Harlequin Presents--June 2021--Box Set 1 of 2

by Dani Collins

  “Whatever makes you more comfortable,” he said.

  “I would like for us to have a prenup.”

  Stunned, Dev stared at her. It was something he’d fully intended to work into the conversation. With wealth like his, they were as common as summer homes in warm places. But it had felt somehow wrong discussing one with Clare. As if he was questioning her character.

  “I’m glad I can still shock you,” she said with a small smile.

  Dev said nothing.

  “I...when this is all over—however long it takes—I’d like to part as friends, Dev. I... I don’t have a lot of those but the ones I have, I like to keep them. A prenup guarantees that our divorce will be straightforward, and we’ll be more likely to keep in contact, right?”

  “If I’d thought otherwise, even for a moment, I wouldn’t have suggested this.”

  She nodded. “I’m realizing that.”

  “Is that all?” he said, uncomfortable with the look she sent him. It wasn’t exactly gratitude. It was the same thing he’d seen in her eyes that morning. And the night when he’d carried her from the library on the yacht.

  It was an emotion that Dev didn’t know how to accept. Or even how to feel it himself, much less return it.

  “Will you have loads and loads of marital sex written into the prenup?”

  Dev didn’t laugh. Because as sure as he was that she was serious, he was also beginning to understand that this was no small matter. He held out his hand to her.

  She looked at it without taking it.

  “Come, Clare. Let’s get you to bed. You’re in shock and I shouldn’t have sprung this on you.”

  She shook her head stubbornly.

  “You’re angry with me, I get it. We can talk this over after you’ve had a good night’s sleep.”

  “I’m not angry with you at all. You’re going above and beyond for me. It’s just... I have a hard time being dependent on anyone. I don’t want to be beholden to you, Dev. At the same time, I don’t think I can quite act per some guidelines written down on paper. It would be too much of a farce. It would make it as much of a cage as that mobster was wanting to thrust me into.”

  Dev held her loosely, her fierce need to be in control of her own destiny striking an echo in him. “What can I do to make this better for you, sweetheart?” he said, pressing his mouth to her temple. “What can I do to make this less a punishment and more of your choice? Other than the lots and lots of sex that we’re going to get to have during this marriage, that is.”

  She laughed then, and he felt as if he’d won a gold medal again.

  As if for the first time in his life, there was perfect alignment, perfect harmony between him and another soul.

  It was also the first time in his life he’d laid himself open and offered to give someone else everything he could. Emotionally, that was.

  CHAPTER NINE

  DEV KEPT SURPRISING HER. In a good way. In a fantastic, knee-buckling way. In a come-trust-me-with-your-heart kind of way.

  Clare was so tired of freeze-locking her heart. Of pretending it didn’t want more. That it hadn’t already started thawing in this man’s presence a while ago.

  She was so tired of pretending that she wanted more out of life.

  She looked into Dev’s eyes, something solid and immovable lodging in her throat. She kept expecting so little, and he bowled her over every single time. A strange swooping sensation began in her belly, as if she was perpetually in flight. She drew a deep breath. “I need this to be more than just a...sterile agreement on paper.”

  He curled his upper lip in a deliberately lecherous way. “You mean all the sex won’t unsterilize it? Because if I remember rightly, it was explosive.”

  Clare laughed and tucked away a lock of hair that fell onto his forehead. There it was again—that floaty feeling. It felt like the most natural thing in the world to laugh with him like this. To touch him like this. “Like you said, we’d have done that eventually whether we got hitched or not.”

  “True,” he said with a nod. He sat down on the sofa and pulled her onto his lap with an effortless poise, as if he couldn’t go too long without touching her. “Let’s see then.” His palm was big and broad against her back, and Clare wanted to melt into it. “I prefer to sleep in the center of the bed. And I hog all the sheets.”

  Clare slipped her arm around his neck and settled in. “I would have found that out anyway.”

  He grinned. And tangled his fingers with hers in her lap. “So this is like a toll I have to pay then?” His thumb rubbed at her pulse on her wrist. “For you to marry me?”

  They were both smiling and he was touching her so casually, and yet Clare could sense that invisible boundary tightening around him as he spoke. But she wasn’t going to give in and let him keep his distance from her.

  It had nothing to do with their getting married either. It had everything to do with the fact that she wanted to know more about him. That she wanted him to share in her own life too. That for the first time, she wanted more from life itself.

  The strength of that urge sent a shiver of fear through her. An almost familiar echo from when she’d so patiently waited for her dad to show up, although he never did. But Clare pushed it away.

  “How about I share something first?” she prompted, not for a game of give and take but because she wanted him to know. Because he’d earned her trust. By giving his own to her.

  He looked at her and knew. Just like that. He knew from her face that it wasn’t a small or silly thing. “Clare, it doesn’t—”

  She pressed her finger against his lips. “I want to tell you this.” She swallowed the ache in her throat. “I haven’t told a soul since I found out. But I want to tell you, Dev.”

  His fingers tightened over hers. “I’m not going anywhere, sweetheart.”

  “I didn’t borrow the money from that crime lord. In fact, the first I heard of him owning me—” she shuddered, and Dev’s arms came around her like a cocoon “—was when that goon of his accosted me in London. I didn’t take the money, Dev. I didn’t even know who he was.”

  His finger under chin, Dev tilted her face up to his. “Then why does he think he owns you?”

  Shame filled her chest but Clare pushed on. “My father passed away a few years ago now. We...we were not a normal family.”

  “Is anyone’s family normal, Clare?” he said, and Clare heard the answering ache in his words. It made it so much easier to go on.

  “I have no memories of my mother. When I was five, my father dropped me off at my aunt’s. With loads of promises of coming back. Of traveling around the world, making his fortune and treating me like a princess.”

  Dev nodded, encouraging her to go on.

  Clare laughed, feeling that hope and disappointment in her chest like it was yesterday. “My aunt was not happy, to say the least. But she gave me shelter and food and for the most part, she was indifferent to my existence. But I hung on to my father’s promises. I believed that one day he’d come back for me. It sustained me...that hope.”

  “But—”

  “If you say it was foolish, I’ll never forgive you. So please don’t.”

  “I won’t,” he said with emphasis. “I won’t say anything you’ve done is foolish, Clare. Or wrong. You’re a survivor. That’s all that matters.”

  Clare thought she might have fallen a little in love with him then. “I studied hard, got a scholarship to go to an excellent private school. That’s where I met Amy and Bea. I found a job I liked, but I always wanted to be my own boss. So one day, Dad contacted me to tell me that he’d discovered he was dying, but that his hard work had finally paid off. That he was sending me a sum of money that I would have inherited after he passed away anyway. He said it was his gift to me—reparation for all the birthdays and holidays he’d missed. I was overjoyed to hear from him after so
many years, and devastated he didn’t have long left to live. I was foolish enough to think my faith in him had been validated. It was a lot of money, and I used it to set up The London Connection.”

  Dev’s brows pulled together into a ferocious scowl. The tension in him was immediate. “Wait, so he sent you that capital? He took the money from the mobster and gave it to you?”

  Her eyes prickling with heat, Clare nodded. “I wondered how that even works, in this day and age. Yes. And of course he died without paying it back. So the mobster eventually discovered what happened to him, and turned his attention to me. How could a man use his own daughter as collateral? Did he think a major crime lord would never find me?”

  “I’m so sorry, Clare.” His hand around her arm, his mouth pressed to her temple, Dev held her tight. As if he was determined to stop her from falling apart.

  “I keep thinking with each day that passes, it’ll hurt less. That I’ll understand why he did this. That something will make me see the whole thing in a new light. But the cold, hard reality doesn’t change. When all his other schemes failed, he took the easy way out. He only sent me that money before he died to salve his own conscience for neglecting me my whole life, and he even managed to mess that up in the worst possible way.”

  * * *

  I took money from a man I shouldn’t have trusted.

  Her words came back to Dev. She’d meant her father, not the mobster. How could anyone hold that against her?

  Dev fisted his hands by his side, fury filling him slowly. What the hell kind of a man jeopardized his daughter’s life like that? He banked the fury knowing that it had taken Clare everything to tell him that much. Knowing that she needed comfort just then and nothing more.

  She didn’t want a champion; that much had been clear from the start.

  But this... Dev now understood the fear, the need to be in control, the strength of will it had taken her to not only manage her emotions but to use the opportunity to pitch her firm to him.

  Having always lived in the world of overachievers, Dev was full of admiration for this woman who’d withstood so much and still remained strong and fierce. All the while retaining a sense of joy in life.

  “It’s not your shame. Or even your burden, Clare. It’s his. It doesn’t matter that he repeatedly broke your faith in him. That he betrayed you in the worst way possible. None of it is your fault. You know that, right?”

  “I do know that. But I’ve moved on from anger and hurt. I have to.”

  Dev frowned. This woman was forever going to surprise him. “What do you mean?”

  Clare shifted her head and met his gaze. “If I let it, what he did will become a poison inside of me. It will corrupt my business, my life, my heart. And that isn’t something I can afford to allow to happen. I have to choose to forgive him. Or it will become the thing that will consume and corrupt me.” She took a deep breath. “So I’m going to try to let it go. I’m going to focus on getting out of this mess. On moving forward with my life. And that means I’ll marry you and help polish your tarnished halo—” she scrunched her fingers through his hair, and his scalp prickled with sensation “—playing the part of your adoring wife for a while...and then go back to making The London Connection even better than it already is. There, now I feel mostly in control of this situation.”

  Pleasure and pride wound through Dev like a rope that couldn’t be untangled. At the same time, he also felt a perverse resentment at her inner strength. Of how bravely she was making the choice to not let her father’s betrayal ruin her.

  He clearly didn’t possess the same strength. He didn’t have the generosity of spirit that she possessed. Even worse, he had no intention of forgiving anyone for anything.

  Holding her like this, watching her choose joy and happiness over resentment and anger, he felt more than a little jaded. At twenty-nine, he felt as if he’d already lived through ten lifetimes of anger and resentment. All his choices in life now looked like they were tainted too.

  Because he’d allowed the poison of his childhood to run rampant inside him for his whole life.

  “Thank you for listening to me, Dev,” she said softly, pulling him back to the present. “For just about everything.”

  “I didn’t do it for your gratitude, Clare.”

  “No, you did it because it was the right thing to do. Thanks to you, my faith in men isn’t completely dashed.”

  Dev shook his head. “Don’t, Clare. This will benefit me too. So don’t make me out to be some kind of hero.” He pressed on. “But I know how hard it must have been to lay yourself open like that, so thank you for trusting me with the truth.”

  She looked up then, and the piercing quality of her gaze pinged through him. “I couldn’t let you think I was that foolish anymore. It was fine when I thought you were just another only-in-it-for-a-good-time playboy.”

  He grinned at that. “I love these titles you keep coming up with for me.”

  “But none of them truly fit, do they?”

  Dev frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that I’ve seen more of the real you than you show the world, Dev. But there’s still a lot more lying hidden. What was it you called it? Paying a toll? I don’t want you to tell me as if it’s a toll you’re paying. I want you to want to tell me. I’d like to get to know the part of you that you don’t show anyone else.”

  No one had ever asked him that. No one had ever cared enough to know. Not even his twin knew it all. But to confide in Clare meant something he wasn’t prepared to admit to. “You’re mistaking me for a deep lake. I’m a shallow pond, remember.”

  She pushed out of his arms and looked down at him. “All lies. But it’s okay, Dev. If my pathetic excuse for a dad has taught me one thing, it’s that you can’t demand things from people—loyalty or love or even confidences—that they’re unwilling to give. But I’d like you to know that I want more from you. From this partnership. More than orgasms, that is,” she added candidly.

  Dev had no idea how she did it—making demands of him he couldn’t fulfill one minute and making him laugh the next. But there was no point in letting her think this was more than it was. His tone was grave when he said, “I’ve given you everything I’m capable of giving, Clare. Does that help?”

  She scrunched her nose and smiled. A sad smile. As if she understood even though he didn’t say the words. “Not really. But I’ll take that as a win for now. And now, I’m going to shower, eat a tub of ice cream and then your spare bed’s got my name on it.”

  When she’d have slipped away, Dev pulled her back to him. He felt a strange reluctance to let her go, even though she’d be in the next room to his.

  For the first time in his adult life, he felt an acute need for companionship. For more whispered confidences. For more of a connection with a woman than just a sexual one.

  For all of those things with this particular woman.

  And yet he didn’t want to fight it. Or shove it away. Or call it a temporary madness.

  In this moment, he felt all of that resentment and distance that forced him to stand alone in the world fall away. In this moment, he felt perfectly aligned with the universe and with Clare.

  Her arms came around his neck as he pressed his mouth to the upper curve of her breast. He could taste the salt of the ocean, smell the sea breeze and her own distinct floral scent on her skin. Desire thrummed through him as she responded instantly. Her nails raked over his skin, and a shudder went through her.

  Dev licked at the thundering pulse at her neck. He let his hands run rampant, caressing the dips and valleys of her body. He didn’t even need this to go any deeper than it was right now. There was a sense of contentment in just holding her and in stoking the fire of their mutual desire higher and hotter.

  With a muttered curse, she tugged his face to hers and kissed him fiercely.

  Laughter and
something else he didn’t want to name held him in its grip as she devoured his mouth as if there was no end to her hunger for him. Dev had never been appreciated so thoroughly in his life.

  When she let him go, he was rock hard, panting and desperate for more.

  “Good night then,” the minx whispered, a wicked glint in her blue eyes.

  The dark shadows under her eyes tugged at him. “You don’t have to go to bed alone tonight, Clare.” When she smiled slowly, he held up his palm. “I’m not talking about sex. I’m concerned that nightmare you had on the yacht will be back.”

  “If it does, then you’ll pick me up and bring me to your bed, won’t you?”

  She didn’t wait for him to deny her. Not that Dev would have. He had a feeling he wouldn’t have to share anything with her. Because the damned woman had seen and knew everything about him already.

  More than he felt comfortable sharing with anyone.

  “You’re putting a lot of trust in me that’s not warranted, Clare,” he warned. “I’m no hero.”

  “Ha! Believe me, Dev, the last thing I need is a hero. Because they don’t really exist, do they? If there is such a thing, it’s people like us who live their lives, day after day, even though they’ve been dealt a bad hand.”

  “Then what is it you think you know about me, Clare?” he asked. He suddenly wanted her opinion. He wanted to know what it was that she thought of him.

  “I think you’re a man who wants more than he realizes. A man who doesn’t have as much as he thinks he does. A man who has a lot more to give.”

  With that parting, perceptive shot, she walked away.

  Making Dev wonder and question and doubt all the things he’d always thought were unshakeable truths about himself.

  * * *

  She was getting married in a few minutes.

  As she looked at the knee-length, cream A-line dress she’d picked up during the short shopping jaunt that Dev had allowed her back in Rio before they’d spent several days sailing to his villa on St. Lucia, Clare wondered how many times she’d have to say it in her head for it sink in completely.