A Breathless Bride

Two

Infuriated by the intimacy of his hold and the torrent of unwanted sensation, Sienna pried at Constantine’s fingers. “Let. Me. Go.”

“No.” His gaze slid past hers.

Movement flickered at the periphery of Sienna’s vision, she heard a car door slam.

Constantine muttered something curt beneath his breath. Now that the torrential downpour was over, the media were emerging from their vehicles.

He spun her around in his arms. “I wasn’t going to do this. You deserve what’s coming.”

Her head jerked up, catching his jaw and sending a hot flash of pain through her skull, which infuriated her even more. “Like I did last time? Oh, very cool, Constantine. As if I’m some kind of hardened criminal just because I care about my family—”

Something infinitely more dangerous than the threat of unwanted media exposure stirred in his eyes. “Is that what you call it? Interesting concept.”

His level tone burned, more than the edgy heat that had invaded her body, or the castigating guilt that had eaten at her for the past two years. That maybe their split had been all her fault, and not just a convenient quick exit for a wealthy bachelor who had developed cold feet. That maybe she had committed a crime in not revealing how dysfunctional and debt-ridden her family was.

Her jaw tightened. “What did I ever do to truly hurt you, Constantine?”

Grim amusement curved his mouth. “If you’re looking for a declaration, you’re wasting your breath.”

“Don’t I know it.” She planted her palms on his chest and pushed.

He muttered a low, rough Medinian phrase. “Stay still.”

The Medinian language—an Italian dialect with Greek and Arabic influences—growled out in that deep velvet tone, sent a shock of awareness through her along with another hot tingling shiver.

Darn, darn, darn. Why did she have to like that?

Incensed that some crazy part of her was actually turned on by this, she kept up the pressure, her palms flattened against the solid muscle of his chest, maintaining the bare inch of space that existed between them.

An inch that wasn’t nearly enough given that explosive contact.

Maybe, just maybe, the press would construe this little tussle as Constantine comforting her instead of an undignified scuffle. “Who called the press?” She stabbed an icy glare at him. “You?”

He gave a short bark of laughter. “Cara, I pay people to keep them off.”

She warded off another one of those hot little jabs of response. “Don’t call me—”

“What?” he said. “Darling? Babe? Sweetheart?”

His long, lean fingers gripped her jaw, trapping her. He bent close enough that anyone watching would assume their embrace was intimate, that he was about to kiss her.

A bittersweet pang went through her. She could see the crystalline depths of his eyes, the tiny beads of water clinging to his long, black lashes, the red mark on his jaw where her head had caught him, and a potent recollection spun her back to the first time they had met, two years ago.

It had been dark but, just like now, it had been raining. Her forward vision impeded by an umbrella, she had jogged from a taxi to the front door of a restaurant when they had collided. That time she had ended up on the wet pavement. Her all-purpose little black dress had been shorter, tighter. Consequently the sexy little side split had torn and her umbrella and one shoe had gone missing in action.

Constantine had apologized and asked if anything was broken. Riveted by the low, sexy timbre of his voice as he had crouched down and fitted the shoe back on her foot, she’d had the dizzying conviction that when she had fallen she had landed in the middle of her favorite fairy tale and Prince Charming had never looked so good. She had replied, “No, of course not.”

Although, she had whimsically decided, when he left her heart could be broken.

The pressure of Constantine’s grip on her arms zapped her back to the present. A muscle pulsed along the side of his jaw and she was made abruptly aware that, his mystifying anger aside, Constantine was just as disturbed as she.

“Basta,” he growled. Enough.

Constantine jerked back from the soft curve of Sienna’s mouth and the heady desire that, despite all of his efforts, he had never been able to eradicate. “You’re wearing the same dress.”

“No,” she snapped back, informing him that in the confusion of the collision she had been as caught up by the past as he. “That was a cocktail dress.”

“It feels the same.” Wet and sleek and almost as sensual as her skin.

“Take your hands off me and you won’t have to feel a thing.”

Her voice was clipped and as cool as chipped ice, but the husky catch in her throat, her inability to entirely meet his gaze, told a different story.

He should let her go. She was clearly shaken. Lucas had been right—on the day of her father’s funeral he should show compassion. But despite the demands of common decency, Constantine was unwilling to allow her any leeway at all.

Two years ago Sienna Ambrosi had achieved what no other woman had done. She had fooled him utterly. Touching her now should be repugnant to him. Instead, he was riveted by the fierce challenge in her dark eyes and the soft, utterly feminine shape of her body pressed against his. And drawn to find out exactly how vulnerable she was toward him. “Not until I have what I came for.”

Her pupils dilated with shock, and any lingering uncertainty he might have entertained about her involvement in her father’s scam evaporated. She was in this up to her elegant neck. The confirmation was unexpectedly depressing.

She blushed. “If it’s a discussion you want, it will have to wait. In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re both wet and this is my father’s funeral.” She shoved at his chest again.

His hold on her arms tightened reflexively. The sudden full-body contact sent another electrifying shock wave of heat through Constantine, and in that moment the list of what he wanted, and needed, expanded.

Two years ago passion had blindsided him to the point that he had looked past his parents’ stormy marital history and the tarnished reputation of the Ambrosi family in an attempt to grasp the mirage. He didn’t trust what he had felt then, and he trusted it even less now. But he knew one thing for sure: one night wouldn’t be enough.

Sienna threw a glance over her shoulder. “This media craziness is all your fault. If you hadn’t turned up, they wouldn’t have bothered with us.”

“Calm down.” Constantine studied the approaching reporters. “And unless you want to be on the six o’clock news, stay with me and keep quiet. I’ll do the talking.”

The two dark-suited men who had been flanking Constantine earlier materialized and strolled toward the reporters.

In that moment Sienna realized they had been joined by a television crew.

The barrage of questions started. “Ms. Ambrosi, is it true Ambrosi Pearls is facing bankruptcy?”

“Do you have any comment to make about your father allegedly conning money out of Lorenzo Atraeus?”

Several flashes went off, momentarily blinding her. An ultraslim, glamorous redhead darted beneath one of the bodyguard’s arms and shoved a mike in her face. Sienna recognized the reporter from one of the major news channels. “Ms. Ambrosi, can you tell us if charges have been brought?”

Shock made Sienna go first hot then cold. “Charges—?”

“Unless you want a defamations suit,” Constantine interjected smoothly, “I suggest you withdraw those questions. For the record Ambrosi Pearls and The Atraeus Group are engaged in negotiations over a business deal. Roberto Ambrosi’s death has complicated those negotiations. That’s all I’m prepared to say.”

“Constantine, is this just about business?” The redheaded reporter, who had been maneuvered out of reach by one of the bodyguards, arched a brow, her face vivid and charming. “If a merger of some kind is in the wind, what about a wedding?”

Constantine hurried Sienna toward a sleek black Audi that had slid to a halt just yards away. “No comment.”

Lucas climbed out of the driver’s seat and tossed the keys over the hood.

Constantine plucked the keys out of midair and opened the passenger-side door. When Sienna realized Constantine meant her to get into the car, with him, she stiffened. “I have my own—”

Constantine leaned close enough that his breath scorched the skin below her ear. “You can come with me or stay. It’s your choice. But if you stay you’re on your own with the media.”

A shudder of horror swept through her. “I’ll come.”

“In that case I’m going to need your car keys. One of my security team will collect your car and follow us. When we’re clear of the press, you can have your little sports car back.”

Suspicion flared. “How do you know I have a sports car?”

“Believe me, after the last few days there isn’t much I don’t know about you and your family.”

“Evidently, from the answers you gave the press, you know a lot more than I do.” She dug her keys out of her purse and handed them over. As badly as she resented it, Constantine’s suggestion made sense. If she had to return to the cemetery to pick up the car later on, it was an easy bet she’d run into more reporters and more questions she wasn’t equipped to answer.

Seconds later she was enclosed in the luxurious interior of the Audi, the tinted windows blocking out the media.

She reached for her seat belt. By the time she had it fastened, Constantine was accelerating away from the curb. Cool air from the air-conditioning unit flowed over her, raising gooseflesh on her damp skin.

Nerves strung taut at the intimacy of being enclosed in the cab of the Audi with Constantine, she reached into her purse and found her small traveling box of tissues. Pulling off a handful, she handed them to Constantine.

His gaze briefly connected with hers. “Grazie.”

She glanced away, her heart suddenly pounding. Hostilities were, temporarily at least, on hold. “You’re welcome.”

She pulled off more tissues and began blotting moisture from her face and arms. There was nothing she could do about her hair or her dress, or the fact that the backs of her legs were sticking to the very expensive leather seats.

She glanced in the rearview mirror. Her small sports car was right behind them, followed by the gleaming dark sedan, which contained the second of Constantine’s bodyguards and his brothers. “I see you still travel with a SWAT team.”

Constantine smoothly negotiated traffic. “They have their uses.”

She flashed him a cool look. There was no way she would thank him yet, not when it was clear that Constantine’s presence had attracted the press. Until he had showed up, neither she nor any member of her family had been harassed. She studied the clean line of his profile, the inky crescents of his lashes and the small scar high on one cheekbone. Unbidden, memories flickered—the dark bronze of his skin glowing in the morning light, the habit he’d had of sprawling across her bed, sheets twined around his hips, all long limbs and sleek muscle.

Hot color flooded her cheeks. Hastily she transferred her gaze to the traffic flowing around them. “Now that we’re alone you can tell me what that media assault was all about.” The very fact that Constantine had interceded on her behalf meant something was very wrong. “Conned? Charges? And what was that about negotiating a deal?”

With her background in commercial law, Sienna was Ambrosi Pearls’ legal counsel. At no point in the past two years had her father so much as mentioned The Atraeus Group, or any financial dealings. After the loan Roberto had tried to negotiate had fallen through, along with her engagement, the subject had literally been taboo.

Constantine braked for a set of lights. “There is a problem, but I’m not prepared to discuss it while I’m driving.”

While they waited in traffic her frustration mounted. “If you won’t discuss it …” her fingers sketched quotation marks in the air, “then at least tell me why, if Ambrosi Pearls is supposed to have done something so wrong, you’re helping me instead of throwing me to the media wolves?”

“In an instant replay of the way I treated you two years ago?”

The silky edge to his voice made her tense. “Yes.”

The lights turned green. Constantine accelerated through the intersection. “Because you’re in shock, and you’ve just lost your father.”

Something about the calmness of his manner sent a prickle of unease down her spine, sharpened all of her senses.

His ruthless business reputation aside, Constantine was known to be a philanthropist with a compassionate streak. He frequently gave massive sums to charities, but that compassion had never been directed toward either her or her family.

“I don’t believe you. There’s something else going on.” During the short conversation during which he had broken their engagement, Sienna had tried to make him understand the complications of her father’s skyrocketing gambling debts and the struggle she had simply to support her mother and keep Ambrosi Pearls afloat. That in the few stressful days she’d had before Constantine had discovered the deal, the logic of her father asking Lorenzo Atraeus for a loan had seemed viable.

She had wasted her breath.

Constantine had been too busy walking out the door to listen to the painful details of her family’s financial struggle.

“As you heard from the reporters, there is very definitely ‘something else going on.’ If you’ll recall, that was the reason our engagement ended.”

“My father proposed a business deal that your father wanted.”

“Reestablishing a pearl facility on Medinos was a proposal based on opportunism and nostalgia, not profit.”

Her anger flared at the opportunism crack. “And the bottom line is so much more important to you than honoring the past or creating something beautiful.”

“Farming pretty baubles in a prime coastal location slated for development as a resort didn’t make business sense then and it makes no sense now. The Atraeus Group has more lucrative business options than restoring Medinos’s pearl industry.”

“Options that don’t require any kind of history or sentiment. Like mining gold and building luxury hotels.”

His gaze briefly captured hers. “I don’t recall that you ever had any problem with the concept of making money. As I remember it, two years ago money came before ‘sentiment.’”

Sienna controlled the rush of guilty heat to her cheeks. “I refuse to apologize for a business deal I didn’t instigate.” Or for being weak enough to have felt an overwhelming relief that, finally, there could be an answer to her family’s crippling financial problems. “My only sin was not having the courage to tell you about the deal.”

She stared out of the passenger-side window as Constantine turned into the parking lot of a shopping mall. It was too late now to admit that she had been afraid the impending disgrace of her father’s gambling and financial problems would harm their engagement.

As it turned out, the very thing she had feared had happened. Constantine believed she had broken his trust, that her primary interest in him had always been monetary. “I apologized for not discussing the deal with you,” she said, hating the husky note in her voice, “but, quite frankly, that was something I would have assumed your father would have done.”

Constantine slotted the Audi into a space. She heard the snick as he released his seat belt. He turned in his seat and rested an arm along the back of hers, making her even more suffocatingly aware of his presence.

“Even knowing that my father’s lack of transparency indicated he was keeping the deal under wraps?”

A dark sedan slid into a space beside the Audi. One of Constantine’s bodyguards, with Lucas in the passenger seat and Zane in the rear. A flash of cream informed her that her sports car, driven by the second bodyguard, had just been parked in an adjacent space.

Feeling hemmed in by overlarge Medinian males, Sienna released her seat belt and reached for her purse. “I didn’t understand that you were so against the idea of reestablishing a pearl industry on Medinos.”

Stupidly, when she hadn’t been frightened that she would lose Constantine and burying her head in the sand, she had been too busy coping with the hectic media pressure their engagement had instigated.

Life in a fish tank hadn’t been fun.

“Just as I couldn’t understand why you failed to discuss the agreement, which just happened to have been drawn up the day following our engagement announcement.”

Her gaze snapped to his. “How many times do I have to say it? I had nothing to do with the loan. Think about it, Constantine. If I was that grasping and devious I would have waited until after we were married.”

A tense silence stretched, thickened. Now she really couldn’t breathe. Fumbling at the car door, she pushed it wide.

Constantine leaned across and hauled the door shut, pinning Sienna in place before she could scramble out. The uncharacteristic surge of temper that flowed through him at the deliberate taunt was fueled by the physical frustration that had been eating at him ever since he had decided he had to see her again.

The question of just why he had taken one look at Sienna two years ago and fallen in instant lust, he decided, no longer existed. It had ceased to be the instant he had glimpsed her silky blond head at the funeral. Even wet and bedraggled, her eyes red-rimmed from crying, Sienna was gorgeous in a fragile, exotic way that hooked into every male instinct he possessed.

The combination of delicacy paired with sensuality, in Anglo-Saxon terms, was crazy-making. He was at once caught between the desire to protect and cushion her from the slightest upset and the desire to take her to bed and make love to her until she surrendered utterly.

It was an unsettling fact that he would rather argue with Sienna than spend time with any other woman, no matter how gorgeous or focused on pleasing him she might be.

“Now that’s interesting. I assumed that the reason you stayed quiet about the loan was that your father needed the money too badly to wait.”

Her face went bone-white and he knew in that instant that he had gone too far.

Then, hot color burned along her cheekbones and the aura of haunted fragility evaporated. “Or maybe I was simply following orders?”

His gaze shifted to her pale mouth, the line of her throat as she swallowed. “No,” he said flatly.

Sienna had been Roberto’s precocious second-in-command for the past four years. She had run the family’s pearl house with consummate skill and focused ambition while her father had steadily gambled the profits away at various casinos. The last time she had taken an order from Roberto, she had been in the cradle. If she had a weakness, it was that she needed money.

His money.

And she still did.

She pulled in a jerky breath. He felt the rise and fall of her breasts against his arm, the feathery warmth along his jaw as she exhaled. The light, evocative scent she wore teased his nostrils as flash after flash of memory turned the air molten.

A tap on the passenger-side window broke the tension. One of his security guards.

Constantine released his hold on the door handle, his temper tightly controlled as he watched Sienna climb out and collect her car keys.

Levering himself out of the Audi into the now blistering heat of early afternoon, Constantine gave the guard his instructions. For the past four days he had seldom been without an escort but for the next hour he required absolute privacy.

Peeling out of his damp jacket, he tossed it behind the driver’s seat. He frowned as he noticed Lucas speaking with Sienna. From the brevity of the exchange he was aware that his brother had simply offered his condolences, but Sienna’s smile evoked an unsettling response.

The fact that Lucas was every inch a dangerous Atraeus male shouldn’t register, but after the charged few moments in the Audi, the knowledge of just how successful his brother was with women was distinctly unpalatable.

Constantine strolled toward Sienna as she slid her cell phone out of her purse and answered a call.

Lucas waylaid him with a brief jerk of his chin. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

“Positive.”

“It didn’t look like a business discussion back at the cemetery, and it sure as hell didn’t look like a business discussion just then.”

Constantine knew his gaze was cold enough to freeze. “Just as long as you remember that Sienna Ambrosi is my business.”

Lucas lifted a brow. “Message received.”

Jaw tight, Constantine watched as Lucas climbed into the passenger-side seat of the dark sedan. He lifted a hand as the car cruised out of the parking lot. Maybe he hadn’t needed to warn Lucas off, but the instinct to do so had been knee-jerk and primitive. In that moment he had acknowledged one clear fact: for the foreseeable future, until he had gotten her out of his system, Sienna Ambrosi was his.

While he waited for Sienna to terminate her call, he grimly considered that fact, sifting through every nuance of the past hour. The tension that had gripped him from the moment he had laid eyes on Sienna at the funeral tightened another notch.

Constantine knew his own nature. He was focused, single-minded. When he fixed on a goal he achieved it. His absolute commitment to running the family business was both a necessity and a passion and he had never flinched from making hard choices. Two years ago, severing all connection with Sienna and the once pampered and aristocratic Ambrosi family had been one of those choices.

Sliding dark glasses onto the bridge of his nose, Constantine crossed his arms over his chest and studied the pure line of Sienna’s profile, the luscious combination of creamy skin and dark eyes, her soft pale mouth.

Until he had been handed an investigative report he had commissioned on Ambrosi Pearls and had discovered that Sienna had been linked on at least three occasions with Alex Panopoulos, a wealthy retailer.

He still remembered the moment of disorientation, the grim fury when he’d considered that Panopoulos could be Sienna’s lover.

He had soon eliminated that scenario.

According to the very efficient private eye employed by the security firm, Panopoulos was actively hunting but the Greek hadn’t yet managed to snare either of the Ambrosi girls.

Sienna registered Constantine’s impatience as she ended her conversation with Carla, who had been concerned that she had been caught up in the media frenzy in the parking lot.

Constantine lifted a brow. “Where do we talk? Your place or mine?”

Sienna dropped her phone back into her purse. After the tense moments in the car and the sensual shock of Constantine invading her space, she couldn’t hide her dismay at the thought of Constantine’s apartment. Two years ago they had spent a lot of time there. It had also been the scene of their breakup.

The thought of Constantine in the sanctuary of her own small place was equally unacceptable. “Not the apartments.”