explain.

“I like making people look good. I like making them feel good about themselves. I like pleasing them. And I like working with hair. It's alive. Responsive.”

He raised an eyebrow, but he didn't contradict her.

“I like the people I work with, too. Even the bitchy cranky ones like Ballou.”

“Pardon my skepticism,” he said dryly.

“Well, I like almost everyone,” Sierra qualified with a grin.

And she saw Finn and Izzy, Gib and Chloe, and the others she worked with as often as she ever did.

But she didn't see Pam and Frankie much. She called and talked to them on the phone a couple of times a week, and Frankie always asked when she was coming down to watch
Star Trek
with them.

And finally, because she missed them, she said, “Tomorrow. I'll come tomorrow night.”

She told Dominic the next morning that she was going to visit Pam and Frankie and watch
Star Trek.

“Why don't you invite them to watch it here?”

She must have gaped, because he scowled and shrugged dismissively. “It won't bother me. I'll just be in my office working. Besides, I bet Frankie would rather watch on a big screen.”

Frankie was thrilled. He was practically bouncing off the walls when they arrived. He looked brighter than he had in some time. He'd been through all the tests, Pam told her while Frankie, wide-eyed, looked around.

Everything was great, Pam said. Except she wasn't a good match to donate a kidney and neither was her sister. “So we just have to wait until the right match comes along.”

“It will,” Sierra said confidently.

“I hope so.” Pam lifted her gaze to the heavens. “I'm counting on it.”

“C'mere, Mom,” Frankie urged. “Look out here. It's just like you're in my tree house. This is so cool,” he said over and over till Pam shushed him.

“You'll bother Sierra's husband. He's working upstairs,” she admonished.

He was. He'd disappeared straight after dinner. “I'll get out of your way,” he'd said. She'd been going to invite him to stay, but given his eagerness to be gone, she didn't say a word.

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.”