The Inconvenient Bride. Anne McAllister

in savings. Sometimes it seemed like a lot. But compared to what Frankie needed, it was a pittance. Even if she begged on the streets she didn’t think she could come up with as much as Pam needed. But she wasn’t ready to admit defeat.

      “I’ll think of something,” she’d vowed and squeezed Pammie’s hands. “Don’t worry.”

      But if she had told Pammie not to, Sierra worried herself. All morning long, she’d worried. But she hadn’t come up with any ideas at all.

      “Okay. Let’s go. Long necks, ladies. Lots of chin. Gimme lots of chin.” Finn started moving again, shooting as he did so. “Don’t block each other, for God’s sake. Move, Alison.”

      Alison moved—right into one of the reflectors. It fell over with a crash.

      Ballou dropped the half dozen dresses in his arms. “Oh, no! Ohmigod!” He scrabbled for them. “They’ll get creased! Sierra, help!”

      “Damn!” Finn’s face turned red. “Sierra, get the reflector.”

      “I’m frizzing again,” Alison wailed. “Sierra! Do something!”

      And just when Sierra thought the day couldn’t possibly get any worse, the studio door banged open and in strode Dominic Wolfe.

      Strong, Finn’s lady-marine-drill-sergeant office manager came hurrying, hard on his heels. “Excuse me, sir! Sir! You can’t go in there!”

      But Strong didn’t know Dominic Wolfe.

      “The Hotshot With The Cool Head,” the Times business pages had headlined him just last week in an in-depth profile of the hard-driving, hard-working CEO of Wolfe Enterprises that they’d called “an old-fashioned business with a new-fashioned future.”

      What they meant was that under his guidance, Wolfe Enterprises, a communications company had moved from radio and television right into the newest electronic and digital media without a glitch.

      “Because Dominic Wolfe knows what he wants,” the article had said. “And what Dominic wants, Dominic gets.”

      And that, Sierra could have told them, was the honest-to-God truth.

      Strong might have been no more than an angry mosquito as she buzzed after him.

      Sierra watched in morbid astonished fascination, aware that her heart was kicking over in her chest. She hadn’t seen Dominic Wolfe since her sister Mariah married his brother Rhys three months ago.

      She had very carefully not seen him since that time—just as he had very carefully not seen her.

      She had done her damnedest to forget him.

      And she’d certainly never expected him to turn up in the middle of Finn MacCauley’s studio, heading straight toward her.

      But before he reached her, Finn stepped between them. “Wolfe?” He looked perplexed, obviously wondering what his friend Rhys’s high-powered CEO brother was doing here.

      They all wondered—the annoyed Strong, the slack-jawed Ballou, the starry-eyed models, the makeup artist—and Sierra.

      Especially Sierra.

      Since he’d pushed his way through the door, he hadn’t taken his eyes off her. And whatever amazing electricity had begun sizzling between them the first time they’d met when she’d stormed into his office last summer, demanding the whereabouts of his brother, was still sizzling all these months later—even though they denied it, assuaged it, tried to ignore it.

      Now she stepped round Finn and looked up into Dominic’s ice-chip eyes. “What do you want?”

      “I want you to marry me,” Dominic said.

      He didn’t care that she looked poleaxed or that Finn looked murderous or that everyone else seemed to think he’d just escaped from bedlam.

      He repeated the words. “Marry me,” in case she wanted to pretend she hadn’t heard them.

      “Marry…you?”

      It was the first time he’d seen Sierra Kelly slack-jawed. But at least she’d finally found her voice. And privately Dominic was satisfied that he’d actually succeeded in shocking her.

      “That’s what I said.” He grinned now, daring her.

      And, because she was Sierra, she tipped her sock-it-to-me chin right straight at him and dared him right back. “You’d have to pay me a million bucks!”

      “Half a million.”

      “What!” She went beyond slack-jawed, straight to flabbergasted. “Be serious.”

      “I am serious.” He grabbed her arm and dragged her out into the reception area where half a dozen pairs of prying eyes couldn’t oversee and an equal number of ears couldn’t overhear. “You want a half a million bucks, fine.”

      “But—” she started to protest, then looked at him narrowly, suspiciously. “Why?”

      “Because.”

      She laughed. “Because? Oh, there’s a reason. This from the man the Times calls ‘focused, decisive, a man who knows his own mind.’”

      Dominic snorted. “One reporter’s impression.”

      “Backed up by pretty solid evidence,” Sierra said. “So, I repeat, why do you want to marry me?”

      He rubbed a hand over his hair, still damp from the rain and admitted, “I don’t.”

      Sierra’s hazel eyes flashed. She folded her arms across her Day-Glo orange rib-topped chest, but not before he’d noted the faintest outline of her nipples. He felt a stirring in his groin.

      “Well, then?” Sierra eyed him narrowly. She tapped the toe of her boot.

      Dominic gritted his teeth. “I need to get married.”

      “I thought only women needed to get married.”

      Damn her smart mouth! He could feel heat climbing up his neck. “It’s time I got married. CEOs look more responsible when they’re married.”

      “You’re marrying me to look responsible?”

      “I’m marrying to shut my old man up! I want him to get the hell out of my life! I want him to stop trying to find me a wife. I want him to get his claws out of me and out of the company and stay the hell down in Florida playing shuffleboard where he belongs!”

      “Like you would be content to play shuffleboard.”

      Dominic blinked. “What?”

      Sierra rolled her eyes. “You wouldn’t want to spend your life playing shuffleboard. And you’re just like him.”

      “The hell I—well, so what if I am!” Dominic scowled and kneaded the taut muscles at the back of his neck. Then he found his rationale. “He’d do the same damn thing I’m doing then. He’d do things his own way.”

      “He’d marry me?” Sierra said skeptically. “He’d marry a woman with magenta hair?”

      “It’s not magenta,” Dominic muttered, giving her tousled locks a quick assessing glance. “It’s purple.”

      Actually it was more of a magenta, now that she mentioned it. A very vivid magenta and not easily ignored, unless you looked the other way, which was what he tried to do. But his eyes kept coming back to it with a certain morbid fascination.

      But morbid fascination, to be honest, was a good part of Sierra’s appeal. Maybe not the only part, but it would serve the old man right when Dominic introduced Sierra as his wife. He could see what he’d driven his eldest son to!

      “Purple, magenta,” Sierra brushed his quibble off. She was still looking at him as if he’d lost his mind. “I’m thinking maybe green next week. I did it green for St. Patrick’s,” she told him