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“Yes. You?”
“Dandy.”
She sipped her champagne as the conversation ground to a halt. Painfully. Gah, normally she thrived on conversation and loved exchanging observations, jokes, witty repartee. Something.
The hushed crowd murmured around them and the tinkle of chamber music floated between the snippets of dialogue, some in English, some in Spanish. Or Portuguese. Bella still couldn’t tell the difference between the two despite hearing Spanish spoken by Miami residents of Cuban descent for most of her life.
She spotted her cousin Juan Carlos Salazar across the room and nearly groaned. While they’d grown up together after his parents died, he’d always been too serious. Why wasn’t he in Del Sol managing something?
Of course, he looked up at that moment and their gazes met. He wove through the crowd to clasp Will’s hand and murmur his appreciation for the party to his hosts. Juan Carlos was the kind of guy who always did the right thing and at the same time, made everyone else look as if they were doing the wrong thing. It was a skill.
“Bella, are you enjoying the party?” he asked politely.
“Very much,” she lied, just as politely because she had skills, too, just not any that Juan Carlos would appreciate. “I saw Tía Isabella. I’m so glad she decided to come to Alma.”
“I am as well. Though she probably shouldn’t be traveling.” Juan Carlos frowned over his grandmother’s stubbornness, which Bella had always thought was one of her best traits. “Uncle Rafael tried to talk her out of it but she insisted.”
The Montoros all had a stubborn streak but Bella’s father took the cake. Time for a new subject. “How are things in the finance business?”
“Very well, thank you.” He shot Will a cryptic glance. “Better now that you’re in Alma working toward important alliances.”
She kept her eyes from rolling. Barely. “Yes, let’s hear it for alliances.”
Juan Carlos and Will launched into a conversation with too many five-syllable words for normal humans to understand, so Bella amused herself by scrutinizing Will as he talked, hoping to gather more clues about his real personality.
As he spoke to Juan Carlos, his attention wandered, and Bella watched him watch a diminutive dark-haired woman in serviceable gray exit by a side door well away from the partygoers. An unfamiliar snap in Will’s gaze had her wondering who the woman was. Or rather, who she was to Will. The woman’s dress clearly marked her as the help.
Will didn’t even seem to notice when Juan Carlos excused himself.
“Do you need to attend to a problem with the servants?” Bella inquired politely.
She’d gone to enough of her parents’ parties to know that a good host kept one eye on the buffet and the other on the bar. Which was why she liked attending parties, not throwing them.
“No. No problem,” Will said grimly and forced his gaze back to Bella’s face. But his mind was clearly elsewhere.
Which told her quite a bit more about the situation than Will probably intended. Perhaps the dark-haired woman represented at least a partial answer for why Will seemed both pained by Bella’s presence and alternatively agreeable to a marriage of convenience.
Bella had come to the party as requested by God and everyone and she deserved a chance with Will. He owed it to her, regardless of whether he had something going on with the diminutive maid.
“Look, Will—”
“Let’s dance.” He grabbed her hand and led her to the dance floor without waiting for an answer, off-loading their champagne glasses onto a waiter’s tray as they passed by.
Okay, then. Dancing happened to be one of her favorite things about parties, along with dressing up and laughing in a private corner with someone she planned to let strip her naked afterward.
For some reason, the thought of getting naked with Will made her skin crawl. Two out of three wasn’t bad, though, was it?
The quartet seated in the corner had switched from chamber music to a slightly less boring bossa nova– inspired piece. Not great, but she had half a chance of finding a groove at least.
Was this how the people of Alma partied? Or had the glitzy Miami social scene spoiled her? Surely not. Alma was one of the wealthiest countries in the European Union. What was she missing?
Halfway into the song, Will had yet to say a word and his impersonal hand at her waist might as well have belonged to an eighty-year-old grandfather. This might go down in history as the first time a man under thirty had danced with her and not used it as an excuse to pull her into his strong embrace. It was as if Will had actually wanted to dance or something.
None of this screamed, “I’m into you.”
Perhaps the problem with this party lay with the host, not the country. Will might need a little encouragement to loosen up.
When the interminably long dance finally ended, Bella smiled and fanned herself as if she’d grown overheated. “My, it’s a little warm in here.”
Will nodded. “I’ll get you another glass of champagne.”
Before he could disappear, she stopped him with a hand on his arm, deliberately leaning into it to make the point. “That’s okay. Let’s go out on the terrace and talk.”
The whole point was to get to know each other. The car trip hadn’t worked. Dancing hadn’t worked. They needed to try something else.
“Maybe in a few minutes,” Will said with a glance around the room at large. “After I’ve played the proper host.”
Disappointment pulled at her mouth but she refused to let a frown ruin her lipstick. “I hope you won’t mind if I escape the heat for a bit by myself.”
For a moment, she wondered if he’d really let her go. He’d invited her, after all, and hadn’t introduced her to one person yet. This was supposed to be a date, wasn’t it?
“Certainly.” Will inclined his head toward the double glass doors off the great room. “I’ll find you later.”
Fuming, Bella wound through the guests to the terrace—by herself!—and wondered when she’d lost her edge. Clearly a secluded terrace with a blonde American in half a dress didn’t appeal to Will Rowling. What did—dark-haired housekeepers?
Great, she thought sourly. Bella had come to the party with the genuine intent of seeing where things might go with Will, because she said she would. Because she’d bought into the hoopla of being a princess, which came with responsibilities she’d never asked for nor wanted any part of.
But she’d done it, only to be hit over the head with the brutal truth yet again. The man her father wanted her to marry had less than zero interest in her as a person. She wouldn’t be surprised to learn Will was perfectly okay with a hard-core marriage of convenience, complete with separate bedrooms and a paramour on the side.
Sounded an awful lot like her parents’ marriage, and that she wanted no part of.
She shuddered, despondent all at once. Was it asking too much for someone to care what she would actually have to sacrifice with this mess her father had created?
The night was breathtaking, studded with stars and a crescent moon. Still, half the stone terrace lay in shadow, which went perfectly with her mood. Leaning on the railing, she glanced down into the crash of ocean against the cliff below.
“Thinking of jumping?”
The male voice emanating from behind her skittered down her spine, washing her in a myriad of emotions as her heart rolled and her pulse quickened. But she didn’t turn to face him because she was afraid if she actually glimpsed James for even a fraction of a second, all of her steely resolve to work things out with his brother would melt like gelato in the sun. And the leftover hot sticky mess would be difficult to clean up indeed.
“Would you stop me?” she murmured.
“No. I’d hold your hand all the way down, though.”
Her eyelids fluttered closed. How had he managed to make that sound so daringly romantic?
The atmosphere shifted as he moved closer. She could feel him behind her, hear the intake of his breath. A sense of anticipation grew in the silence, peppering her skin with goose pimples and awareness.
Before it grew too intense, she blurted out, “I called Will.”
James wasn’t for her. She needed to keep reminding herself that.
“I gathered that.” He sounded amused and reckless simultaneously. “I plan to personally drive him to the eye doctor tomorrow.”
“Oh? Is he having problems with his eyes?”
“Obviously. Only a blind man would let you out of his sight, especially if he knew you planned to be alone on a moonlit terrace. Any plonker could be out here, waiting to ravish you.”
She’d been so wrong. Other than a similar accent, James’s voice was nothing like Will’s. Will had yet to lose the ice while James breathed pure fire when he spoke.
“Good thing his moral, upstanding brother is the only one out here. He wouldn’t dare lay a finger on me.”
Maybe James needed a reminder that Bella and Will were supposed to get married, too. After all James had been the one to cool things off between the two of them, which had absolutely been the right thing to do.
“Yeah? While Will’s having his eyes examined, maybe I’ll get my IQ checked, then,” James said silkily.
“Feeling a little brainless this evening?”
“I definitely feel like my brain has turned to mush. I think it’s that dress. Your bare back framed by that little bit of fabric...it makes me imagine all sorts of things that probably aren’t very smart.” The frank appreciation in his voice floated through the still night, wrapping around her deliciously. “Let me see the front.”
“No.” Feeling exposed all at once, she crossed her arms. “I didn’t wear this dress for you.”
“Shame. I’m the only one here who fully appreciates what’s underneath it.”
In a flash, her core heated with the memory of being in James’s arms on the beach, his hard body flush with hers.
“You shouldn’t speak to me like that,” she said primly, and nearly gasped as he drew achingly close to her back. She could sense his heat and it called to her.
“Because you don’t like it?” he murmured, his mouth not two inches from her ear in a deliberate tease that shot sensation down the back of her throat.
Her breath caught and she gripped the railing lest her weak knees give out. “Because I do.”
He laughed and it spiked through her with fingers of warmth.
“That’s right,” he said smoothly, as if recalling something critically important. “You’re weak and liable to give in to temptation. Everything I’ve always wanted in a woman.”
“That’s so funny. I’d swear you brushed me off at our last meeting,” she couldn’t help but reply. It still stung, despite all the reasons why she suspected he’d done so.
“I did,” he admitted in an unprecedented moment of honesty. Most men she’d ever met would have tried to pass it off, as if she’d been mistaken. “You know why.”
“Because you’re not interested.”
The colorful curse he muttered made her smile for some reason. “You need your IQ checked if you believe that.”
“Because my father scared you off?”
“Not even close.”
“Because I’m supposed to be with Will,” she said definitively and wished it hadn’t come out sounding so bitter.
“Yes.” James paused as if to let that sink in. “Trust me. It was not easy. But he’s my brother.”
“So you’re okay with it if I marry Will?”
She imagined Christmas. That would be fun, to sit next to her boring husband who was screwing another woman on the side while the man she’d been dreaming about sat across the room. As Mr. Rowling carved the turkey, she could bask in the warm knowledge that she’d furthered a bunch of male ambition with her sacrifice to the royal cause.
“Is that what you want?” he asked quietly, his voice floating out on the still night air.
The question startled her. She had a choice. Of course she did. And now she needed to make it, once and for all.
The night seemed to hold its breath as it waited for her to speak. This was it, the moment of truth. She could end this dangerous attraction to the wrong brother forever by simply saying yes. James would walk away.
Something shifted inside, warring with all the sermons on responsibility and family obligations. And she couldn’t stand it any longer.
She didn’t want Will.
Whirling, she faced James, greedily drinking him, cataloguing the subtle differences in his features. He and Will weren’t identical, not to her. The variances were in the way James looked at her, the way her body reacted. The heat in this man’s gaze couldn’t be mistaken. He was all James and 100 percent the object of her desire.
She let her gaze travel over his gorgeous body, clad in a tuxedo that fit like an extension of his skin, fluid and beautiful. And she wanted nothing more than to see the secrets it hid so carefully beneath the fabric.
He raked her with a once-over in kind that quickened her core with delicious tightness. That was how a man should look at you in such a dress. As if he’d been presented with every last fantasy in one package.
“The back was good,” he rasped, his voice clogged with undisguised desire. “But the front...”
Delighted that she’d complied with Isabella’s fortuitous request to wear red, she smiled. “I do like a man at a loss for words.”
Moonlight played over his features and glinted off the obscenely expensive watch on his wrist as he swept up her hand and drew her closer. So close, she could almost hear his heart beating.
“Actions speak louder and all that.” His arm slid around her waist, pulling her to within a hairsbreadth of his body and she ached for him to close the distance. “Plus, I didn’t want to miss your answer.”
“Answer to what?”
He lowered his head to murmur in her ear, “What it is that you want.”
* * *
If she wanted Will, Bella had about two seconds to say so, or James would be presenting the woman in his arms with some hot and heavy temptation. He preferred to get on the same page before that happened because he had a bad feeling he might be the weak one on this terrace.
With so much forbidden fruit decked out in a mouthwatering dress that screamed sin and sex, he’d rather not put his ability to resist Bella to the test. But he would resist if she said no, regardless of whether he’d been baiting her in hopes of getting her to break first. Because then he’d be in the clear if she came on to him, right?
The sharp intake of her breath and a sensuous lift of her lips gave him all the nonverbal communication he needed. Then she put the icing on it with a succinct, “Will who?”
The gap between their bodies slowly vanished until their torsos brushed, but he couldn’t have said if he closed it or she did. This was not what he’d planned when Bella had inadvertently joined him on the terrace, but it was certainly what he’d fantasized might happen if she’d given him the slightest encouragement.
With her lithe little body teasing his, her curves scarcely contained by that outrageous dress, he could hardly get his mind in gear long enough to form complete sentences. “You could have just said that from the outset.”
“You could have said call me instead of Will on the boardwalk.”
Not if he’d hoped to sleep at night he couldn’t have. Of course, he’d done little of that anyway, tossing and turning as he imagined this gorgeous, vibrant woman with his brother.
