“Maybe I love you, and maybe I don’t,” she said. “But if you’re here out of guilt—if that’s all it is—you can go back to being you. I deserve to be happy. I deserve a man who cares more about his wife and his family than his need to be in control of everything.”
He searched her face. “That man is gone. I wouldn’t take him back, even if he came crawling. When I was in the hospital, I had to learn how to accept help. How to be grateful to doctors and nurses who were doing their damnedest to keep me alive. I wasn’t in charge, Lisette. I wasn’t top dog. I like to think I learned a bit of humility. But if I brag about it too much, it kind of defeats the purpose,” he joked.
She stared at him, only now realizing that a new light shone from his eyes, a new peace.
He rubbed his thumb over her cheek. “Please, my love. Tell me you don’t love me if that’s what you want to say, but you’re going to have to work to make me believe it. Because I remember what it was like to be inside you when you screamed my name. I still hear those moments in my dreams.”
Her joy and her fear collided in her chest. “My period is three weeks late,” she blurted out. “You didn’t sign on for that.”
* * *
He stared at her, trying to process the incredible words. He put a hand on her flat belly. “Of course I did. It was my idea on the boat that day, remember?”
“But only because you thought it would be all up to me later. You thought you were going to be dead and gone. Parenting is two decades or more of flat-out hard work.”
He dropped his forehead to hers, his whole body shaking. “I adore you, Lizzy Tarleton. There’s nothing in this world I would like more than to make a dozen babies with you and live happily ever after.”
Lisette sobbed, wiping her cheek on his shoulder. “Truly?” Was this terrible nightmare really over?
He pulled her close. “We said vows. For better or for worse. We’ve gotten the latter out of the way early. Now let’s plan our future together, my love.” He scooped her up and sat on the sofa with her in his lap. “And you might want to stop crying, because I bought this new shirt just for today.”
Her giggle was watery.
He bent his head and kissed her. Lisette wrapped her arms around his neck. “I do love you, Jonathan,” she whispered. “I’ve loved you for a very long time. But...”
He reared back, alarm written on his face. “But what?”
“I think three babies will be enough.”
His smile returned. “I’ll wear you down.”
She felt his sex pressing beneath her leg and knew that he wanted her every bit as much as she wanted him. “How do you feel about make-up sex?” she asked, stroking his bottom lip suggestively.
His grin was devilishly masculine and enthusiastic. “I thought you’d never ask.”
* * *
Hartley Tarleton reveals his own secrets—
and the ones his family has been hiding for
decades—in the searing conclusion to the
Southern Secrets trilogy.
Available October 2019!
Keep reading for an excerpt from Wanted: Billionaire’s Wife by Susannah Erwin.
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Wanted: Billionaire’s Wife
by Susannah Erwin
One
Danica Novak wanted a hot shower, cool bedsheets and at least ten hours of uninterrupted sleep after her early morning cross-country flight. Instead, she got a claim form for lost luggage, a taxi driver who hit every possible red light between the airport in San Francisco and her office building in Palo Alto, and yet another phone squabble with her parents’ health insurance company about her brother’s medical bills. This was the third person she’d talked to since her plane landed, and it wasn’t yet 11:00 a.m. in California.
“The treatment isn’t covered?” She braced her cell phone between her right shoulder and ear while using her hands to dig through her tote bag for any loose bills with which to pay the fare. Her credit card was useless, as she had discovered when she tried to buy food on the plane. Her sudden trip to Rhode Island at last-minute airfare prices had eaten up what remained of her cushion. “You can’t negotiate to bring the costs down? At all?”
The driver stared at her through the rearview mirror, his fingers tapping an impatient rhythm on the steering wheel. When her eyes met his in the mirror, he flicked the meter back on. Danica smiled at him through gritted teeth and held up her index finger in the universal plea for just one more minute, while mustering the strength to keep her voice pitched at a pleasant conversational level.
She learned as a teenager, while helping her father apply for the license for his dry-cleaning business, that getting angry with faceless bureaucracies rarely resulted in a positive outcome. “Yes, I understand you’ve been told the treatment is classified as elective. Can I talk to a manager about this? Hello?” She stared at the phone. The call had dropped—or she had been hung up on.
A staccato beep from the car’s horn ripped her attention back to the driver. “Lady, I gotta go.”
“One second, please?” She put the phone down to better sift through the contents of her bag. The emergency twenty she always carried had to be somewhere—aha! She added it to the other bills and thrust the fare at the driver, scrambling out of the car as fast as the vinyl seat would let her. The taxi took off, the late Monday-morning sunshine bouncing off its fenders.
She stretched her neck, the bunched muscles in her shoulders protesting when she turned her head from side to side, and opened the glass door to the office building. It seemed a century ago when she last passed through the entrance, racing out in the middle of the day to pack for an emergency visit home. She was still reeling from the shock of seeing her brother, Matt, a perpetual motion machine since birth, so still in his hospital bed.
Matt had been a surprise baby, arriving eight years after Danica to the entire family’s delight. Now a high-school senior, he’d attracted attention from universities for his athletic ability. Until two weeks ago, when a freak three-way collision during a football game caused a massive concussion, a fractured femur and spinal shock.
Now out of danger, his prognosis was good for a full recovery, but his doctors worried he wasn’t responding as well as he could to conventional treatment. The experimental spinal therapy the insurance company was currently denying might speed up his return to health, but they wouldn’t know unless a way was found to pay for it. And she’d find one. Sh
e’d told her parents she would take care of it, and she hadn’t let them down yet.
Once inside, she closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Only four companies shared the office building, and the lobby was empty most times of day. She welcomed the quiet, letting it wash over her. Family leave was officially over. Time to switch back to worker bee. The Rinaldi Executive Search presentation to Ruby Hawk Technologies was in two days, and it needed to be perfect. Her promised promotion from Johanna Rinaldi’s assistant to search consultant depended on it.
She grabbed a free copy of the Silicon Valley Weekly off the lobby’s reception desk, hoping to catch up on the latest tech-industry news while she headed down the corridor to the Rinaldi offices. The tabloid newspaper was accessible online, but the print version was easier to read while walking. As if the universe had decided she needed a reminder of just how crucial the next few days would be, a color photo of Luke Dallas, the thirty-three-year-old CEO and founder of Ruby Hawk Technologies, stared out at her from the front page.
Like most people in the valley, Danica followed the meteoric rise of Ruby Hawk Technologies with awe. But the man behind the company held a special fascination for her. She long thought Luke Dallas looked as if he should be brooding on a windswept English moor rather than writing code in a glass-and-steel California office. His strong, chiseled features were a perfect match for the rumors of his hard-nosed tactics. In a town that tolerated eccentric if driven geniuses, he stood out for his demanding demeanor.
A shiver traced her spine as her gaze met his in the photo, the blue of his eyes stunning even in newsprint. She would soon be sitting across the table from that stare. A month ago, Danica discovered Ruby Hawk had terminated their contract with their search agency. She knew Johanna and Luke had gone to business school together, and she’d used that information to land a meeting to pitch Ruby Hawk their services. He was scheduled to sit in that meeting.
Surely, he couldn’t be that arresting in real life. It must be a trick of the photographer’s, maybe the light—
Her peripheral vision screamed out a warning just in time. She barely avoided colliding with a very broad, very muscular male chest. She swallowed her gasp of appreciation for the obviously fine physique under the tailored button-down shirt, threw the man a quick smile of apology and returned to perusing the article while she rummaged in her bag for her office key.
It took a second before the man’s face fully registered. She looked up from the newspaper and stared at him. Then she glanced down at the photo. Then back at the man. Her mouth went dry as her heartbeat thudded in her ears.
Luke Dallas stood in front of the closed door of Rinaldi Executive Search. In the flesh. All six feet, four inches of him, from his wavy dark hair to his rather impressively sized loafers.
She’d been wrong. He was indeed that arresting—and more—in person. A two-dimensional image was incapable of capturing the aura of danger in his stance, coiled tension threatening to spring into action at the slightest provocation. The photo revealed the handsome symmetry of his features, but couldn’t impart the sheer sensuality and command. This was a man who got what he wanted and didn’t care how. Pinned by the force of his gaze, she shivered as his expression darkened. The air grew heavy, thickening with the ominous atmosphere of two weather fronts about to collide into a supercell.
She was in the direct path of the storm.
* * *
This should have been a day for triumph. Instead, Luke Dallas’s jaw hurt from hours of clenching his teeth. It was a new sensation. He was always in control, no matter the situation.
But that was before this morning. Before a casual meeting in an out-of-the-way coffee shop, away from prying eyes and ears, to sign the deal memo for his company’s acquisition turned into an ambush orchestrated by Irene Stavros and her father, Nestor. His vision still flashed red.
He’d travelled straight from the meeting, the ultimatum handed to him by Nestor running on a constant loop, to Johanna Rinaldi’s boutique search firm. Johanna was the only person he could think of under the time-crunched circumstances who could help to extricate him from the trap Nestor had pulled closed so artfully.
Where the hell was she? Her office was locked tight and no one answered the door or the phone. His patience had just stretched past its breaking point when a woman, who couldn’t be bothered to look where she was going, nearly ran him over. She stared at him with eyes so wide they threatened to take over the rest of her face. Pretty eyes though. Big and green. A man could get lost in those depths if he wasn’t careful.
Then she blinked, breaking the connection, and his anger came back.
“Can I help you?” he barked, partially to cover being caught staring at a stranger, no matter how attractive, and partially because she wasn’t Johanna and, right now, Johanna was the only person he wanted to see.
“You’re Luke Dallas.” Her gaze ping-ponged between the newspaper clutched in her hand and his face. “But our meeting isn’t until Wednesday.”
“You work for Johanna?” Finally. Maybe his day could get back on track and he could salvage what was left of it.
“Um.” Her eyes were still wide as she ran a hand through her messy blond ponytail, then used it to tug on a white shirt that looked like it had been put on straight off the floor. Finally, she held it out to be shaken. “Yes. I do. I’m Danica. Novak. Danica Novak.”
He shook her proffered hand. When he pressed against it, her fingers trembled and she leaned back, as if she were Little Red Riding Hood and he the Big Bad Wolf and they were standing in Grandmother’s house. An appealing rosy shade appeared on her high cheekbones.
“It seems you know my name.”
“Yes, well,” she said, waving the newspaper clutched in her left hand, “it helps to have a visual aid.” She gave him a tentative smile, and if he thought her eyes pretty before, the smile turned them downright stunning. Then the newspaper headline caught his gaze and made him forget any nonsense about the eyes being the windows to the soul.
“May I see that?” he asked. She handed it over.
He read the article, the hallway walls pressing in further with every word. The Weekly’s business reporter Cinco Jackson somehow had received wind of Luke’s talks with the Stavros Group, despite his best efforts to keep them quiet. The article outlined the rumors surrounding the acquisition, calling it a done deal with the papers due to be signed imminently. Luke would be lucky to make it ten feet past Ruby Hawk’s front door without his employees questioning him about timing and next steps.
Thanks to his family, plus some savvy investments of his own, Luke could’ve retired after college graduation and still lived an extremely comfortable life. But that was due to being born to the right parents. He hadn’t earned it.
He refused to be like his stepsiblings, living off the fat of their inheritances. He wanted to build something, like his great-grandfather had. He wanted it to last, unlike his great-grandfather’s legacy. The Draper & Dallas department store chain was long gone. The advancements made by Ruby Hawk in biofeedback and neural technology, however, could make lives better for generations.
He crushed the newspaper in his hand. Ruby Hawk Technologies was his. He’d created the company, pouring his own money into it. Now he needed additional capital for the company to reach its full potential, to prove to those who wrote him off as a rich dilettante that he had what it took to be a tech visionary.
He’d explored options for raising more money but none provided the combination of financing, ownership control and corporate independence Luke sought. Then Irene Stavros suggested he talk to her father. A month ago, Luke received a deal term sheet from Nestor.
On paper, it was perfect. The Stavros Group would buy Ruby Hawk and infuse the company with the cash it needed to expand, while allowing Ruby Hawk to continue to operate autonomously. The original management team, including Luke as CEO, would remain intact and he would
continue to call all the shots without interference from the acquiring parent company. Anticipating an easy close to the deal, Luke ordered and installed expensive new equipment for his engineers. Then when he went to meet Nestor to sign the paperwork, Nestor revealed his trap. Unless Luke went along with Nestor’s demands, he wouldn’t have the means to make payroll in six months’ time.
And now, the article. Thanks to it revealing the deal terms, his employees would be expecting their stock options to be worth millions upon the completion of the acquisition.
He had to save this deal. “Where’s your boss?”
Her green eyes widened at the snap of his words.
“I’ve been here for half an hour and no one has answered the door or the phone. What kind of a business is this?” He thrust the tabloid back at her. He’d deal with the story later.
“We’re very good at what we do. I’m sure there’s an explanation.” She shook out the crumpled paper.
He raised an eyebrow and looked at his watch.
Color rose even higher in her cheeks. “I just got off a plane. Johanna probably has a meeting off-site.” She opened a substantial tote bag and searched inside. “Although that doesn’t explain why Britt isn’t on phone duty,” she murmured under her breath. Her hand surfaced holding a key ring. “Wait here while I make sure the lights are on.”
She swung open the door and disappeared inside, shutting it behind her. He heard a stifled exclamation, followed by a loud thud. Just as he was about to investigate the noise, she emerged, slamming the door shut and leaning against it.
Her face made her white shirt seem dark gray by comparison. “Um, maybe you should wait at the diner next door. The coffee is good. It’s all single origin, hand poured—”
“No.” It would be a long time before he’d be able to drink coffee without the memory of that morning’s meeting poisoning the taste. “What’s wrong? Is someone hurt?”
A Contract Seduction Page 18
