The Inconvenient Bride - By Anne McAllister Page 0,58

under his head and stared at the ceiling fan that moved lazily in the moonlit room. “Just like that. And I agreed.”

He remembered it so well, how sure he’d been that his dad was right, that it was time to get married, even when he didn’t even have a woman in mind.

“A few days later he told me that one of the men he did business with had this gorgeous daughter. ‘You ought to see her,’ he said. Then, ‘You ought to marry her.’ He was joking then, but I guess the seed was planted.” He sighed, remembering how foolish he’d been, thinking it was going to be that easy.

“So I got introduced. And she was very pretty.”

“How pretty?” Sierra asked in a small voice. She was lying against him, one leg over his, her head nestled in the curve of his shoulder. Her words stirred the hair on his chest. Her apprehensiveness stirred his heart.

“Pretty enough,” he said because he had to be honest. But she’d never made his heart kick over. She’d never made his pulse race. She’d been lovely in a grave, gentle way. Nowhere near as vibrant as Sierra. “Not like you,” he said. “She was a student, a senior in college. An art major. At some Midwestern school. I can’t even remember which. Doesn’t matter. She was in New York for the summer, doing something at one of the museums, an internship or something. And we started dating.”

It had been so pleasant. So simple to sweep her off her feet, to take her nice places, to invite her out to the family home on Long Island, to take her sailing. She’d been enchanted, had loved it all. And her fresh-faced innocence and enthusiasm had charmed him, too.

When his father had approved, had said the words that made Carin the perfect mate—“You know, she reminds me of your mother”—it had been the easiest thing in the world to propose.

He hadn’t been surprised when she’d accepted. “And then we decided to get married.”

Sierra raised her head briefly. “Just like that?”

“We had spent more time together than you and I did,” Dominic reminded her.

She lay her head back down and he felt her nod. Her fingers played lightly across his chest. “Go on.”

“She loved to go sailing, so I thought coming down here would be a great idea. We could get married here, I told her. And she thought that sounded wonderful. She didn’t have a mother to plan a big wedding back in Wisconsin. Her mother and father had split years before and Carin had stayed with her father. So we just decided that Bahamas was it. I had work to do, so she came down early. One of us had to be in residence three weeks to qualify for the marriage license. So she came and stayed in the house. Then the week of the wedding everybody else came. Except me. I was putting together a deal and I didn’t get here until the night before.”

He stopped, swallowed, wondering again as he had so many times if that had been the problem. If he’d got here sooner would she have talked to him? Would she have told him what she couldn’t tell anyone else?

“I didn’t get here until the rehearsal was starting. And that was a crock anyway because her bridesmaid wasn’t flying in until morning, and Nathan, who was supposed to be my best man, got a call from some magazine and took off, leaving Rhys in his place. I should have realized things weren’t going to work.”

But he hadn’t. He’d gone through the rehearsal in a daze. He’d been exhausted, coming down with a cold, and short-tempered when anyone talked to him.

Including Carin.

Not that Carin ever said much. She’d asked him how he was, he remembered that. And he’d growled something about just being glad when the whole thing was over with.

He’d meant glad to be married.

He’d given her a chaste kiss on the forehead so he wouldn’t give her his cold. “I barely spoke to her,” he told Sierra now. “Except to tell her to get a good night’s sleep.” And he remembered mustering a grin that had promised she wouldn’t be getting one on their wedding night.

“And then I said, ‘See you in the morning.’ But I didn’t.” He could still remember all the preparations, the last-minute things that needed to be done before he was left to stand by Rhys in the garden near the trellis of bougainvillea and wait for