The Temporary Mrs. King

by Maureen Child

  He’d lain awake, waiting for the room to stop spinning before finally falling asleep. Then he’d been chased in his dreams by a wildly laughing Stanford waving a giant brandy bottle at him while Melinda threw bouquet after bouquet at his head.

  “Don’t even want that dream analyzed,” he murmured.

  All he really wanted at the moment was to quiet the jackhammers behind his eyes. He coughed and his head almost exploded. Moaning softly, he was reaching for a bottle of aspirin when his brother Rafe’s face came up on the screen.

  “Sean—” He paused and frowned. “Damn. You look like hell.”

  Thanks to videophone conferencing, there was no disguising his hangover. For the first time in his life, Sean cursed technology. “Yeah, thanks Rafe. Nice to see you, too.”

  His brother’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “Are you hung over?”

  “Brilliant observation,” Sean said tightly as he struggled with the cap on the aspirin bottle. Childproof, okay. But did they have to seal the damn thing as if it contained the nuclear codes for Armageddon?

  “Hard to miss, what with the dark circles under your eyes and the way you’re cringing in the sunlight like a vampire away from his crypt.”

  God, why hadn’t he waited to call until later? Or at least closed the drapes? Well, he knew why he hadn’t done that. It had just seemed too taxing at the time.

  “What’s going on?” Rafe asked. “Did you get the deal?”

  “The deal. About that…”

  “Damn it, Sean,” Rafe shouted.

  “Can you dial it down a notch or two?” Sean rubbed at the spot between his eyes even though he knew it wouldn’t do any good. He finally managed to get the aspirin bottle open and tapped two tablets onto his palm. Then he tapped out two more. Desperate times.

  He washed them all down with a long gulp of water from the bottle on his desk and prayed they were miracle aspirins, about to kick in and restore him to health in the next thirty seconds.

  No luck.

  Rafe grumbled, took a breath and said, “Fine. I’m calm. Now tell me what’s going on?”

  “It’s a long story,” Sean said, rubbing his eyes. “And I’d rather tell it only once. Is Lucas in the office?”

  “That doesn’t sound good,” Rafe muttered, “but yeah. He’s here.” Reaching to one side of his desk, he hit a button and said, “Marie, get Lucas in here, will you? Thanks.”

  “Marie? New assistant?” Sean asked.

  “Yeah,” Rafe admitted. “Katie insisted I hire somebody to help me so I can get home in time for dinner every night.”

  His brother might sound like he was complaining, but Sean knew how nuts about his wife Rafe really was. And who could blame him? Rafe could be a pain in the ass at times, but his wife was a peach. Not to mention, she made the best cookies in the known universe.

  “How’s Katie?” Sean managed to ask.

  “She’s great,” Rafe said and a soft smile curved his mouth. Amazing the changes Katie had made to the formerly surly Rafe King. “She says I should tell you she’s saving a batch of her pistachio chocolate mint cookies for you.”

  Sean swallowed hard. Ordinarily, that would have been a nice surprise. At the moment though, it felt like live snakes were writhing in his belly. Still, it was the thought that counted. “Tell her thanks.”

  Rafe frowned at Sean’s less than enthusiastic reply, then waved Lucas over when he came into the room. In a second or two, Lucas was sitting beside Rafe so that both of them could be seen.

  “Damn,” Lucas said, pulling his head back in shock. “You look like hell.”

  Sean sighed. “That’s the consensus. How’s the baby?”

  “Danny’s great,” Lucas said, grinning. “I swear he said Daddy this morning.”

  Sean laughed and was rewarded with another jolt of pain. Since his new nephew was barely three months old, that wasn’t likely. But Lucas was convinced his son was a genius. And who was Sean to argue?

  “On topic, guys? Are you out there partying with some blonde when you should be doing business?” Rafe asked.

  “Because the blondes can wait until we get the damn land,” Lucas put in.

  “He doesn’t need to be dating any blondes when he’s there to work,” Rafe argued.

  “I agree, but he’s not dead and he’s not married, Rafe. God, I thought Katie had lightened you up a little.”

  “I don’t need lightening up.”

  His brothers’ voices were getting louder and the pain in Sean’s head just kept growing. He tried to tune out the argument taking place back in Long Beach, California. But Kings were hard to ignore. Even for one of the family.

  Rafe and Lucas could go on for hours and Sean knew it. Their argument would slide from Sean to their current project and might even drift to old grudges from when they were all kids.

  He smiled in spite of his headache. All of his brothers were close. Their father, Ben King, had never married any of the women who bore his many sons, but every summer, he gathered his sons together at his ranch in California. For three months every year, the King boys were real brothers and they had forged a bond that had only gotten stronger over the years.

  Sean’s smile faded a bit as he thought about his parents. Ben had done the best he could, he knew. But Sean’s mother had been too fragile to deal with life. Too…breakable to leave the man she had eventually married, even when the abuse began and—

  “Sean!”

  He came up out of the misery of his memories with a grateful start. Looking at his brothers’ identical expressions, he cleared his throat and said, “There is no blonde.”

  “Well that’s something anyway,” Rafe muttered.

  “She’s got black hair,” Sean said. But that didn’t describe Melinda’s hair either. More like the color of deepest night, when a man’s dreams and fantasies came to life. When a woman with eyes like hers and a touch that was all heat could turn even the strongest man into Jell-O.

  He sighed, letting her memory fill his mind and reverberate throughout his body. This was going to be a long couple of months, he told himself. Not being able to touch her was going to take every ounce of self-control he possessed. Because he had known her for about twenty-four hours and already wanted her. Bad.

  “I knew there’d be a woman,” Lucas said, almost proudly. But then, Sean thought, maybe his brother was living vicariously now that he was married.

  “Let him talk.” The voice of reason from Rafe. Amazing, Sean thought. Katie really was a miracle worker.

  “I thought we were meeting about the hotel project,” Lucas grumbled. “I’m not interested in hearing about Sean’s latest conquest.”

  That was all it took for the two of them to run away with the conversation again. If he were back home, in the office, Sean would be munching on cookies and using his smartphone to check in on customer bases and suppliers. Here, he was lucky just to be sitting upright.

  Sunlight was bright in the hotel room, but thankfully, the desk where he was sitting was positioned so that his back was to the bay window. He knew that out the window lay a fantastic view of the harbor and pristine aqua-blue ocean, if he was interested—which he wasn’t at the moment. It was way too bright out there.

  His hotel room at the Stanford hotel was the kind of plush he could only guess would have been considered five stars fifty years ago. Their one big concession to modern life seemed to be the high-speed internet service and the minibars. Otherwise, he might have been on an old movie set.

  There were no flat-screen TVs or high-end bathrooms or, hell, even hairdryers or in-room coffee setups. And yet, there was something quietly…elegant here that no modern hotel could ever hope to claim.

  “Okay, fine,” Lucas was telling Rafe. “I’ll listen to Sean if you’ll keep quiet.”

  Sean laughed, then winced as his headache pounded.

  “What’s this about Sean?” Rafe asked in a quiet, even tone that had Sean silently thanking him.

  “I don’t even know w
here to begin,” he admitted. It had been a wild twenty-four hours and he wasn’t sure even he completely believed what had happened.

  “Start with the land,” Lucas prodded. “Do we have the deal or not?”

  Sean pulled in a deep breath, then took another long gulp of water while his brothers waited impatiently.

  “Well?” Rafe asked.

  Snorting a choked-off laugh, Sean said, “There’s some good news and some bad news.”

  “Perfect,” Rafe muttered.

  “Start with the good,” Lucas told him. “It’ll give me strength for the rest of it.

  “Okay, good news is, we got the deal.”

  Rafe and Lucas both laughed in relief. “Well, why the hell didn’t you say so?” Rafe crowed.

  “I knew you could do it,” Lucas said. “I told Rose just last night that nobody can stand against Sean when he turns on the King charm.”

  “Hmm…” He would have agreed a couple of days ago. But, since meeting Melinda Stanford, he had to admit that his charm apparently had limits. She hadn’t proposed to him because she was blown away by his wit and seductive powers. And she sure as hell wasn’t tumbling into his bed. Yet.

  “Okay,” Rafe said. “Let’s have the bad news.”

  “How bad can it be?” Lucas said, still grinning. “We got the deal. We can start construction right away and—”

  “Let him finish,” Rafe said without taking his gaze from Sean’s.

  Sean kept his eyes fixed on Rafe, since there was no point in trying to avoid it anyway. “Okay, the thing is, looks like I’m getting married.”

  Silence.

  His brothers just stared at him. Then they turned to look at each other before shifting their gazes back to Sean in a move that was so smooth it looked choreographed.

  “Married?” Rafe said.

  “Are you nuts?” Lucas asked.

  “The black-haired woman?” Rafe asked.

  “The very one,” Sean told them. “Melinda Stanford.”

  “Walter’s granddaughter. That’s why the phone call.”

  Sean looked at Lucas and nodded.

  “You met her, fell in love and proposed all in twenty-four hours?” Rafe demanded, his voice hitching higher with every word.

  Sean stiffened. “Who said anything about love?”

  “Then what the hell, Sean?”

  “I made a deal with Melinda. We get married, the Kings get the land.”

  “Oh hell no,” Rafe argued. Clearly outraged, his spine went stiff and his chin jutted out as if he were stepping into a knock-down, drag-out fight.

  “This is ‘taking one for the team’ to a whole new level,” Lucas put in.

  Sean rubbed one hand across his face and prayed again that the aspirin he took would start working before his head exploded. “It’s done. I made the deal, and I’ll stick with it.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  He snapped, “I didn’t see any other way to get the property.”

  “You’re out of your mind.”

  “No, I’m not,” Sean said, reeling in the irritation starting to churn inside. “It’s a temporary thing. Two months and we’ll get a divorce. But the Kings will still have the land.”

  Lucas shook his head as if he couldn’t think of anything to say—which under other circumstances might have been funny. Rafe, on the other hand, wasn’t having that problem.

  “You can’t do this, Sean,” he said tightly. “Getting married knowing you’re getting a divorce just isn’t—”

  “What,” he asked, “right?”

  “What I want for you,” his older brother finished pointedly. “When you get married it should damn well mean something.”

  Sean gritted his teeth and bit back the words he wanted to say. That getting married didn’t mean anything to some people. That he’d already tried marriage a long time ago and wasn’t interested in repeating that mistake. That the only reason he had agreed to this farce was so that his family could get what they needed—and because he had an escape clause written into the bargain.

  His brothers were happily married to wonderful women they each loved desperately. They would never understand Sean’s point of view. And why would they? His brothers didn’t know that Sean had already been married once before. In fact, no one knew about that very brief, very messy marriage and divorce and that was how he wanted it.

  Kings made mistakes, sure. But they didn’t talk about them and they for damn sure didn’t share their feelings about them. It had been Sean’s mistake, and he’d cleaned it up. Dredging it back up now wouldn’t serve any purpose at all.

  When he felt like he could speak without clenching his teeth even tighter, Sean said, “Don’t think of it as a marriage. Just a merger.”

  “Damn strange way to do business,” Lucas muttered.

  “Strange or not, we’re getting what we want out of it,” Sean told them. And that’s what he had to keep uppermost in his mind. This was for the Kings. For their future. Going into business on this hotel with their cousin Rico would take their construction company to an even higher level than where they already were and that was something that was worth any risk. “Walter’s going to have the deed to the property drawn up for our signatures before the wedding.”

  “Which is when?” Rafe wanted to know.

  “By the end of the week,” Sean said and swallowed hard as if there were a noose around his neck, tightening. Ridiculous. He had agreed to this, and he wouldn’t back out.

  “A week?” Lucas stared at him, stunned.

  “Tell us when,” Rafe said. “We’ll be there.”

  “No.” Sean shook his head, in spite of the throbbing behind his eyes.

  “What do you mean, no?” Lucas demanded, with a glance at Rafe to make sure he was just as pissed.

  He was.

  “Of course we’ll be there for you, you moron,” Rafe said. “We’re not going to let you do this on your own.”

  “Damn it, Rafe,” Sean said, “it’s not like this is the real deal. It’s business and that’s all it is.”

  “Doesn’t seem right not being there,” Lucas muttered. “We support each other. Always have. Always will.”

  He smiled in spite of everything, grateful for his brothers and the strong family ties they had. But love his brothers or not, he didn’t want them there for the wedding. There was just no point. And damned if he’d listen to Rafe and Lucas—or worse yet, Katie and Rose—giving him grief for doing what he knew he had to do.

  “It’s fine,” Sean insisted, meaning every word. “It’ll be easier on me if you’re not here.”

  “Won’t Stanford expect your family to be there?”

  Damn. Wincing, he silently acknowledged that he hadn’t really considered that.

  “Probably,” he admitted, but shook his head again anyway. “I’ll just tell him it happened too fast for you guys to get out here.”

  “Yeah, that’ll go over big,” Rafe muttered.

  “Look,” Sean told them both with a tired sigh, “I’ll take care of the details here. You guys get hold of Rico and tell him we’re on. I’ll check out the small construction company here on the island, see what we can use and what we’ll need to bring in.”

  “I’ve got a cargo ship putting out to sea in a week or so,” Rafe said. “We can get most of our equipment onboard and get to work as soon as possible.”

  “Sounds good,” Sean said, relieved to be back on safer terrain. Talking about the job, the business, he felt more in control. “With the weather here, it being fall won’t be a problem. We should be able to keep the job running right through winter without many weather delays.”

  “Sounds good,” Lucas told him with a grin. “Rico’s going to want to jump into this project. Oh, and he’s having us build him a house on the island too. Guess he’s decided to make Tesoro his main residence.”

  Sean held up one hand. “All I negotiated for was the hotel property. Rico’s on his own with the house deal.”

  “
Seriously,” Lucas muttered with a snort, “what do you have left to bargain with? Your soul?”

  “Funny,” Sean told him.

  “Oh, Rico’s got the land for the house,” Rafe told him. “Walter had no problem with that. It was the beachfront property he was hanging onto. Until now.”

  “Yeah,” Sean said, feeling that metaphorical noose tightening around his throat again. “Until now.”

  “Are you sure you’re okay with this?” Rafe asked.

  “Why wouldn’t I be?” Sean answered his question with a question and let it go.

  “Always were the most stubborn one of us,” Lucas said.

  “Yeah, right.” Rafe laughed. “You make Dad look reasonable.”

  “No reason to be insulting,” Lucas countered.

  “You want insulting?” Rafe argued.

  Sean smiled to himself as he watched his brothers fall into a familiar argument. They were in California, but they might as well have been on Mars for as far away as Sean felt from the family he loved. But it was better this way, he told himself.

  No reason for them to meet Melinda or to celebrate a marriage that had a two-month expiration date.

  He’d made the deal and he’d stick to it. But damned if he’d have an audience for it.

  Four

  “You’re doing what?”

  “I’m getting married,” Melinda said and waited for the crushing, debilitating panic she kept expecting to set in. It didn’t, which was completely weird because if anyone had the right to panic, it was her.

  After Sean and her grandfather had had their meeting, she’d spent five quick minutes with the man who would soon be her husband. Sean hadn’t said much, just told her that it was set and that he was going to have dinner with her grandfather. Then he told her he’d call her sometime today. Which, so far, he hadn’t.

  She shot a quick look out the kitchen window. It was only late morning. Still plenty of time. So why was her stomach doing a jittery dance and her throat occasionally closing up so even breathing was becoming an Olympic event?