A Breathless Bride. Fiona Brand
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father proposed a business deal that your father wanted.”
“Reestablishing a pearl facility on Medinos was a proposal based on opportunism and nostalgia, not profit.”
Her anger flared at the opportunism crack. “And the bottom line is so much more important to you than honoring the past or creating something beautiful.”
“Farming pretty baubles in a prime coastal location slated for development as a resort didn’t make business sense then and it makes no sense now. The Atraeus Group has more lucrative business options than restoring Medinos’s pearl industry.”
“Options that don’t require any kind of history or sentiment. Like mining gold and building luxury hotels.”
His gaze briefly captured hers. “I don’t recall that you ever had any problem with the concept of making money. As I remember it, two years ago money came before ‘sentiment.’”
Sienna controlled the rush of guilty heat to her cheeks. “I refuse to apologize for a business deal I didn’t instigate.” Or for being weak enough to have felt an overwhelming relief that, finally, there could be an answer to her family’s crippling financial problems. “My only sin was not having the courage to tell you about the deal.”
She stared out of the passenger-side window as Constantine turned into the parking lot of a shopping mall. It was too late now to admit that she had been afraid the impending disgrace of her father’s gambling and financial problems would harm their engagement.
As it turned out, the very thing she had feared had happened. Constantine believed she had broken his trust, that her primary interest in him had always been monetary. “I apologized for not discussing the deal with you,” she said, hating the husky note in her voice, “but, quite frankly, that was something I would have assumed your father would have done.”
Constantine slotted the Audi into a space. She heard the snick as he released his seat belt. He turned in his seat and rested an arm along the back of hers, making her even more suffocatingly aware of his presence.
“Even knowing that my father’s lack of transparency indicated he was keeping the deal under wraps?”
A dark sedan slid into a space beside the Audi. One of Constantine’s bodyguards, with Lucas in the passenger seat and Zane in the rear. A flash of cream informed her that her sports car, driven by the second bodyguard, had just been parked in an adjacent space.
Feeling hemmed in by overlarge Medinian males, Sienna released her seat belt and reached for her purse. “I didn’t understand that you were so against the idea of reestablishing a pearl industry on Medinos.”
Stupidly, when she hadn’t been frightened that she would lose Constantine and burying her head in the sand, she had been too busy coping with the hectic media pressure their engagement had instigated.
Life in a fish tank hadn’t been fun.
“Just as I couldn’t understand why you failed to discuss the agreement, which just happened to have been drawn up the day following our engagement announcement.”
Her gaze snapped to his. “How many times do I have to say it? I had nothing to do with the loan. Think about it, Constantine. If I was that grasping and devious I would have waited until after we were married.”
A tense silence stretched, thickened. Now she really couldn’t breathe. Fumbling at the car door, she pushed it wide.
Constantine leaned across and hauled the door shut, pinning Sienna in place before she could scramble out. The uncharacteristic surge of temper that flowed through him at the deliberate taunt was fueled by the physical frustration that had been eating at him ever since he had decided he had to see her again.
The question of just why he had taken one look at Sienna two years ago and fallen in instant lust, he decided, no longer existed. It had ceased to be the instant he had glimpsed her silky blond head at the funeral. Even wet and bedraggled, her eyes red-rimmed from crying, Sienna was gorgeous in a fragile, exotic way that hooked into every male instinct he possessed.
The combination of delicacy paired with sensuality, in Anglo-Saxon terms, was crazy-making. He was at once caught between the desire to protect and cushion her from the slightest upset and the desire to take her to bed and make love to her until she surrendered utterly.
It was an unsettling fact that he would rather argue with Sienna than spend time with any other woman, no matter how gorgeous or focused on pleasing him she might be.
“Now that’s interesting. I assumed that the reason you stayed quiet about the loan was that your father needed the money too badly to wait.”
Her face went bone-white and he knew in that instant that he had gone too far.
Then, hot color burned along her cheekbones and the aura of haunted fragility evaporated. “Or maybe I was simply following orders?”
His gaze shifted to her pale mouth, the line of her throat as she swallowed. “No,” he said flatly.
Sienna had been Roberto’s precocious second-in-command for the past four years. She had run the family’s pearl house with consummate skill and focused ambition while her father had steadily gambled the profits away at various casinos. The last time she had taken an order from Roberto, she had been in the cradle. If she had a weakness, it was that she needed money.
His money.
And she still did.
She pulled in a jerky breath. He felt the rise and fall of her breasts against his arm, the feathery warmth along his jaw as she exhaled. The light, evocative scent she wore teased his nostrils as flash after flash of memory turned the air molten.
A tap on the passenger-side window broke the tension. One of his security guards.
Constantine released his hold on the door handle, his temper tightly controlled as he watched Sienna climb out and collect her car keys.
Levering himself out of the Audi into the now blistering heat of early afternoon, Constantine gave the guard his instructions. For the past four days he had seldom been without an escort but for the next hour he required absolute privacy.
Peeling out of his damp jacket, he tossed it behind the driver’s seat. He frowned as he noticed Lucas speaking with Sienna. From the brevity of the exchange he was aware that his brother had simply offered his condolences, but Sienna’s smile evoked an unsettling response.
The fact that Lucas was every inch a dangerous Atraeus male shouldn’t register, but after the charged few moments in the Audi, the knowledge of just how successful his brother was with women was distinctly unpalatable.
Constantine strolled toward Sienna as she slid her cell phone out of her purse and answered a call.
Lucas waylaid him with a brief jerk of his chin. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”
“Positive.”
“It didn’t look like a business discussion back at the cemetery, and it sure as hell didn’t look like a business discussion just then.”
Constantine knew his gaze was cold enough to freeze. “Just as long as you remember that Sienna Ambrosi is my business.”
Lucas lifted a brow. “Message received.”
Jaw tight, Constantine watched as Lucas climbed into the passenger-side seat of the dark sedan. He lifted a hand as the car cruised out of the parking lot. Maybe he hadn’t needed to warn Lucas off, but the instinct to do so had been knee-jerk and primitive. In that moment he had acknowledged one clear fact: for the foreseeable future, until he had gotten her out of his system, Sienna Ambrosi was his.
While he waited for Sienna to terminate her call, he grimly considered that fact, sifting through every nuance of the past hour. The tension that had gripped him from the moment he had laid eyes on Sienna at the funeral tightened another notch.
Constantine knew his own