“Ms. Rimmer has developed into a major, major talent.”

—Romantic Times Magazine

His every move was so purposeful, so sure and so determined.

His body was so strong and hard and big. Everything he did, he did better than anyone else.

He had a law degree from Stanford, and a business degree from one of those snooty eastern colleges. He’d shot a charging rhino, wrestled alligators. He’d made love to the most beautiful women in the world, taken his father’s millions and turned them into billions.

And once, long, long ago, he had been six years old. A little boy. A boy who woke up in the middle of the night and went into his baby brother’s room.

Where he had been found the next morning, out cold on the floor, a large bloody bruise on the left side of his head.

And the baby—vanished. Forever…

“Famed for her deliciously different characters, Ms. Rimmer keeps the…love sizzling hot.”

—Romantic Times Magazine

CONVENIENTLY YOURS: Cast of Characters
A Bravo Family Saga

THE NINE-MONTH MARRIAGE

—Cash Bravo and Abby Heller

MARRIAGE BY NECESSITY

—Nate Bravo and Megan kane

PRACTICALLY MARRIED

—Zach Bravo and Tess DeMarley

MARRIED BY ACCIDENT

—Melinda Bravo and Cole Yuma

THE MILLIONAIRE SHE MARRIED

—Jenna Bravo and Mack McGarrity

THE M.D. SHE HAD TO MARRY

—Lacey Bravo and Logan Severance

THE MARRIAGE AGREEMENT

—Marsh Bravo and Tory Winningham

And watch for…

MARRIAGE: OVERBOARD

—Gwen Bravo McMillan and Rafe McMillan

(Weekly serial at www.eHarlequin.com)

THE MARRIAGE CONSPIRACY

—Dekker (Smith) Bravo and Joleen Tilly

(Coming in October only from Silhouette Special Edition)

The Bravo Billionaire
Christine Rimmer

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Dear Reader,

I can hardly believe it. This book, The Bravo Billionaire, marks the eighth in my series of stories about the Bravo family. The first seven books, as you may know, appeared in the Silhouette Special Edition line. I started out thinking I was going to write only three Bravo books—the stories of three cousins: Cash, Nate and Zach.

So much for what I started out thinking. Your response to the Bravos has been so enthusiastic, how could I help but write more Bravo tales?

With The Bravo Billionaire, I had a great time creating a new branch—the L.A. branch—of the Bravo family. They are fabulously wealthy, and they live in a huge hilltop Bel Air mansion called Angel’s Crest. The hero, Jonas, is the man who has everything—except love, family and companionship. He swears he doesn’t want those things. But that’s before his mother’s will forces him into close contact with Emma Lynn Hewitt. Emma, a west Texas dog groomer with a heart as big as her home state, is determined to make of Jonas a kinder, gentler, better man….

I do hope you enjoy this bigger-than-ever Bravo tale.

All my very best,

For Steve,

always.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 1

Jonas Bravo did not like to wait.

Make no mistake. He knew how to wait. He was actually quite good at waiting—when he considered the wait worth it, when it would mean a fat return on an iffy investment, or a plum contract in his pocket.

He could wait and he had waited. But he refused to wait unnecessarily, when waiting, as he saw it, would get him nowhere.

People who made Jonas wait unnecessarily never did it more than once. Because the famous Bravo Billionaire had ways of showing his displeasure. He could do it with a look, with a certain inner stillness—a look and a stillness that made the object of his displeasure wonder just what kinds of scary, crazy things Jonas Bravo might do if pushed too far. They all knew the stories about him, about what he and his family had been through when he was a child, and the wild things he’d done during the earlier years of his manhood. So they wondered—and they worried.

And they didn’t displease him again.

Apparently, the receptionist at McAllister, Quinn and Associates, Attorneys at Law, had been warned not to make Jonas wait. Young, faultlessly groomed and predictably gorgeous, she glanced up when he got off the elevator, which opened about ten yards from her desk. Her stunning china-blue eyes went round as dinner plates as she regarded him across the expanse of parquet floor and good Oriental rugs.

She bounced to her feet. “Mr. Bravo. This way. Mr. McAllister is waiting for you.” She bustled to the big elaborately carved double doors that led to the inner sanctum and quickly pulled one of the doors wide. Jonas gave her a curt nod and went through, heading down the wide wood-paneled hallway toward Ambrose McAllister’s corner office.

The receptionist rushed along in his wake. “Um, Mr. Bravo. Mr. McAllister asked me to show you to the—”

Jonas froze her in her tracks with a sharp backward glance. “I can find my own way.”

“Oh. Well. Of course, whatever you—”

“Thanks.” He didn’t have to look behind him again to know that she had returned to the reception area where she belonged. He passed a few secretaries’ nooks. Ambrose’s minions looked up, muttered swift, respectful, Hello, Mr. Bravos and went back to what they were supposed to be doing.

Ambrose’s door opened just before Jonas reached it. The lawyer who had handled the personal legal affairs of the Los Angeles Bravos for over three decades didn’t miss a beat.

“Jonas. Here you are.” Ambrose took Jonas’s hand and shook it. Though he was well into his seventies now, Ambrose McAllister’s handshake remained firm and his bearing proud. “So good to see you.” Silver brows drew together in a perfectly orchestrated expression of concern—real concern, in this case, Jonas knew. Ambrose honestly cared for the members of the Bravo family and had become something of a family friend over the years. But he was a lawyer, and a damn good one. Good lawyers knew how to manufacture appropriate expressions on demand.

“How are you?” Ambrose asked.

“Fine.”

Ambrose shook his head sadly. “I know I already said this at the funeral, but Blythe is missed. Greatly.”

Jonas dipped his head in acknowledgement of the lawyer’s sympathetic words. Since the death of his mother, Blythe Hamilton Bravo, seven days before, Jonas had heard a lot of condolences and he’d done a lot of nodding in acknowledgement.

“And how is that beautiful little sister of yours?”

“Mandy’s doing well.”

Jonas’s sister, Amanda, had been adopted by his mother two years ago. At the time of the adoption, Jonas had been furious at Blythe. The way he saw it then, she had no business taking on an infant at an age when most women were well into their grandmothering years.

But Jonas’s fury had not lasted. How could it? Mandy was…special. She had the knack for melting even the hardest of hearts. Jonas still wasn’t sure how she’d done it, but somehow, the sprite had managed to break down even his considerable defenses. Within a month of the baby’s coming into their lives, Jonas had accepted his fate. He loved his little sister and he would do anything for her.

Ambrose leaned closer and spoke more confidentially. “You know, don’t you, that if there is anything I can do, not only as your family’s attorney, but as a—”

“I do know, Ambrose. And I appreciate your thoughtfulness.”

“Damn it.” Ambrose lowered his voice even further.

“She was too young. Only sixty…” Blythe had died of a particularly virulent form of leukemia. It had struck suddenly and killed her within two months of the original diagnosis. “I know it must be difficult, for both you and the child.”

“Honestly Ambrose, we’re managing.”

The lines of concern between the silver brows deepened—and then relaxed. “Well. I’m glad to hear it.” Ambrose clapped Jonas on the arm and let go of his hand. “Let’s move on to the West Conference Room, shall we? We’ll be more comfortable there.”

It was not Jonas’s intention to become comfortable. “Ambrose. What’s this about?”

Instead of answering, Ambrose said mildly, “Right this way.” He herded Jonas around the corner and down another wide hallway. Jonas allowed himself to be led, though he disliked having his questions evaded almost as much as he disliked being made to wait.

And this was not the first time Ambrose had refused to give him answers on this subject. Last Friday, when the lawyer had called to set up this meeting, he would only say that it concerned Blythe’s will. Before her death, Blythe had asked Ambrose to invite Jonas to his offices. Certain issues required discussion.

“What issues?” Jonas had demanded.

“Monday, Jonas. My office. Two o’clock?”

Jonas had tried to get the lawyer to simply come out to the house or drop in at Bravo, Incorporated. Ambrose had held firm. He’d said that Blythe had felt that a neutral setting would be better for everyone.

“Why a neutral setting?”

“I’ll explain it all on Monday.”

“Ambrose. Who the hell is everyone?”

But Ambrose wouldn’t say. “Please forgive me, Jonas. You’ll have all the information you need on Monday. At my office.”

Jonas had let the lawyer off the hook. After all, the man was only doing his job, following his client’s wishes—the client being Jonas’s exasperating mother, in this case. Who could say what Blythe Bravo had gotten up to in those last grim weeks before her death?

“All right, Ambrose. Monday. Two in the afternoon.” He’d ended the call.

So now it was Monday. It was 2:04 p.m.

And some answers had better be forthcoming.

“Here we are,” Ambrose said cheerfully, stopping before another pair of carved double doors. A bronze plaque on the wall to the left of the doors read, West Conference. Ambrose slid adroitly around Jonas and opened one of the doors. “After you.”

Jonas didn’t see the kennel keeper until he’d stepped over the threshold.

She was sitting all the way down at the end of the table, in one of the twelve high-backed cordovan leather swivel chairs, her back to the west wall, which consisted of one huge pane of glare-treated glass. Beyond the glass lay Century City in all its smoggy splendor, high-rises shimmering beneath the August sun.

The kennel keeper, whose name was Emma Lynn Hewitt, wore a snug-fitting jacket the color of orange sherbet. If she had a shirt on under the jacket, Jonas couldn’t see it. He could, however, see a tempting swell of cleavage. Her silky pale blond hair curled, soft and shiny and unrestrained, around her very pretty face. It wasn’t long, that hair, only chin-length, but still, it always managed to look just a little mussed, a little wild. Though the conference table blocked his view, he knew without having to look that her tight, short skirt would be as orange as her jacket. And that her shoes would have very high heels and open toes.

By all rights, Emma Lynn Hewitt should have looked cheap. But somehow, she didn’t. Somehow, she managed to look…sweet. Sweet and way too damn sexy. She also came across as if she meant business. He didn’t know how she did that, though he suspected it had to be in the way she held herself—chin high, slim shoulders back.

Just another of Blythe’s strays, he reminded himself, a little nobody from a bend-in-the-road town in Texas. As it had turned out, his mother’s investment in the woman’s dog grooming and boarding enterprise had been a profitable one, so he couldn’t fault the perky Texan on that count. Still, he had always disliked her.

Though he effortlessly schooled his face to betray nothing, Jonas noted a certain raw feeling in his gut—as if someone had taken a cheese grater to it. He was thinking the obvious: What in hell is she doing here? But he didn’t speak the question aloud. It would have been bad strategy, was too likely to betray his dismay. The Bravo Billionaire, as any dedicated tabloid reader would avidly tell you, did not experience feeble emotions like dismay.

There was a blue folder in front of the kennel keeper. And one in front of each of the two chairs to her left and to her right. Her folder was open. She’d apparently been reading the contents while she waited for him and for Ambrose. Judging by the strange, rather stricken look on her face, what she had read must have surprised—even shocked—her.

The cheese grater sawed another layer off the lining of Jonas’s stomach. He realized he no longer felt the urge to ask what she was doing here.

No. All at once, he didn’t even want to know.

Ambrose said, “Jonas. You’ve met Ms. Hewitt?”

“I have.”

The woman started to stand, then appeared to think better of the move and kept her pretty little butt in the chair. She swallowed. And nodded.

He nodded back.

“Have a seat.” Ambrose had him on the move again, ushering him down the long table toward the chair—and the folder—to the right of Emma Hewitt.

Jonas sat. Ambrose crossed behind the kennel keeper and took the chair to her left.

Once settled in his chair, Ambrose opened the folder on the table in front of him and then reached in his breast pocket and pulled out a pair of half glasses. “Ahem. Jonas.” He put on the glasses. “Before she died, your mother made a few changes to her will. She asked that I call you and Ms. Hewitt in together to discuss them.”

Jonas sat very still.

Peering over the tops of his glasses, Ambrose gestured at Jonas’s folder, which Jonas had not yet allowed himself to touch. “If you’ll just read the sections I’ve highlighted, I’m sure Blythe’s wishes will be made clear to you. And of course, I’ll be right here to answer any questions you might have.”

“I see,” said Jonas.

The kennel keeper said nothing. She was a splash of hot orange in his side vision.

“Please,” Ambrose urged. “Have a look.”

What damn choice did he have? Jonas opened the folder and began to read.

A quick scan of the highlighted passages and he had the picture.

Once he understood his mother’s insane intention, he closed the folder and said, very quietly, “All right. I’ve read it.”

“Good.” Ambrose glanced at the dog groomer. “Ms. Hewitt? Have you looked through your copy?”

She nodded.

“Well,” said Ambrose. “As I said, please feel free to ask any—”

“Wait a minute,” said Jonas. Ambrose waited. “I think we need to make certain we’re all in agreement as to exactly what it says here.”

Ambrose announced, “An excellent idea.” Then he fell silent—as if he expected Jonas to explain the will that he had prepared.

Not a chance. Jonas said nothing. And the dog groomer from Texas kept her mouth shut, as well.

Ambrose realized the task had fallen to him. “Well,” he said. “Ahem. As you can both see, the issue here is custody—the custody of the child, Amanda Eloise Bravo.”

Ambrose laid it all out for them.

“The will now requires that you, Jonas, must marry Ms. Hewitt here—and cohabit with her at a location of her choosing—for one year. During that year, you and Ms. Hewitt are to have joint physical and legal custody of your adopted sister. At the end of that year, should either you or Ms. Hewitt choose to divorce, then full custody of Amanda will be yours, Jonas. However, if you fail to marry Ms. Hewitt within three weeks of your mother’s death—and to remain married to her for one full year—then custody goes to Ms. Hewitt.”

Ambrose paused to remove his reading glasses. He took a snowy white handkerchief from his breast pocket and began wiping the lenses of the glasses. He did all this while looking at Jonas, a look that managed to be both regretful and unwavering. “And should you try to contest the will, all legal expenses incurred by Ms. Hewitt in fighting your suit will be paid by your mother’s estate.”

Ambrose put his handkerchief back in his pocket. He folded his glasses and set them on top of his folder. “That’s about it,” he said with a grim smile.

Jonas stared at the lawyer. He kept his face composed, but he was thinking that he would really enjoy breaking something. Yes. He’d very much like to rip something in two.

Blythe’s death had caused him far more pain than he would ever admit. And the pain—which he knew to be grief—had taken him completely by surprise. He was thirty-six years old, after all, and had believed himself immune to grief since well before his tenth birthday. Apparently, he had believed wrong. Because deep in his most secret heart, he missed his harebrained mother terribly.

And somehow, the fact that he’d ended up missing her so damn much made this ridiculous alteration to her will all the more infuriating. She’d set this whole thing up and then managed to die without dropping him so much as a hint as to what he was in for.

“I do have a question,” said Jonas.

Ambrose lifted those silver eyebrows.

Jonas hit him with it. “Did my mother honestly imagine that paying Ms. Hewitt’s legal expenses would keep me from taking this issue to court?”

Ambrose put on his most solemn expression. “I can’t say what your mother imagined. But I hope you realize that the will before you is perfectly legal and binding. If you fail to marry Ms. Hewitt within the next two weeks, you could very well lose custody of your sister.”

“I could. But I won’t.”

Ambrose looked suddenly weary. “Jonas. Who can ever be truly certain of any outcome when it comes to the vagaries of our legal system? I’m only saying that if you fail to abide by the terms your mother has set out here, the possibility is quite good that when the matter comes before a judge, Mandy will go to Ms. Hewitt.”

Jonas waved an impatient hand. “Look, Ambrose. We both know that my mother spent a number of years in one of L.A.’s finest psychiatric hospitals. I could put up a valid argument for mental incompetence.”

Ambrose’s expression had become downright reproachful. “You could, but I think you know that that kind of an argument would be unlikely to hold up under scrutiny. Your mother’s clinical depression occurred three decades ago. Two of the doctors who attended her then are still living. At your mother’s request, I contacted both of them and each assured me he would be willing to testify that she completely recovered from her condition. And she never relapsed. She was…eccentric, perhaps. But she was also in full command of her faculties when she set out these changes to her will.”

Jonas gave the lawyer his coldest stare. “I suppose you’ll attest to that.”

Ambrose did not waver. “I certainly will. Jonas, I promise you, I did discuss this at length with Blythe.”

“Did you make any effort to talk her out of it?”

“As a matter of fact, I did. But she wouldn’t be swayed. She insisted that she wanted these changes in the will. She said she honestly felt they were for the best—for Mandy. And for you.”

Jonas said nothing for a full count of ten. When he did speak, he was pleased to find that none of the rage shimmering through him could be heard in his voice. “All right. So you’re saying you believe these changes are going to stand up in court.”

“Yes.”

“And my mother’s estate provides the funds so that Ms. Hewitt here can make certain they do.”

“Exactly,” said the lawyer, still regretful—and still firm. “Jonas, I’m sorry, but I’ve said it before and I’ll say it once more. If you fail to marry Ms. Hewitt, your sister could very well end up in her custody.”

Jonas allowed the corners of his mouth to lift in a humorless smile. “That is, assuming Ms. Hewitt is willing to become Mandy’s guardian.”

“Well, yes,” the lawyer allowed, looking slightly uncomfortable at that suggestion. “And I did point that out to Blythe. If Ms. Hewitt is unwilling, then these changes become meaningless.”

If Ms. Hewitt is unwilling…

The words seemed to ricochet tauntingly in Jonas’s brain.

Of course, Ms. Hewitt was willing. His mother wouldn’t have done this without Ms. Hewitt’s consent and active participation—would she?

She did it without mine, he thought, and then shoved the idea into the back of his consciousness.

Miss Hewitt was willing. She had to be. She’d seen her chance to catch herself a rich husband and she’d jumped at it.

Jonas turned his head just enough to give the woman in orange a withering stare. She stared right back, defiant, but a little too pale—as if she were every bit as surprised by this news as he.

Fat chance. The bitch probably dreamed up the whole insane scheme and kept after his mother on her damn deathbed until she agreed to it.

Blythe had always wanted the one son she had left to marry and give her a few grandchildren to spoil. But Jonas had made it poignantly clear to her that he never would. A man’s family, he had learned at a very young age, provided big opportunities for incalculable loss.

No, thank you. He ran his own life and he answered to no one and he couldn’t lose what he didn’t have. And he was…content. He liked his life just as it was and saw no reason to change it.

But evidently, his mother had decided to give him a reason.

She’d known his one weakness, the weakness she herself had created by adopting the sprite. His weakness was Mandy. And Blythe had used Mandy—just as this dog groomer from Texas had used her.

“Ambrose,” Jonas said. “Thank you for answering my questions. Now, I have a few things to say to Ms. Hewitt. Leave us.”

Ambrose hesitated. Jonas knew why. The lawyer thought it unwise to leave the little Texan alone with him right then. After all, one could never be sure what the Bravo Billionaire might do when provoked.

In the past, when he’d been younger and less disciplined and his people did not do what he asked them to do, Jonas sometimes threw things. Expensive, very breakable things always worked best. Things that shattered satisfyingly on impact. Once, he’d thrown a Ming vase through a stained-glass window. And on another occasion, he’d tossed a Tiffany bowl at a marble fireplace. He had also, during what he thought of as his Great White Hunter phase—a short phase, really, though the scandal sheets liked to make much of it—stood his ground to bring down a charging rhinoceros. Beyond the rhino, the rumor mill had it that he’d wrestled alligators and won, and that he’d gone at a grizzly bear with only a hunting knife for a weapon.

He never denied such rumors. Why should he? Being considered fearless and unpredictable had always worked in his favor.

“Ambrose,” he said, making a warning of the name.

The lawyer shifted nervously in his chair and turned his worried gaze on the dog groomer. “Er, Ms. Hewitt. Perhaps you have some questions?”

And, right then, for the first time since Jonas had entered the room, the dog groomer spoke.

“It’s all right, Mr. McAllister.” Her voice was a honeyed Texas drawl. It crept along Jonas’s nerve endings, setting off little flares of annoying heat right below the surface of his skin. He found himself staring at the tiny mole, low down on her right cheek, midway between her pert nose and her soft lips.

“You go on now,” she said. “I’ll talk to Mr. Bravo alone.”

Chapter 2

Emma Lynn Hewitt could see that the lawyer was worried for her. And maybe he had good reason to be. It was probably plain crazy for her to volunteer to be alone with Blythe’s scary, overbearing son right then.

But come on. What could the man do to her, really? If looks could kill, she’d have keeled over stone dead when he walked in the room and spotted her sitting there.

He was probably going to say some ugly things. He might even throw something—that big crystal water pitcher on the credenza over there, or maybe even a swivel chair or two. She had heard he sometimes threw things. But to the best of her recollection, she hadn’t heard that he threw things at people.

No. She didn’t believe he would do anything to physically hurt her. He would just use words to try to beat her into submission. Well, sticks and stones, as her aunt Cass used to tell her all the time. Words, even the mean, hard words of Blythe’s big, scary son, could not hurt her unless she allowed them to.

This was not her fault, whatever Jonas Bravo chose to believe.

The lawyer coughed. “Ms. Hewitt. Are you certain about this?”

Emma reached out and gave the lawyer’s sleeve a nice little pat. “I’ll be just fine. Don’t you worry ’bout me.”

“Well. If you’re positive…”

She beamed him a giant-sized smile. “I am.”

Mr. McAllister picked up his glasses and stood. Emma watched the tall, kind-faced lawyer walk down the length of the big conference table and go out through the double doors. It was a lot easier looking at the lawyer than at the man who sat beside her with tension radiating off him like steam.

As soon as the door swung shut behind the lawyer, Blythe’s son spoke in that arresting voice of his, which was soft and deep and just a little bit rough, like velvet when you rub it against the grain.

“This is your doing, isn’t it?”

Emma sucked in a big breath through her nose. One of her best groomers and dearest friends, Deirdre Laventhol, was real big on yoga. In yoga, you always breathed through your nose.

It was supposed to be calming.

Emma slowly let the breath back out the same way she’d sucked it in. It didn’t help much. She still felt angry and confused and a little bit afraid of the man who was so determined to blame her for something she had not done. Her heart was beating too fast. Just racing away in there. And her hands felt clammy. She had to resist the urge to rub them on her skirt.

Oh, Blythe, she thought miserably, why did you do this? I told you I plain don’t like him. And he never liked me. I told you that.

But Blythe hadn’t listened. She was like that sometimes, once she got an idea in her head.

Emma would say, “I don’t like him and he doesn’t like me, either. He always gives me that narrow-eyed suspicious look, like he’s waiting for me to grab the silver and run—or to cheat you out of every last penny you own.”

And Blythe would say, “You’re wrong, Em. You don’t understand him. Naturally he’s hostile with you. He doesn’t want to admit the attraction. But you’re the woman for him. And he’s just right for you.” And then Emma would groan and order her friend to forget that idea. Blythe would always drop the subject about then, which left Emma assuming that her friend had gotten the message.

To assume, Aunt Cass used to say, makes an ass out of u and me, too…

Emma made herself look at him again. It wasn’t that he was so hard to look at. He was a big, muscular man in a high-dollar suit with a burning look in eyes that sometimes looked blue—and sometimes looked black as the darkest part of the night.

Not handsome. No. His features were too blunt, too…basic for that. Not handsome, but masculine. Emma had always thought that the air kind of vibrated with male energy whenever Jonas Bravo was around—even when he wasn’t ready to chew nails like he was now.

Women were supposed to be drawn to him “like moths to a dangerous flame.” Yep, she’d actually read that about him somewhere. Blythe had told her that his “playboy phase” had come to an end around the time he turned thirty. But during it, he’d dated the most beautiful and charming women in the world. Famous actresses. The stunning youngest daughter of one the nation’s oldest and wealthiest families. Not to mention a long string of starlets and showgirls from both the good old U.S. of A. and abroad.

Blythe had often mentioned oh so casually to Emma that in the past few years, Jonas had hardly dated at all. Blythe had said she considered that a good sign. She thought he was ready for the real thing, for the love of his life.

In fact, looking back now, it seemed to Emma that Blythe was constantly bringing up Jonas whenever she and her friend spent time together. It seemed, looking back, that she should have been warned that Blythe might do something crazy like this—something bizarre and extreme, something just next door to desperate, to try to get her and Jonas hooked up.

But then, Aunt Cass’d had a saying for that, too—the one about hindsight always being twenty-twenty.

“Don’t give me that wide-eyed innocent look,” the Bravo Billionaire growled. “Admit it. You set this up.”

Emma folded her clammy hands in front of her, yanked her shoulders up tall and looked him dead in the eye. Think bold, she told herself silently. Think one hundred percent completely unconcerned about the mean things this awful man is saying to you.

“Didn’t you?” he taunted.

She answered truthfully—as if the truth was going to do her a bit of good with this wild man. “I most certainly did not. I didn’t know a thing about it until I walked in here today.”

One side of his mouth curled lazily into a sneer. “Fine. Then get out of the way.”

Now, what did that mean? She was not in his way. If he wanted to leave, he could get right up and go. “Pardon me?”

“Get out of the way. Refuse to marry me and decline to assume custody of my sister. If you won’t marry me and you won’t take Mandy, either, there’s no problem. She’ll go to me.”

The wild man had a point. Nothing said she had to go along with Blythe’s crazy scheme. Mr. McAllister had said the same thing a few minutes ago, hadn’t he?

If Ms. Hewitt is unwilling, then these changes become meaningless….

Emma could just…do what Jonas Bravo wanted her to do. Get out of the way. Mandy would go to him and—well, wasn’t that the right thing, anyway?

Emma opened her mouth to tell him she’d do what he wanted: step aside. Make no claim on Mandy.

But the words got caught in her throat.

A little over five years ago, right after her aunt Cass died, Emma had first come to L.A. She’d brought nothing but a few cheap clothes, a battered Ford four-door, a degree from a two-year business college in Odessa and a burning will to succeed, to make a mark upon the world. She’d taken a job at a famous deli/restaurant on Fairfax—just until she could figure out what kind of business she intended to make her mark in.

She’d met Blythe Bravo the second morning on the job, when Blythe had dropped in good and early for a black coffee and a plain bagel to go. It was immediate, the feeling of connection between them. It didn’t matter that, on the surface, they had nothing in common. Emma had looked in Blythe’s eyes and known that things were going to be all right, that she didn’t have to be secretly terrified anymore. She had lost her dear aunt Cass and she was starting all over. But she had found a rare friend. That gave her confidence, made her certain that she really was going to make it in L.A.

“When can you take a break?” Blythe had asked the third time she walked into the deli and found Emma behind the register. “We’ll do lunch.”

After that, they met two or three times a week—for lunch, to take in a movie, sometimes just for coffee and serious girl talk. Within a month, Emma was telling Blythe her idea of creating a special kind of “pet retreat.” And Blythe was offering to be her backer….

Emma owed Blythe so much. She did want a chance to repay her—not only for giving Emma her start, but also for holding out her hand in true and binding friendship.

Some people—like the man who was trying to push her around right now—would say that Emma came from nothing. Her daddy and her mama had both been dead by the time she was five. She’d been raised by a good-hearted, sun worshipping, platitude-loving aunt in a double-wide in a dinky, dusty west Texas town called Alta Lobo.

So yes. Some folks might say she was a nobody from nowhere.

But in Alta Lobo, in her aunt Cass’s double-wide, Emma had learned a number of important lessons. One of them was that if you can possibly give a friend what she wants, you do it.

Emma longed to do just that, to grant her dear friend’s dying wish.

But, oh, Blythe, she thought miserably. Oh, Blythe, why this? Anything but this, to get myself hitched up to this awful man.

Emma was not sure she could bring herself to do it—even for the very best friend she had ever known.

The awful man in question was still watching her through those blue-black angry eyes, waiting for her to give in and say she’d do what he demanded.

Well, she wouldn’t do what he demanded.

Not right yet, anyway.

He would just have to wait a little longer, because she needed time to think.

Emma slid the strap of her bright orange purse high onto her shoulder. She closed the folder on her copy of Blythe’s will and tucked the folder under her arm.

Jonas said, “Where do you think you’re going?”

“Out of here.”

“Oh, no you don’t. Not yet.”

Emma pushed back the big leather swivel chair and stood. “This is a lot to think about. I’m not makin’ any snap decisions, Mr. Bravo. I need a little time.”

He looked at her as if he’d like to pick her up and toss her through that big window behind her. And probably all he’d do was smile in satisfaction when she hit the pavement ten stories below. “Time, Ms. Hewitt, is the thing we don’t have much of. You’ve got to marry me in the next two weeks—or you’ve got to prove to my satisfaction that you do not intend to try to claim custody of my sister.”

“Excuse me,” Emma Lynn Hewitt replied. “I do not have to marry you. And I do not have to prove a single thing. I have to decide whether or not I can bear to grant my dearest friend’s dyin’ wish. And if I decide I just can’t make myself do that, since to do it I’d have to marry up with you, then I have to figure out whether or not I want to fight you for custody of sweet little Mandy. Those are the things that I have to do and they are all that I have to do. And in order to do them, I need some time.”

She turned for the door, thinking as she headed for it that maybe refusing to marry him would be the best way to go. She could refuse—and then fight to get Mandy put in her care. Maybe that would satisfy her obligation to her friend. After all, the little sweetheart would certainly have a better chance at a happy, normal life with her than she ever would with Jonas Bravo.

“I’ll see you in hell before I let you have Mandy,” the billionaire said before she got out the door.

Emma paused, turned to face him again and gave him her sweetest, brightest smile. “I’m sure you know just where you’re headed, Mr. Bravo. But whether I’ll be there to meet you remains to be seen.”

“We are not finished here.”

“Oh, yes we are. I told you. I need a little time to think.”

“How much time?”

“A few days. Then I’ll get back to you.”

He started to stand. She didn’t stay to watch him come at her.

She darted through the door, yanked it closed behind her and headed for the exit as fast as her three-inch heels would carry her.

Chapter 3

Jonas dropped back to his chair as soon as the blonde in the orange suit bolted from the room. There was nothing to be gained by following her right then, nothing left, at that moment, to use on her save physical force. And contrary to what a lot of people believed, Jonas Bravo never used physical force. He only let them think that he might.

A few days, she had said. She would get back to him in a few days.

What the hell, Jonas wondered, was a few days? Two? Three? Four?

He felt caged. Caught. Bested.

Made to wait.

He sat alone in the conference room for several minutes, giving his frustration a chance to abate, at least minimally. Eventually it occurred to him that Ambrose would be ducking back in shortly, just to check and make sure he hadn’t torn the little dog groomer limb from limb.

Since Jonas felt zero inclination to deal with Ambrose again right then, he left the lawyer’s offices and went to Bravo, Incorporated, which was housed in the Bravo Building, a towering forty-story structure of pale granite and dark glass in downtown L.A.

He had a meeting at three with the project manager of a certain upscale shopping center that was due to open in six weeks. It was a project in which he’d made a significant investment of Bravo, Incorporated funds.

The meeting lasted two hours. When it was over, Jonas hardly remembered a thing that had been said. He kept thinking about the kennel keeper, about that word, few, about what she had really meant when she said it.

About how damn long she intended to make him wait.

After the meeting, there were calls to make and papers to sign. He spent an hour and a half closeted with one of his assistants, going over correspondence and contracts he needed prepared.

By seven, he had had enough.

He was supposed to meet the CEO of a certain Internet startup group for dinner at L’Orangerie. But he knew it would be pointless. Right then, he couldn’t have cared less if every decent tech stocks opportunity out there passed him right by. He had his secretary call and reschedule the appointment for Thursday night.

After all, Thursday was three days away. He’d have his answer from the dog groomer by then—wouldn’t he? Weren’t three days a few? He flexed his thick, powerful fingers, thinking how pleasant it would be to wrap them around Emma Lynn Hewitt’s neck and begin to squeeze.

Before he left his office, he downloaded the file on the Hewitt woman into his laptop. There might be something in it he had missed, something he could use to get her to start seeing things his way and to do so as quickly as possible.

Jonas kept files on all of his mother’s various causes and charities, as well as on her friends and acquaintances. In spite of what had happened thirty years ago, when she’d lost a son and a husband within months of each other and spent four years in psychiatric care as a result, Blythe Bravo had ended up a trusting soul. She was also a person who felt a responsibility to leave the world a better place than she’d found it. Jonas felt no such responsibility. And he made it a point not to trust anyone until they had proven they were worthy of trust.

He’d had the Hewitt woman investigated five years ago, when she’d first popped up in his mother’s life. Once he’d read the report provided by his investigators, he’d come to the conclusion that, while she rubbed him the wrong way personally, Emma Lynn Hewitt was probably harmless.

Harmless. He scowled as he thought the word.

And he felt bested again.

By a blonde with big breasts and inappropriate shoes.

On the way home, in the quiet back seat of the limo, he studied the file. He was still going over it when he reached Angel’s Crest, the hilltop Mediterranean-style house in Bel Air where Bravos had lived for three generations. Jonas owned a number of houses and apartments, among them a hunting lodge in Idaho, a small villa in the south of France and a penthouse on Fifth Avenue. But he considered Angel’s Crest his home.

Palmer, who ran the house, greeted him at the door. “Good evening, sir.”

Jonas nodded. “Palmer.” He handed the butler his briefcase and the laptop. “Put these in the study, will you?”

“Certainly.”

He told Palmer that he’d have a light meal in the small dining room in one hour and then he climbed the curving iron staircase to the second floor.

He visited his sister in the nursery. As usual lately, she babbled nonstop. It was all two-year-old talk, that phase of language development consisting in the main of instructions and demands.

“Jonah”—she always called him Jonah, he assumed because the “s” at the end of his name was as yet beyond her—“come here,” and “Jonah, sit there,” and “I like this story. Read it to me.”

He felt better. Soothed. Just to see her round, smiling face, her mop of dark curls and those big brown eyes. To know that she was safe. Always, he would keep her safe. He employed round-the-clock security at Angel’s Crest. What had happened to his brother would never happen to the sprite.

She did say, “Jonah, I want Mama,” looking up at him solemnly, with absolute trust—and a sadness that tore at his heart.

He took her on his lap and explained for—what was it? The tenth time? The eleventh?—that Mama had been very sick and had to go away and would not be coming back.

Claudia, the nanny, reappeared at eight-thirty with a shy smile and a questioning look.

“Bath time,” he told Mandy. “Be good for Claudia.”

With a minimum of fuss, Mandy allowed him to say good-night.

He stopped in his private suite of rooms for a quick shower and a change of clothes, then he went on down to the smaller of the house’s two dining rooms, where Palmer served him his meal. He ate, reminding himself not to dwell on how damn huge and quiet even the small dining room seemed without Blythe’s easy laughter and teasing chatter to liven things up a little.

The food, as always, was excellent. He told Palmer to be sure to give the cook his compliments.

It was after ten when Jonas retreated to his study, a comfortable room of tall, well-filled walnut bookcases, arching leaded-glass windows, intricate crown moldings and big, inviting chairs upholstered in green and blood-red velvet. He sat at his inlaid mahogany desk, opened the laptop and dug into the file on Emma Hewitt again.

What he read didn’t tell him any more than he already knew. She was an orphan from Texas with two years in a nowhere college under her belt. At the time he’d had her followed she had been twenty-one, working the morning shift at the restaurant where she’d met his mother and keeping a stray cat and an iguana in her studio apartment, unbeknownst to the landlord. There had been no boyfriend at the time, though Jonas thought he remembered Blythe telling him there had been someone last year—or was it the year before?

And if there had been someone, was that someone still around? Jonas shrugged. Since he didn’t have a clue what the woman planned to do about Blythe’s will, he supposed, at this point, that the possibility of a boyfriend was pretty much a nonissue.

The file—or, technically, the series of files—contained a number of pictures snapped on the sly by one of the detectives he’d hired. There she was in her little white blouse and short black skirt, grinning at a customer, her order pad poised, pen ready to roll. And there she was at some Hollywood nightspot, with what looked like a strawberry daiquiri in front of her and a wide, happy smile on her face. And at Venice Beach, wearing cutoff shorts, a skimpy little nothing of a top and inline skates, being pulled along by a high stepping, beautifully groomed pair of Afghan hounds. In that picture, he couldn’t help but notice, her legs looked especially long, her breasts particularly high and full.

Jonas sat back for a minute and rubbed at his eyes. Full breasts and long legs, he reminded himself, were not the issue here.

He looked at the screen again, began bringing up the pictures one by one, noting as he did so that the love of animals came through good and clear. The cat and the iguana. The Afghan hounds. A shot taken in a pet store, with a parakeet on her head and a mynah bird on her shoulder, one at what looked like Griffith Park with someone’s tiny Chihuahua balanced on her outstretched hand.

Jonas stared off in the direction of the limestone mantel, thinking of Bob and Ted, the pair of miniature Yorkshire terriers his mother had owned. Though as a general rule, Jonas had no liking for small dogs, Bob and Ted had surprised him. They were smart and obedient and not particularly prone to yipping. And they’d been fiercely dedicated to their mistress.

Not too long ago, Bob and Ted had moved in with Emma Hewitt. Blythe, in the hospital then for what would be her final stay, had told Jonas she wanted the woman to have the dogs. He hadn’t objected. He’d figured that the kennel keeper was an appropriate choice to inherit the Yorkies. At that point he hadn’t known that the Yorkies weren’t everything his mother intended for Emma Lynn Hewitt to inherit.

Jonas scrolled through the personal information file. The phone numbers had not been updated. There was the number of the deli where she’d worked five years ago, and the number of that studio apartment in East Hollywood where she’d lived when she first came to Los Angeles.

He had the current numbers somewhere, didn’t he? The business number, at least, should be easy enough to find in the phone book or online.

But he knew where he would be certain to find them both.

He got his palm planner from his briefcase, left the study and went upstairs again, this time to his mother’s suite. In her white, pink and gold sitting room, which Blythe had recently redone in grand Louis XVI style, he picked up the phone. As he’d expected, she had the kennel keeper on autodial. There were three numbers: home, mobile and business.

Jonas wasn’t about to talk to the Hewitt woman on his mother’s phone in his mother’s rooms with his mother’s things around him, reminding him all too poignantly of what he’d told his little sister earlier that evening: that Blythe was not coming back.

He found a white leather address book in a drawer beneath the phone and got the numbers from it, entering all three in the palm planner. Then he returned to his study.

He sat down at his desk again, picked up the phone and glanced at the serpentine clock on the mantel. It was nearing eleven. He called the home number.

She answered on the third ring. “Hello?” He heard fuzziness in her voice, a slight slurring, as if he’d wakened her. An image flashed through his mind: the kennel keeper in bed, wearing something skimpy and eyeflayingly bright, the Yorkies snuggled in close, one on either side of her.

He blinked to clear the image. “How long is ‘a few days’?” he asked in a gentle and reasonable tone.

Evidently, the sound of his voice was enough to banish sleep, because she said his name—his given name—flatly, all traces of fuzziness gone. “Jonas.”

“How long is ‘a few days’?”

He heard her take in a breath and sigh as she let it out.

He began again. “I asked how—”

“I heard you.” She heaved another sigh. “I’m sorry. I just don’t know yet. I have to think this over. I have to…consider what all this will mean.”

“What’s to consider?”

“Plenty. I know you don’t believe me, but this was a pretty big shock to me, too.”

He tapped his palm planner lightly on the desktop. And then he set it down and stared at it, not really seeing it, reluctantly coming to grips with the fact that he did believe her. He’d seen the look of sick astonishment on her face when he’d entered that conference room and she looked up from the new will. He’d wanted to think she was in on his mother’s scheme. But now he’d had some time to mull it over, he supposed he had to admit that that angle just didn’t add up.

If she’d been in on it, why would she be giving him the runaround now?

She wouldn’t—unless she was hoping he’d make her an offer.

Fine. An offer, then. “How much do you want?”

She didn’t say anything.

So he went ahead and started laying it out for her. “Sign an agreement giving up all claim to my sister and I’ll pay you—”

“Don’t even tell me.”

“Why not?”

“Because I can’t take any money from you.”

“Of course you can take money from me.”

“No, I cannot.”

“Why?”

“Blythe was my friend. I can’t take money to betray my friend.”

“This is no betrayal.”

“To me it would be. I’m sorry. I won’t take your money.”

“It seems to me, Ms. Hewitt, that if there has been any betrayal in this situation, it’s already occurred.”

“Pardon me?”

“The way I see it, my mother betrayed all of us. You. Me. And Mandy, too.”

“Your mama did not betray anybody.” There was indignation in her voice now. Indignation with a Texas twang.

Jonas rubbed the bridge of his nose. He was getting a headache between his eyes. “All right. Perhaps I’ve used the wrong word. How about tricked? Is that better? Or maybe just plain old screwed.”

“Blythe Bravo did not—”

“She screwed us, Ms. Hewitt. Or at least, she screwed me. And my sister.”

“That is not true. Your mama absolutely without a doubt wanted only the best for you. And for your sister.”

“The best. That would be you?”

There was silence on the line again. Finally, the dog groomer said softly, “Well, I guess your mama thought so, now didn’t she?”

Jonas picked up his palm planner and then set it down. He looked at the spines of the books on a shelf about ten feet from where he sat—all gold-tooled leather, beautifully bound. A number of harsh remarks were passing through his brain, things to the effect that he did not consider a woman who’d been raised in a trailer in some place called Alta Lobo, Texas, to be the best thing for him.

He wisely did not let those remarks get out of his mouth.

“So what do we do now, Ms. Hewitt?”

“Well, I don’t know yet.”

“Ms. Hewitt, you are trying my patience.”

“You know, I got that. I got that loud and clear.”

“I could make you a very rich woman.”

“Well, that is real nice. But no thanks. I mean it. I truly do. I will call you, as soon as I can make up my mind what to do.”

Right then, he heard one short, sharp bark. “Oh, sweetie,” she said. For a minute, he thought she was talking to him. But then she did talk to him, and he realized the difference. “That was Ted. He says hi.”

Damn her. She had the dogs. She wasn’t getting him or his sister.

“You have yourself a nice night now,” she said.

“Ms. Hewitt—”

“’Bye…” The line went dead.

Jonas pulled the phone from his ear and stared at the thing. She had hung up on him.

Nobody hung up on him.

Except, apparently, for Emma Lynn Hewitt.

He called again the next night. She told him that no, she had not made up her mind yet.

He hung up on her that time, because he knew if he didn’t that he would end up raising his voice. Jonas Bravo was not a man who ever needed to raise his voice.

After that, he gave up on phone calls. For two entire days he did nothing about the problem, though it seemed to him that the whole time a clock ticked away relentlessly inside his head, counting down the seconds, the minutes, the hours, moving him closer to the date by which he had to be married to Emma Lynn Hewitt—or possibly lose Mandy.

By the time those two days had passed, it was Thursday night, ten days since Blythe’s death, eleven days before the deadline set out in the will. And three days since the meeting at McAllister, Quinn and Associates.

Three days. If that wasn’t a damn few, he didn’t know what was.

And he’d come up with another angle, another offer he could make her.

Friday, he spent almost three hours closeted with his top corporate attorneys, getting the whole thing in order, lining out exactly what he was willing to do and how it would be accomplished. One of his secretaries typed the thing up.

By then, it was after four. He put the finished prospectus in his briefcase and called for the limousine. A half an hour later, his driver pulled up in front of Emma Hewitt’s place of business in Beverly Hills. The driver got out and opened Jonas’s door for him.

Jonas paused on the sidewalk to reluctantly approve the clean, simple lines of the building. The large plaque on the wall by the big glass door gave the establishment’s name: PetRitz. And a brief description of the services provided: Grooming, Boarding, Animal Care. Not a billboard or a tacky picture of a pink poodle in sight. He gave Ms. Hewitt no credit for this clear display of good taste. In Beverly Hills, tackiness was not permitted, at least not when it came to places of business. No billboards, no neon, no cheesy advertising art of any kind.

Jonas knew that it was his mother’s money and influence that had landed the dog groomer in such a prime location. And it was Blythe’s connections with wealthy animal owners all over the Southland that had brought the Hewitt woman a huge clientele right from the first.

But he also realized that it was the Hewitt woman herself who had somehow managed to keep all those fickle, demanding, big-spending pet lovers coming back. From the day it opened its doors, PetRitz had been a success. Everyone who was anyone took their precious pedigreed pooches to Emma Lynn Hewitt’s exclusive pet salon.

And Jonas had been standing on the sidewalk long enough.

He strode up to the glass door and went inside, where he was instantly bombarded with color and sound.

The waiting room boasted hibiscus-pink walls, lots of big, soft chairs and a skylight overhead that let in plenty of light. There were plants everywhere, palms and huge, trailing coleus, ficus trees, giant ferns and big-leaved begonias. Among the greenery, there were several fish tanks in which bright-colored tropical fish darted about and a couple of huge terrariums where large reptiles basked under glowing heat lamps. A few customers were waiting, sitting in the fat chairs, looking prosperous and contented, thumbing through copies of Pet Life and People. Their animals waited with them. A dignified Irish setter, patient on a leash. A Burmese cat hissing in a carrier. A parrot that kept whistling and asking, “What’s the matter, pretty baby?”

Music was playing. The Dixie Chicks, he thought. Which figured.

And he could also hear bird sounds—not including the parrot. Piped in or real? Had to be recorded. He didn’t see any birds perched among the greenery.

There was a reception counter opposite the door. Behind it, at a computer, sat a plus-sized young woman with hair the same color as the counter: jet-black. The young woman wore a smock the same screaming pink as the walls.

Jonas crossed the room and stood right in front of her. She punched up something on the keyboard, scowled at the screen, then looked up at him, ditching the scowl for a welcoming smile. “Hi there. Need some help?” She wore a rhinestone in her nose, three studs in her left ear and four in her right. On her ample pink bosom rode a black lacquer name tag with pink metallic lettering. Pixie, it read.

“Well, Pixie. I’d like to speak with Emma Lynn.”

The black brows inched closer together on the wide forehead. “Wadeaminute. I know who you are. Blythe’s son. The one they call the Bravo Billionaire.”

“Call me Jonas. Please.”

Pixie beamed in pleasure. “All right. I’ll do that. Jonas.”

“May I speak with Emma Lynn?”

Pixie heaved a huge sigh and her rather close-set eyes grew scarily moist. “I’m so sorry—about Blythe. She was the greatest.”

“Yes. There was no one quite like her. Now…would you get me Emma Lynn?”

“Oh. Yeah, sure.” Pixie got up from her chair and went to a black door on her side of the counter. “I’ll tell her you’re here. Won’t be a sec.”

Pixie was gone for more than a sec.

Approximately two minutes after she disappeared, another woman in a pink smock came through the black door and took Pixie’s place behind the counter. Jonas continued to wait, moving to the side every time a client approached to pick up a pet or drop one off.

It occurred to him after he’d been standing there for about five minutes, listening to twittering birds and the Dixie Chicks and then after the Dixie Chicks, to Sheryl Crow, that he felt like a salesman. Someone in pet supplies, briefcase in hand, waiting for the owner to come out and grant him a few minutes of her precious time.

Waiting.

His least favorite activity.

And he’d been doing it a lot lately. Way too much.

Because Emma Lynn Hewitt wouldn’t make up her damn mind.

There was another black door on his side of the counter, on the same wall as the one behind it. A third woman in a pink smock came out of that door twice to take pets from the people at the counter. It didn’t take a Mensa candidate to figure out that the two doors led to the same hallway.

When the second hand on the big wall clock behind the counter had gone around for the seventh time since Pixie had left him, Jonas decided he’d had enough. He turned around and went through the door on his side of the counter.

“Uh. Excuse me,” the woman behind the counter called after him. “You can’t go back there….”

He ignored her and pushed the door shut behind him.

He was in a long, pink hallway, with three black doors on either side, and one at each end. Sheryl Crow and the birds continued to serenade him.

He stepped across the hall and pushed open a door. It was some kind of lounge, with counters and a refrigerator, a coffeemaker, a couple of couches against the wall, a round table and several chairs. Yet another pink-smocked woman sat at the table sipping coffee and reading a paperback novel. She looked up and frowned at him.

“Excuse me,” he said, and pulled the door shut again.

He tried the door next to it.

An office, with a desk and a big pink swivel chair. Lots of plants, just as in the reception room. Pictures on the bookcases—one of his mother, his sister and the Yorkies out by the pool at Angel’s Crest.

Her office, he thought. But where the hell was she? He ducked out of that room and shut that door, too.

Before he could open another one, Pixie emerged from the door at the far end of the hall.

She frowned at him reproachfully. “Jonas. I said I’d be right back.”

He walked toward her. “Where is she, Pixie?”

Pixie stopped looking reproachful and started looking nervous. She backed up against the door she’d just come through. “Uh. I’m sorry. Right now, she can’t be disturbed.”

“She can’t.”

“No.”

Jonas halted about two feet from where Pixie stood blocking the door at the end of the hall. “Why not?”

“She, uh, she’s working with an especially sensitive client at the moment. She told me to tell you she’ll be getting in touch with you real soon.”

“Real soon?”

“That’s right.”

Jonas flexed his fingers around the handle of his briefcase. “Pixie.”

“Uh. Yeah?”

“I want you to move away from that door.”

Pixie’s plump chin quivered and the rhinestone in her nose seemed to be blinking at him. “No, I can’t do that.”

“Yes, you can. And I think you should.” He took the three steps that were necessary to bring him right up close to her.

She looked at him and he looked at her.

“I’m not a very nice man, Pixie. Do you understand?”

Slowly, she nodded.

“Get out of my way.”

Pixie maintained the stare-down for another ten seconds. That was all she could take. Then, with a small moan, she sidled to the right.

“Thank you.” Jonas opened the door.

Beyond it, the walls were cobalt blue with white trim and the floor was black-and-white linoleum, a classic checkerboard pattern. A pink-smocked Emma Lynn Hewitt stood by a metal-topped table with some sort of adjustable pole attached to it, a noose at the end of the pole. On the table, below the dangling noose, sat a dog. A very small dog—perhaps seven inches tall and six pounds, max. The dog had long, soft-looking caramel-colored fur and bright, slightly bulging eyes.

Jonas registered these details in the first second or two after he entered the room, right before the dog attacked him.

Chapter 4

The dog leapt at him, yapping.

Emma Lynn Hewitt came after it, emitting firm and totally ineffective commands. “Hitchcock, stay! Hitchcock, sit!”

Jonas lifted his briefcase, positioning it as a makeshift shield. The little dog slammed against it and dropped to the floor, where it lay stunned for perhaps a count of three.

And then it was up again, grabbing onto the end of Jonas’s left trouser leg with its sharp, white teeth.

“Oh, please don’t kick him,” begged Emma.

The dog growled and wriggled and ripped at his pant leg. Jonas stood absolutely still. “Then I’d suggest you get him away from me. Now.”

“Hitch. Here, Hitch…”

The dog paused, blinked, and then picked up where it had left off, nails clicking fiercely on the linoleum as it yanked backwards, making a rag of the fine lightweight wool.

Emma knelt. “Hitchcock. Front.”

The dog froze. Growled.

“Front, Hitch. Front.”

The dog gave another growl, then let go.

She scooped the animal into her arms, stood, and backed up. “Good boy. Such a very, very good boy.” The dog whined and licked her chin. She glanced at Jonas. So did the dog, which immediately started growling again. “Wait outside in the hall. I’ll be right there.”

Jonas advised, “Don’t disappoint me, Emma.”

“I won’t. I promise. I’ll be right out.”

He turned for the door.

“Send Pixie in,” she said, as he opened the door.

Since Pixie was standing on the other side wearing the guilty expression of someone caught eavesdropping, there was no need to relay the message. Pixie went in as soon as he got out.

For once, the dog groomer didn’t make him wait.

In under a minute, she came out of the blue room, closing the door and then slumping against it, pale head bowed. She was wearing leopard-skin patterned pants beneath the pink smock, the kind that fit like a second skin and came to just below her knees. There were black platform thongs on her feet. Her toenails were metallic gold. Right then, she reminded him of a very young, very vulnerable Marilyn Monroe.

“I am sorry,” she said, still looking down. “Hitch hates the noose, so I don’t use it. After a little conversation and a lot of praise, he’s usually real good for me. But you surprised him, bursting in the room like that. Pomeranians don’t like surprises.”

“No kidding.”

One of the pink-smocked women—this one skinny as a rail with short, spiky red hair—came out of a door at the opposite end of the hall, leading a fine-looking collie on a leash. The woman paused. “Em? You okay?”

Emma looked over, forced a smile. “I’m fine, Deirdre.”

Deirdre took the collie through the door to the waiting room.

Emma turned her gaze on him then, her expression wistful. “Don’t tell me. Let me guess. Armani, right?”

He realized she was referring to his tattered trousers. “Vincent Nicolosi.”

“Who?”

“Never mind.”

“Someone so exclusive, I’ve never heard of him, huh?”

He shrugged.

“You just send me the bill, all right?”

As far as Jonas was concerned, they’d talked enough about his trousers. “I have something important to discuss with you.”

“Jonas, I really don’t have time right now to—”

He was already striding back down the hall. He stopped at the door that led to the office room. “In here.”

“Jonas, I can’t—”

“In here. Now.”

Amazingly, she did what he’d told her to do, platform thongs clipping smartly as she came toward him. She opened the door. “After you.”

He went in.

She followed, gestured at the two pink Naugahyde chairs opposite the desk. “Have a seat.”

He didn’t sit. He laid his briefcase on her desk, opened it, and took out the prospectus. “Here.” He held it out to her.

“What’s that?”

“A plan I’ve put together.”

She folded her arms below those ripe-looking breasts.

“What kind of a plan?”

“A damn good one.” Since she wouldn’t take it, he dropped the prospectus on the desk. “We’re going to expand this business of yours. You’ll open five new PetRitz locations—in Santa Barbara, San Francisco, Dallas, Philadelphia and New York City. One a year, starting next year. I will take all the risks, and put up all the money. The majority of the profit from this venture will be yours.”

“It will?”

“Yes.”

“And what exactly do I have to do to get so lucky?”

“You’ll contribute your time. Lots of it. And also your…expertise.”

“I heard that.” Her eyes were moss green, or maybe hazel. They kept changing color. And they seemed to be twinkling with humor right then. That little mole above her lip tucked itself into the shadow of her cheek as she grinned.

“Heard what?” he demanded.

“The way you hesitated before you said ‘expertise,’ like you didn’t really mean it.”

“I assure you. I did mean it.”

She tipped her head to the side. “Sure you did. And a Texas summer never gets all that hot.”

“Emma, I am very well aware that you’ve done a fine job here. PetRitz, by any standard, is a success. And my mother realized an excellent profit on her investment.”

“You bet she did.”

“So now, I’m going to help you expand.”

She kept her arms wrapped around her. “In exchange for what?”

“In exchange for—”

She put up a hand. “No. Don’t tell me. Let me guess.” She fluttered her eyelashes, which were curly and dark around those almost-green eyes. “I know. You want me to agree to give up any claim to Mandy.”

He sought the most diplomatic way to say yes.

Before he found it, she prompted, “Am I right?”

“Emma—”

“Just answer the question.”

“All right. Yes. You’ll give up all claim to custody of Mandy.”

“No.”

He glared at her. “Just read the damn thing, will you?”

“I’m not going to give up my claim to custody of your sister. Or at least, if I do, it’s not gonna be because you have paid me off. Oh, Jonas.” She raked both hands back through that white-gold hair and she groaned at the ceiling. “Haven’t we been through this already, more than once?”

“No. This is all new. This is a great opportunity for you to build on what you’ve got here.”

“Well, fine. It’s a great opportunity and I’m passin’ it up—considering that to take it would mean I’d have to turn my back on the dyin’ wish of the second most wonderful woman I have ever known.”

He must have frowned.

Because she explained, “The first most wonderful bein’ my aunt Cass. You know all about my aunt Cass, now, don’t you? Blythe told me how you sicced your detectives on all of her friends. How you keep files on folks, how you never, ever trust anyone.”

“Excuse me. There are people whom I trust.”

“Oh, sure. Maybe. After you’ve had your detectives on them, keepin’ track of their every move for ten or twenty years.”

He felt that urge again, to wrap his hands around her pretty neck and squeeze. He spoke more quietly than ever. “You have no idea the kind of precautions a man in my position has to take.”

“You don’t have to take precautions, Jonas. You just do. I mean, all those guards you have out there at that mansion of yours…”

He did not have guards. Not exactly. He employed a skilled and discreet security force to patrol the grounds at Angel’s Crest.

The woman was smirking. “Bel Air is a gated community, with security guards checking out anybody who tries to get in. And then you’ve got that big stone fence around your property. And did I mention that other locked gate smack in the middle of that high stone fence, that gate with the camera that zooms in on anyone who rings to be let in? And is that all? Oh, no. There is more. Because you’ve also got those guys straight out of Men in Black sneakin’ around in the jacaranda trees, talkin’ to each other on their walkie-talkies. I mean, pardon me, Jonas, but you are kind of paranoid.”

“No.” He spoke with extreme patience. “I am not paranoid. I am careful.”

“You are too careful. And I keep thinkin’ that, no matter how much you love Mandy—and I do know that you love her, Jonas—but no matter how much you care for her, she can’t help but be affected by the way you are, by the way you keep people away from you, the way you are so afraid to trust anybody.”

“I am not afraid.” He spoke more forcefully than he meant to.

She actually had the temerity to roll those just-about-green eyes.

Clearly, they were getting nowhere. He said, very quietly, “I want you to take a good, long look at that offer.” He turned to leave.

She spoke to his back. “Jonas, this is pointless. I am not goin’ to—”

“I’ll call you tonight.” He shut the door on her before she could finish whatever it was she had started to say.

He called her at midnight. She answered the phone on the first ring. “What?”

“Did you read it?”

“I did. All the way through to the part about how I give up all claim to custody of Mandy. And then I stopped reading.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m not takin’ this offer—which I already told you this afternoon. If you’d only bothered to listen, you could have saved yourself a phone call tonight.”

At that moment, Jonas realized he was truly and completely fed up with this woman. So fed up that he said exactly what he was thinking. “I could ruin you, Emma Lynn Hewitt.”

She gasped. He found the small, shocked sound inordinately satisfying. “I guess that was a threat, huh?”

“Let’s call it a warning.”

“Call it what you want. It won’t work.” There was steel beneath the twang. “A person’s got to stand for somethin’ or she’ll fall for anything. My aunt Cass used to say that.”

Terrific. Now she was going to beat him over the head with clever little sayings from country-western songs. “I could care less what your aunt Cass used to say.”

“Well, all right. Then listen to this. This is what I say. You are not bullyin’ me into doing things your way.”

The problem, Jonas realized then, was that she meant exactly what she said. Damn her.

This couldn’t be happening to him. But it was.

Everyone had a price—except, apparently, Emma Lynn Hewitt. For Emma Lynn Hewitt, no amount would be high enough.

He could break her, financially, and she knew it. Yet even the threat of losing everything she’d worked for wouldn’t make her give in and see things his way. The woman had values. And she was determined to stick by them. She would come to her own decision, in her own time. And whatever that decision was, he was going to have to live with it.

“Oh, Jonas.” Her tone, all at once, had become insultingly gentle. “I do understand why you are how you are. Blythe told me all about it. And it’s no secret anyway. I know it was all over the newspapers back then. Such an awful, terrible thing. I am so sorry, that ugly things like that can happen, that sometimes evil never gets made right. And Blythe, well, you probably know that she blamed herself. She said that her breakdown took her away from you just when you needed her most.”

Jonas put the phone below his chin and sat back in his chair. He looked up at the intricately carved crown moldings overhead.

Emma Hewitt blathered on. “When she was better, she tried to reach out to you. But she said, by then, you’d spent so much time feelin’ all alone that you were used to it. You wouldn’t open up to her. You wouldn’t open up to anyone, you wouldn’t—”

Jonas had heard enough. Very quietly, while she was still talking, he hung up the phone.

After that, Jonas waited. He had finally understood that he had no other choice. He did not call Emma Hewitt or try in any way to contact her again.

Three more days went by. During that time, he found he was coming to grips with the fact that there would be a long court battle.

So be it. Possession was nine-tenths of the law. Mandy lived with him and she would continue to live with him. He could have his lawyers stall and negotiate for years. By the time Emma Hewitt won custody—if, in the end, she did win—Mandy would be all grown-up and running her own life, anyway.

By Monday, one week before the deadline set out in Blythe’s will, Jonas had become certain that he would not hear from the Hewitt woman until the deadline had passed and her lawyer got in touch with his lawyer to begin the custody suit.

That night, she came to him at Angel’s Crest.

Chapter 5

It was eleven-thirty at night and it was raining when Palmer got the call from the gatehouse. The butler found Jonas at his desk in the study.

“Ms. Emma Lynn Hewitt at the main gate, sir.”

Jonas shut the lid on his laptop, aware suddenly of the feel of his own blood, the hot surge of it through his veins. “Tell them I’m expecting her and let security know she’s on the way up.”

“Of course.”

“Show her in here when she gets to the house.”

“I’ll do just that, sir.”

Palmer left him.

Jonas got up and went to the bank of windows nearest the desk. He stared out at the night, at the lacy shadows of the jacarandas moving in the wind and the waving branches of the palms. The hard warm August rain pinged against the leaded-glass panes, glittering as it slithered down.

The study was at the front of the house. After a time, he saw her headlights cut the night. The lights slid past the window where he stood and stopped not far from the front portico. They went dark.

Jonas didn’t move. He waited, standing absolutely still.

Soon enough, he heard the door behind him open. “Ms. Hewitt,” Palmer announced.

Jonas turned.

She stood in the doorway, Palmer close behind her. She wore an ordinary gray raincoat thrown over a curve-hugging shirt of some sort of elasticized lace. The shirt didn’t quite meet the waist of her clinging white bell-bottomed pants. His glance moved down. She wore rain-wet platform sandals on her feet. There was purple polish—polish the same color as the tight lace shirt—on her toes.

“Hello, Jonas.”

He met her gaze. Her eyes were very green right then. And troubled. Raindrops glittered in her pale hair.

“Thank you, Palmer,” Jonas said.

The butler left them.

“I want to see Mandy,” Emma Lynn said.

“She’s asleep.”

“I’m not going to wake her up. I just…I have to see her.”

“Why?”

“I meant what I told you, Jonas. I have been making up my mind.”

“Fine. Why is it necessary for you to see my sister?”

She seemed at a loss for a reason, only looked at him, an urgent kind of look, through those troubled green eyes.

He left the window and approached her. Her eyes widened as he got close, as if she feared his nearness. But she didn’t step back.

He went past her. “This way.”

Emma followed Jonas out to the entry hall, with its ebony-inlaid walnut floor and its coffered and arched cathedral ceiling rising three stories high. The grand foyer, Blythe had always called it.

Jonas began to climb the curving staircase. Emma fell in step behind him.

Mandy’s rooms were on the second floor. Jonas went past the dark playroom and entered the bedroom. Lightning flashed once, bright and hard, outside. For a split second, the yellow and blue walls stenciled with dragonflies and dancing frogs were cast into sharp relief.

Then the room plunged into shadow again. The rain drummed away outside, a low sort of sighing sound.

Mandy had graduated from her crib to a big white four-poster several months ago. She lay in the center of the roomy bed, on her side, the quilted yellow and green comforter covering her to her waist, both hands tucked beneath her plump chin. Her thick, silky curls looked very dark against the yellow pillow.

Emma tiptoed to the bed and stood looking down, painfully aware of Jonas, so silent and watchful, in the shadows behind her.

Mandy yawned, then let out a small, contented sigh. She rolled to her back, flopping her arms up and out, so that her hands lay palms-up on the pillow at either side of her head. Her little fists tightened, then went lax again.

As Emma stared at those small, perfect hands, it almost seemed she could hear Blythe’s voice in her mind….

“Am I crazy, Em? Am I totally irresponsible, to want a baby so much at this time in my life?”

“No, you are not crazy. Not crazy at all.”

It had been a Saturday. The Saturday after Thanksgiving. They’d been Christmas shopping. And they’d stopped in at a Mexican restaurant on Melrose for lunch.

Blythe had leaned toward Emma across their table, her face earnest, her voice low. “I want…I guess I want a chance to do right by a child, to help someone grow up and to do a good job of it. I wasn’t there, when it mattered, for Jonas.” She sat back, her eyes suddenly far away and dark with pain. “And with my other baby, I never even had a chance.”

Emma was the one leaning closer then. “Blythe, don’t do this to yourself. What happened was not your fault. Not in any way.”

But Blythe shook her head. “I could have been stronger. I should have been stronger. Jonas needed me then. And I failed him terribly.”

Emma had said what Aunt Cass would have said. “You can’t live in yesterday. You can only live right now.” Then she’d added what she really thought. “And right now, today, you would make a wonderful mother.”

“Oh, do you think so?”

“You bet.”

Blythe looked so young at that moment, sitting back in the booth, a soft smile on her face—but then, she had always looked years younger than her real age. And she’d been blessed with lots of energy. Until the illness that claimed her so suddenly, she was a person who just brimmed with life.

Emma asked, “But could you? I mean, aren’t there laws about how old you can be?”

Blythe picked up her water glass and raised it, as if in a toast. “Money and influence do have their uses.” She set the glass down without drinking from it. “However, there is no getting around the problem of Jonas. He would be furious.”

Emma dipped a chip in salsa and popped it into her mouth. “Well, fine. Let him be furious. It is not his decision.”

“But if anything happened to me in the next few years, he could end up being the baby’s guardian.”

“Blythe. Nothin’ is going to happen to you.”

“I’m sure you’re right. But if something did happen, you and I both know that Jonas is not emotionally equipped to bring up a child. He would need help, Emma.”

Emma crunched another chip. “Now, come on. You weren’t listenin’ to me, were you? I said that nothin’ is going to happen to—”

“Would you be there? That is what I’m asking you, Emma. It’s a great deal to ask, and I know it. But it’s very important to me. To think that I could count on you to help out, to give Jonas a little…guidance, if something happened to me.”

On the bed, Mandy sighed again and turned her darling little face toward the far wall. Emma stared at the curve of her beautiful cheek.

Would you be there?

Emma had looked across the booth at her friend and said, “Yes. You know that I would. If it ever comes to that—which it will not—I will be there to help out.”

Emma had said yes. Yes, after all, is what a person should always try to say to a friend. It had been a promise. A promise she’d been foolishly certain that she would never have to keep…

Emma turned from the sleeping child. Jonas was waiting for her in the shadows. She nodded. He gestured for her to go ahead of him. She did, as far as the upstairs hall. Then he took the lead again. They went back the way they’d come, down the curving stairway, through the grand foyer, along another hallway to the room the butler had called the study, with its beautiful rugs, inviting velvet-covered chairs and pretty jewel-paned windows.

Jonas shut the door. “Take off your coat. Have a seat.”

“No. I won’t stay long.”

He stared at her, a probing, knowing look that caused her stomach to go all jittery. She shivered.

One corner of his mouth lifted the tiniest bit in the Jonas Bravo version of a smile. “You are nervous.”

Why deny it? “You bet I am.”

“Why? What’s going on?”

Lord, give me strength, Emma thought.

She wrapped her raincoat closer around herself, yanked her shoulders back and announced, “All right, Jonas. I’m willin’ to do what Blythe wanted me to do. I will marry you. For one year.”

Chapter 6

Jonas found, surprisingly, that he was relieved. It wasn’t the best decision she could have made. He would have liked it a lot better if she’d simply agreed to stay the hell out of his and Mandy’s lives.

But it could have been worse. At least this way, in a year when they divorced, there would be no doubt that Mandy would stay with him.

“No more stalling,” he said. “We’ll get married right away.”

Those eyes, moss green at that moment, widened. She didn’t speak, but she did nod.

Fine. He’d take that nod as a yes. “And another thing…”

She frowned. “What?”

Jonas did not consider Emma Lynn a gold digger. She might have platinum hair and a wardrobe straight out of a Victoria’s Secret catalogue, but in the past week, the woman had shown herself to be burdened with an excess of integrity.

Still, a man in his position couldn’t be too careful. “I’ll expect you to sign a prenuptial agreement. I’ll settle a few million on you, but that’s all you’ll get out of me.”

She stiffened. And her soft red mouth became a firm line. “I don’t need a few million from you, Jonas Bravo. You make out those papers to say I get nothin’—and you get nothin’ of my fortune, either.”

He couldn’t help it. He laughed. As the sound escaped him, he realized it was something he didn’t do all that often. He composed himself, asked, quite seriously, “What fortune is that, Emma Lynn?”

She had that cute little turned-up nose of hers aimed at the ceiling. “The fortune I’ll earn soon enough, you watch me.”

He was watching. And he was thinking that she did possess a certain spunky charm. She had just succeeded in amusing him. And that was a rare thing. Women so seldom amused him anymore.

Maybe he’d become jaded. There had, after all, been an excess of women in his life during his mid-to-late twenties. All of them had been beautiful and bright and so clever. But sooner or later, they all wanted more than he wanted to give them. He would move on.

The endings of affairs tended to be unpleasant—all those tears and impassioned recriminations. Gradually, he’d come to the conclusion that the great sex at the beginning of a romance just wasn’t enough to make up for all the big emotional scenes at the end. So he had dated less and less until, in the past two or three years, he found that he wasn’t dating at all.

But he had to admit that sometimes he missed having a woman in his life. He missed the feel of a soft, warm body beneath him in bed. He missed kissing. Yes, he really had liked kissing. He liked the taste of women, the sweetness of their mouths beyond the soft boundary of their lips.

Emma Lynn, he couldn’t help but notice, had a very pretty mouth, not too wide, but with full lips. Her mouth was slightly open at the moment. He could see her nice white teeth, which were just the slightest bit overlapping in front—not perfect.

Strange. He liked that.

He also was finding that he’d begun to like that mole above her lip on the right side, the way it slid into shadow when she smiled.

He moved a step closer to her, took in a careful breath.

Yes. A fresh, sweet, scent. Like roses—roses wet with morning dew.

It probably wouldn’t be entirely unpleasant to have her in bed. In fact, having sex with his wife…that could be an interesting diversion. He doubted the attraction would last the entire year, but why not make the most of it while it did?

He wanted to touch her, to reach out and run his finger along her cheek.

Had he ever touched her? He didn’t believe so. He didn’t believe he’d ever so much as taken her hand.

That was odd, wasn’t it? It had been five years since his mother had first introduced them. He remembered that introduction clearly. He had heard them, the two of them, laughing together in the living room off the grand foyer. Or perhaps laughing wasn’t the word for it. They were giggling, like a pair of teenage girls sharing secrets. He’d decided to investigate.

He’d pushed open the tall double doors. And there was his mother in her Chanel and pearls, sitting on one of the striped silk sofas with a way-too-sexy blonde. The blonde wore a very red, very revealing pair of shorts and a skimpy halter top.

His mother had glanced over at him in the doorway. “Jonas, come in. You must meet Emma Lynn…”

He had not come in. He had nodded a curt greeting and bowed from the room, pulling the doors shut as he went.

After that, there’d been no real occasion to touch Emma Lynn. No reason he would want to. She irritated him, and she’d never seemed particularly fond of him, either.

Well, now he was going to marry her—for a limited time, anyway. And he’d decided he’d probably take her to bed. He did want to touch her now. So he would. He reached out his hand.

Emma gulped.

Omigoodness. Jonas was going to touch her. Now why in the world would he go and do that?

She knew she should say something, move back, flinch away.

But she didn’t. She remained absolutely still as his big, square hand brushed at her hair, slid along her cheek—and then dropped away.

They were standing just inside the door of his study. And now neither of them was moving. Emma felt that she couldn’t move, couldn’t think. Could hardly even breathe.

Jonas Bravo had touched her.

And now, he was looking at her so strangely. The very air felt changed. Charged. It seemed to vibrate with the tension between them—a whole new kind of tension. The sexual kind.

Emma’s silly throat had gone bone-dry. She gulped again.

What was this? She did not need this—to get all hot and bothered over Blythe’s big old bully of a son.

Okay, they were getting married. But there wasn’t going to be any funny stuff, no there was not. Blythe’s will hadn’t said a thing about the two of them sleeping together. Emma was going to open him up and teach him a little about giving and caring.

But sex? Uh-uh. There was no need for that and they were not going to go there.

“Um. It’s getting late, isn’t it? I’d better be headin’ out.”

Jonas allowed himself a second smile—this one more obvious than the first.

Yes, he was thinking. There it was, beneath the irritation. Attraction. Mutual attraction. Interesting.

And she was completely bewildered by it. Not prepared for it, fighting it, even.

Jonas felt better by the second.

The way he saw it, Emma Lynn Hewitt’s confusion provided a clear opportunity. It represented his chance to get the upper hand with her. And if there was one thing that Jonas Bravo understood, it was the importance of getting and keeping the upper hand.

He moved in closer. Her eyes got wider. “When?” he asked softly.

She actually licked those pretty full lips. “Um…what?”

“The wedding. When?”

She only stared at him, her gaze sliding from his mouth, to his eyes, then back to his mouth.

Imagine that. Emma Lynn Hewitt had nothing to say.

He answered the question for her. “I’ll tell you when. Tomorrow. First thing. We’ll fly to Vegas. We can be back in L.A. by tomorrow night.”

“Tomorrow?” She looked more bewildered by the second. She also looked aroused. Jonas decided he liked her that way. Aroused and bewildered. And at a loss for words.

“Tomorrow,” he repeated. “I have some important meetings on Wednesday. I’ll need to be back in town for those.”

“Oh. Important meetings. Of course.”

Jonas found himself debating the pros and cons of a kiss. He did want to taste her—but no. Waiting would be better. Tomorrow night, he’d be kissing his wife.

The idea sent a bolt of heat through him. All at once, he was rock-hard.

Yes. It could be amusing, to be married for a year.

Marriage wasn’t for him. He never would have willingly agreed to such a thing. But since his dotty mother had fixed it so he had to marry, well, at least he’d be marrying a woman who, he might as well admit it now, had begun to intrigue him.

She was so deliciously contradictory. The high moral standards, the do-it-to-me shoes…

And it was only temporary. Might as well make the best of it.

“I’ll pick you up at your house,” he said. “Be packed and ready. Say, ten o’clock?”

“Ten. Tomorrow morning? I don’t…it’s all so fast…” She was hedging suddenly, backing toward the door.

Perhaps, he decided, a kiss was in order, after all.

“Emma Lynn.”

“What?”

“Stand still.”

She froze—but her mouth kept going. “I…I have to go. Really. I can’t—”

“Soon.” He closed the space she’d put between them.

She looked up at him, her eyes jewel-green now, soft lips slightly parted. “Uh. No. I think I should go now.”

He bent his head, brought his mouth to a distance of one inch from hers. “Now?”

“Now…”

He hardly had to move at all, just that inch—and he had her mouth. She gasped, and then she stiffened.

He remained absolutely still, mouth to mouth with her, waiting.

Until she sighed. Her breath was sweet, as if she’d been eating apples. And the dewy-rose scent of her was all around him.

Slowly, so as not to startle her, he took her shoulders and very gently pushed the raincoat away. It collapsed to the floor.

She made a small, urgent sound in her throat, a word that didn’t quite take form. A protest, a plea? He couldn’t have said.

And he didn’t care. Her mouth parted a tiny bit more. He slipped his tongue inside and pulled her body in to his.

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