The Temporary Mrs King

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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 where 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.