Marrying for King's Millions

by Maureen Child

  She backed out, turned her face up to his and grinned, oblivious to the streak of dirt across her nose. “A better question, how’d you know where to find me?”

  He stuffed his hands into his jeans pockets and took the few steps separating them. “I got a call from Donna Vega. She tells me you’re interested in the property.”

  Her grin slipped a little, but she clambered to her feet and looked around the dingy, dirty room with a gleam in her eye before she turned back to him. “I didn’t think she’d call you. I was going to tell you myself later—”

  “Tell me what exactly?”

  She brushed her hands together in a futile attempt to dislodge the black streaks covering her palms. “I was out driving and saw the for sale sign in the window, so I stopped to take a look. I called Donna to let me in so I could explore a little.”

  “That explains what you’re doing. Not why.”

  She whipped her short, curly hair off her face with a toss of her head. “I’m going to be opening a bakery, in about a year, remember? This place would be perfect.”

  He shook his head. “This place is only suitable for firewood.”

  “You have no imagination.”

  Travis tried to see what she did in the old bar, but frankly, it escaped him. But that wasn’t the point right now anyway. “You shouldn’t be doing this now.”

  “What?”

  “Looking at property,” he said with a wave of his hand to indicate the decrepit building. “Haven’t we got enough to deal with at the moment?”

  “Travis,” she said, looking into his eyes. “This has nothing to do with any of the other stuff going on.”

  “No?” He cocked his head, folded his arms across his chest and tried not to breathe. There was a very weird smell in the room. “You don’t think the reporters following us around would love to print the story of King’s new wife going out to open her own business? King wives don’t have to work.”

  “What planet are you from?” Julie demanded, hands at her hips and feet braced for battle.

  “Just a minute—”

  “No, you wait a minute.” She tipped her head to one side as if she were thinking deeply, then said, “I suppose you don’t remember your mom doing ranch work every day.”

  “That was different,” Travis argued.

  “It was work. Work she loved doing,” Julie shot right back.

  “My mom is not the point here.”

  “No, she’s not,” Julie said. “But Gina is a ‘King wife’ and she works. She raises and trains horses.”

  “At the home ranch.”

  “Oh, so it’s not the work that bothers you, it’s where your wife works?”

  Was it completely crazy, Travis wondered, that he liked that fire in her eyes? Probably.

  “Not the point,” he said tightly. “You’re not opening the bakery until after the marriage is over, so why get people talking now? Don’t we have enough going on at the moment anyway? Damn it, Julie, we’re supposed to be a united front. How’s it look to everyone if you’re sneaking around behind my back?”

  She flushed and her gaze shifted to one side. Her mouth went firm and tight and she rocked uneasily on her heels. “I hate it when you’re right.”

  “That was too easy,” he muttered, wondering what else was going on in her mind. It wasn’t like her to give up so quickly.

  “Well, I wasn’t thinking how it would look to everyone else in town. And I hate having to worry about how something looks to somebody else. Why should they care what we do? Why are we big news?”

  “Hell if I know,” Travis said. “Maybe people don’t have enough excitement in their own lives so they need to find it somewhere else.”

  “Does it have to be us? ”

  “At the moment,” he conceded, hating it every bit as much as she did. “Sooner or later though, some other poor fool will get into the spotlight and we’ll fade away. Until then…”

  She lifted her gaze to his again. “I know, I know. I wasn’t sneaking, Travis. I saw the place and stopped for a look. I was going to tell you. I mean, if I’m going to tell you something, that can’t be sneaky by definition, right?”

  “Uh-huh.” He was getting a fairly uneasy feeling about all this now. “What else don’t I know?”

  Nine

  “Y ou didn’t mention the fact that you kissed him!”

  Travis’s voice echoed off the high ceiling in the tasting room at the winery. The gleaming oak-paneled room was empty but for the two of them and for a moment, Julie really wished for the crowd that was due to arrive at any moment.

  Twice a week, the King winery hosted tastings in this room. Busloads of tourists wandered through this room, the winemaking area and the gift shop. They tasted wine, snacked on the offerings that Julie herself made for the occasions and, in general, had a lovely time while providing a nice distraction for everyone else from the everyday work of the winery.

  She looked up from the elegant table set with china, old silver and the appetizers and desserts she’d spent most of the day cooking. There were tiny, perfect shrimp, dark green sprigs of prosciutto-wrapped asparagus and gourmet crackers dotted with a feta/spinach mixture. The desserts were nearby and looking just as tempting—lemon tarts, brownie bits with hot fudge baked inside and tiny shortbread cookies dipped in an almond cream sauce. And yes, she was thinking about food because she wasn’t quite ready to concentrate on her husband just yet.

  Hopefully, the finger foods she’d spent hours putting together would entice their visitors far more than they interested her at the moment.

  But then, the strangers headed for the winery wouldn’t be facing the thundercloud of Travis’s expression. Julie’s stomach churned uneasily and she swallowed hard to avoid the sudden rush of nausea filling her mouth.

  Watching as Travis stalked across the shining wood floor, she nearly groaned at the flash of fury in his eyes. Apparently, she wasn’t going to be feeling better anytime soon. The way he shook the newspaper he held told her that she wasn’t going to like what was in it.

  A sinking sensation opened up inside her and she really wished she could avoid this confrontation. She didn’t much care if that made her a coward or not.

  Yesterday, she’d confessed to her meeting with Jean Claude and had thought that after that explosive argument with Travis, the subject would be buried. Naturally, her life just wasn’t that easy.

  And how strange was it that even facing Travis when he was angry, she felt a rush of heat that pushed through her bloodstream in a frantic race. He wore an expensively cut black suit, white dress shirt and a bold red tie. His dark hair was ruffled and his eyes were flashing.

  The man was gorgeous. Even when he looked as though he could bite through a steel bar.

  When he reached the table she stood behind, he stopped directly opposite her and shook the newspaper again in one tight fist. “When you told me about your little meeting with Pierre, ” he growled. “You neglected to tell me just how cozy it was.”

  “It wasn’t cozy,” she argued, making a grab for the paper. He snatched it back and she stared directly into his eyes, giving back as good as she got. Fine, he was mad. Well, join the club. She was more than tired of being dragged through public scrutiny by a s
candal-hungry press. And defending herself to the one man who should have a little faith in her was getting to be just as irritating. “If you think I would willingly kiss that little worm, you’re nuts.”

  “A picture’s worth ten thousand words,” he said, and held the paper up in front of him, showing her the front page.

  “Oh, God.”

  There it was. In startlingly clear black and white. A picture of the moment when Jean Claude had bent down to touch his thin, nasty lips to hers. Apparently, he had had a photographer stationed somewhere nearby. She never should have tried reasoning with a man who had no morals. This was her fault. All of it.

  “He was probably hiding in the trees,” she muttered.

  “Who?”

  “The photographer, of course!” She grabbed at the paper again, but Travis shook his head, turned it in his hands and read the words beneath the photo aloud instead.

  “Clandestine lovers?”

  Shock had her jaw dropping. “Cland—”

  “Jean Claude Doucette and Julie O’Hara Doucette King—”

  Appalled, Julie screwed up her mouth as if she’d bitten into a lemon. “I don’t still have his name, do I?”

  “Meet secretly at a lookout on Highway One.”

  “That sounds horrible….”

  His gaze lifted to hers and in those dark brown depths, she could have sworn she saw actual flames. “Oh, it gets better,” he assured her. “The story that accompanies the picture wonders if Travis King knows that his wife is still in love with the man she never bothered to divorce before moving on to another marriage.”

  Now his eyes were dark, unfathomable. His jaw was clenched and his mouth was hardly more than a slash across his face. Even though he was standing directly opposite her, she felt as closed off from him as if she’d been in a sealed room.

  And still, she had to say, “Travis, you can’t believe that.”

  “What do you expect me to believe,” he whispered angrily. “You set up a meeting with him.”

  “Yes,” she said, lifting her index finger to make the point. “But I told you about it afterward.”

  His eyes fixed on hers and Julie felt the hard slam of his silent accusation just seconds before he said it aloud.

  “You should have told me before you did it, so there would have been time to stop you.”

  She sighed a little, anger blending with frustration and sorrow. “That’s why I didn’t.”

  “Why the hell did you go to see him? What was so damned important you had to go behind my back and meet up with your ex-husband?”

  “I explained this yesterday, Travis,” she said, forcing patience into her being, though she actually felt like jumping up and down and tearing at her hair. He had to have the hardest head she’d ever come up against. “It was something I had to do. I had to try to reason with Jean Claude myself.”

  “I’ve got lawyers I’m paying to stop him. My brothers are looking in to it.”

  Frustration bubbled into a froth inside her, swamping her sorrow, drowning even the anger. “You just don’t get it, Travis. I’m not the stay-at-home, wait-for-the-big-brave-man-to-take-care-of-things kind of woman.” She pushed her hands through her hair then let them drop to her sides again. “Don’t you see? Jean Claude is bothering you because of me. He’s only giving you this much trouble because I was once stupid enough to marry him. It was up to me to face him.”

  “Damn it, Julie.” He crumpled the paper in his fist and squeezed.

  “I had to do something, Travis,” she said, her voice getting stronger with every word. “I take care of myself. I always have. I don’t know how to do anything else and frankly, I wouldn’t want to. This whole mess was, at the heart of it, my fault. So it was up to me to fix it.”

  “You did a hell of a job,” he said, shaking the wadded-up newspaper again.

  “Yeah, well…” Her frustration bubbled a little hotter, a little thicker. “I gave it a shot. Something I had to do. I just should have remembered that I was dealing with a snake. No,” she corrected herself quickly. “Something that crawls under snakes. Or maybe something that snakes ooze through.”

  “He kissed you.” The words were soft, barely audible, and she watched as an emotion she’d never seen before shot across his eyes and disappeared again a moment later.

  What was it? What was he feeling? Was it only anger? Or was there something more? Something deeper?

  Grumbling, she admitted, “He moves pretty fast for a snake.”

  Travis came around the table, smoothed her hair back from her face, then cupped the back of her neck with his big palm. “I didn’t like seeing him touching you.”

  Her heartbeat quickened and her blood felt hot and thick in her veins. One touch from this man and she was butter on a stove. “Trust me, I didn’t like it much, either.”

  “I want to,” he said.

  “What?” God, she could hardly think with his hand on her.

  “Trust you. I want to trust you, Julie.”

  Everything in her went still as glass. She looked up into his eyes and felt the threads of connection stretching between them. Could he feel it? Did he ache for her touch as she did for his? Did his skin sizzle from the contact of hers? Did he feel more than he’d wanted or expected to?

  Could he see in her eyes that she loved him?

  She loved him.

  Julie swayed a little as that acknowledgement sank in. She had loved him almost from the start, she knew that now. Or maybe she’d always loved him and had somehow buried that knowledge deep inside. All she could be sure of was that since their wedding night, her heart had been his.

  If only he wanted it.

  “You can trust me, Travis.”

  He smiled a little, no more than a slight curving of his mouth, but it briefly lightened the darkness of his eyes. Then he moved his hand, stroked her cheek with the tips of his fingers and dropped his palm to her bare shoulder. Where their flesh met, there was heat. Electricity. And a sense of pulse-pounding urgency that told her she wanted him now. Wanted his body covering hers. Wanted to feel that intimate slide of bodies meshing, becoming one. Wanted to luxuriate in the sensations that she could only find with Travis.

  But this wasn’t the time. Or the place. Even as he touched her, she felt the reserve in him. As if he were holding himself back from her deliberately.

  “Trust isn’t something that comes easy to me, Julie.”

  “Try, Travis,” she urged. “You’ve known me most of my life and I think somewhere inside you, you know I didn’t betray you. I’m not in league with Jean Claude.” She reached for his hand and curled her fingers around his. “I am who I’ve always been.”

  He smiled again, softly, temptingly. “And who is that?”

  “Julie,” she said with a small smile. “Just Julie.”

  Noise sounded in the distance. Car doors slamming, a bus engine rumbling, voices lifting, talking, laughing.

  “Our guests are here,” he said, straightening up and moving away.

  “Travis—” He was pulling back from her and only a moment ago, he’d been so close. So tantalizingly close, she’d thought for a second that he was going to kiss her. To tell her he did trust her. That he believed in her.

  But the moment
was gone and the shadows in his eyes smothered the light she’d seen gleaming there so briefly.

  The door to the tasting room opened, allowing a slice of afternoon sunlight to spill inside. Voices trailed in the wake of that splash of gold and Julie knew the first of their guests were arriving. “Travis,” she said softly, frantically, “I wouldn’t betray you.”

  He only looked at her as though trying to figure out who she really was. But didn’t he know? Apparently not.

  “By the way,” Travis said, his voice carrying subtly beneath the encroaching noise. “You look beautiful tonight.”

  Staring at her now—her dark red hair, her green eyes wide and innocent, her luscious mouth in a hard firm line—he felt a staggering rush of desire that made him wonder what he was thinking with. His mind or his hormones?

  She wore a deep yellow dress with one shoulder strap. The skirt was full and ended just above her knees. He’d seen her dressing only an hour ago and had wanted nothing more than to trail his fingertips down the line of her spine displayed by the deep back of the dress. Now, he still wanted that.

  Despite the newspaper photo.

  Despite everything…he wanted her.

  What did that make him?

  A fool?

  As the voices behind them grew and came closer, Travis sucked in a deep breath, held it and then released it slowly, trying to find an even keel again. If only for a short time. Long enough to get through the tasting.

  “This isn’t the time,” he said finally, and told himself not to notice the disappointment in her eyes. She wanted him to give her unconditional trust and belief. But how could he when everything conspired to make him think that she was in league with ol’ Pierre?

  “Travis—”

  “Isn’t this lovely? ” a high-pitched female voice cooed from too close by and Travis shook his head.

  “We’ll talk about this later,” he said quietly. “When we’re alone.”