His Black Sheep Bride / The Billionaire Baby Bombshell: His Black Sheep Bride / The Billionaire Baby Bombshell. Anna DePalo

He couldn’t picture their carefree, sandy-haired friend trying to pass himself off as a mere mister. Nor did he understand why Hawk would have wanted to.

      “Right, and what’s going on there Hawk?” Sawyer asked. “The rumor mill, and pardon me for reading my own newspapers, has it that you were more than friendly with a certain lovely wedding planner—”

      Hawk grimaced. “What’s going on is a private matter.”

      “Precisely my point,” Colin said.

      “A private matter, Your Grace?” Sawyer quizzed. “You mean between you and your alias, James Fielding?”

      “Put a sock in it, Melton,” the duke growled.

      “Yes, Melton,” Colin said, siding with Hawk, “unless you’d like us to quiz you on your pursuit of the fair Ms. Kincaid.”

      It was Sawyer’s turn to grimace. His friends knew his acquisition of Kincaid News was tied up with Tamara’s hand in marriage. Fortunately, they didn’t know the particulars about his most recent interactions with Tamara. She’d gotten under his skin—so much so that he’d kissed her. And it had been some kiss—hot and wonderful enough to leave a man thirsting for more.

      “I’ve seen Kincaid’s daughter with a date,” Hawk commented, arching a brow. “Always the same one.”

      Sawyer shrugged. “She takes a date from time to time.”

      “A date who’s not you,” Colin pointed out.

      “Just an occasional date?” Hawk probed. “And you know this how?”

      Sawyer gave a Cheshire-cat grin. “From the man himself, Mr. Tom Vance, lately of the rock band Zero Sum, and perhaps soon to be the recipient of some very good career news.”

      Colin quirked an eyebrow, for once betraying a hint of surprise.

      Hawk started to shake his head. “Don’t go there …”

      Since he already had, Sawyer gave both of them a bland look. “Know of any good West Coast record producers?”

      She was sunk.

      Or more accurately, practically destitute.

      Tamara stared at the letter in her hand. Her bid for investors had fallen flat. Financing was tight these days, and people apparently weren’t lining up to give money to a lone jewelry designer with a big idea and not much else to her name.

      She’d maxed out her credit cards and had already gobbled up her allotment of small business loans.

      She looked around her loft from her seat at a workbench cluttered with pliers, clasps and assorted gemstones. Her business had a name, Pink Teddy Designs, and not much else these days. Yesterday, she’d received notice her rent would be increasing, so soon even the four walls around her would cease to exist—as far as she and her business went, anyway.

      She’d have to find another place to live and work. There was no way she could afford a ten percent rent increase—not with things the way they were.

      She’d never have admitted this to Sawyer when she’d encountered him last week at the fashion party in TriBeCa, but these days she was hanging by a thread—one that was becoming very frayed very fast, ever since she’d left her salaried position two years ago at a top jewelry design firm to strike out on her own.

      Rats.

      She was desperate—and Sawyer’s words reverberated through her mind. I’m in a position to help you move your jewelry business to the next level.

      No, she wouldn’t let herself go there.

      And with any luck, Sawyer didn’t have a clue as to just how dire her current financial situation was. He hadn’t seemed as if he did. In fact, his words to her that night indicated he thought she was looking to expand her business, not merely survive.

      She hoped her appearance had also served to throw him off the scent. She’d dressed to project an image of success. She’d worn expensive earrings of her own design to the fashion party—as much for advertising as for anything else, though the earrings were worth much more than the typical Pink Teddy piece of semiprecious jewelry.

      Yes, she dreamed of expanding her business and having her name added to the roster of top celebrity jewelry designers. But she’d also had to start small, given her financing, or rather lack thereof. And now she was nearly broke.

      People assumed she had money—or at least connections—as the daughter of a millionaire Scottish viscount. In fact, she was entitled to be addressed as the Honourable Tamara Kincaid and not much else. After her parents’ divorce when she was seven, she’d gone to reside in the United States with her mother, who had been able to maintain a respectable, but not settled, lifestyle. Instead, thanks to child-support payments, Tamara had been entrusted to the care of a series of babysitters, schools and summer camps while her peripatetic mother had continued to travel and move them within the United States.

      Her mother resided in Houston now with husband number three, the owner of a trio of car dealerships, having finally achieved a measure of stability.

      Tamara sighed. Partly because of the physical distance, she and her mother weren’t very close, but a fringe benefit was that her mother didn’t interfere much in her life.

      Of course, she could hardly claim the same benefit with respect to her father, who owned an apartment in New York City.

      But unlike her mother, she’d thumbed her nose at her father’s money. Because the strings attached had been more than she’d been able to accept. As she’d grown older, her father had made his opinions known, and her artsy tendencies, her penchant for the bohemian and her taste for the unconventional had not gone over well.

      Her father’s attempts to meddle had, of course, reached their zenith in his crazy plan to marry her off to Sawyer.

      Really, that scheme was beyond ridiculous.

      Sure, her parents’ marriage had been an ill-advised union between an American and a British aristocrat—a still-naive girl from Houston on the one hand, and the young and ambitious heir to a viscountcy on the other. But her starry-eyed mother, who’d imagined herself in love, had been thrilled by the prospect of residing in a British manor house.

      In contrast, Tamara prided herself on being a worldly-wise New Yorker. And much as she hated to admit it, she had her father’s skeptical nature. She’d inherited her mother’s coloring and features, but that’s where similarities ended.

      She liked her life just fine. She was bohemian with an edge.

      A marriage between her and Sawyer Langsford was laughable. They barely spoke the same language, though she had been known to read his paper, The New York Intelligencer, and occasionally watch the Mercury News channel.

      To Sawyer’s credit, Tamara acknowledged, his media outlets didn’t stoop to petty sensationalism. And she had to admit he’d built an international media empire from the two British radio stations and the regional newspaper he’d inherited from his father. At thirty-eight, he’d stuffed a lifetime’s worth of career accomplishments into a mere fifteen years or so.

      At twenty-eight, she was a decade behind Sawyer in experience and worlds away in outlook. Yes, she wanted her design business to float instead of sinking into the great abyss, and yes, she dreamed of becoming successful. But she didn’t aspire to the same lofty heights of empire building that her father and Sawyer did.

      She’d effectively been abandoned twice by her father—once, in a transatlantic divorce, and then again by Viscount Kincaid’s devotion to his media company. She couldn’t—wouldn’t—risk acquiring a husband who was from the same mold.

      It would be beyond foolhardy, notwithstanding the kiss the other night.

      Still, the kiss had repeatedly sneaked into her thoughts over the past few days. Sawyer had made her toes curl. And embarrassingly, she’d clearly responded to him.