The Inconvenient Bride Read Free Page A

quarter of a million dollars.”
    Sierra had almost twenty thousand in savings. Sometimes it seemed like a lot. But compared to what Frankie needed, it was a pittance. Even if she begged on the streets she didn’t think she could come up with as much as Pam needed. But she wasn’t ready to admit defeat.
    â€œI’ll think of something,” she’d vowed and squeezed Pammie’s hands. “Don’t worry.”
    But if she had told Pammie not to, Sierra worried herself. All morning long, she’d worried. But she hadn’t come up with any ideas at all.
    â€œOkay. Let’s go. Long necks, ladies. Lots of chin. Gimme lots of chin.” Finn started moving again, shooting as he did so. “Don’t block each other, for God’s sake. Move, Alison.”
    Alison moved—right into one of the reflectors. It fell over with a crash.
    Ballou dropped the half dozen dresses in his arms. “Oh, no! Ohmigod!” He scrabbled for them. “They’ll get creased! Sierra, help!”
    â€œDamn!” Finn’s face turned red. “Sierra, get the reflector.”
    â€œI’m frizzing again,” Alison wailed. “Sierra! Do something!”
    And just when Sierra thought the day couldn’t possibly get any worse, the studio door banged open and in strode Dominic Wolfe.
    Strong, Finn’s lady-marine-drill-sergeant office manager came hurrying, hard on his heels. “Excuse me, sir! Sir! You can’t go in there!”
    But Strong didn’t know Dominic Wolfe.
    â€œThe Hotshot With The Cool Head,” the Times business pages had headlined him just last week in an in-depth profile of the hard-driving, hard-working CEO of Wolfe Enterprises that they’d called “an old-fashioned business with a new-fashioned future.”
    What they meant was that under his guidance, Wolfe Enterprises, a communications company had moved from radio and television right into the newest electronic and digital media without a glitch.
    â€œBecause Dominic Wolfe knows what he wants,” the article had said. “And what Dominic wants, Dominic gets.”
    And that, Sierra could have told them, was the honest-to-God truth.
    Strong might have been no more than an angry mosquito as she buzzed after him.
    Sierra watched in morbid astonished fascination, aware that her heart was kicking over in her chest. She hadn’t seen Dominic Wolfe since her sister Mariah married his brother Rhys three months ago.
    She had very carefully not seen him since that time—just as he had very carefully not seen her.
    She had done her damnedest to forget him.
    And she’d certainly never expected him to turn up in the middle of Finn MacCauley’s studio, heading straight toward her.
    But before he reached her, Finn stepped between them. “Wolfe?” He looked perplexed, obviously wondering what his friend Rhys’s high-powered CEO brother was doing here.
    They all wondered—the annoyed Strong, the slack-jawed Ballou, the starry-eyed models, the makeup artist—and Sierra.
    Especially Sierra.
    Since he’d pushed his way through the door, he hadn’t taken his eyes off her. And whatever amazing electricity hadbegun sizzling between them the first time they’d met when she’d stormed into his office last summer, demanding the whereabouts of his brother, was still sizzling all these months later—even though they denied it, assuaged it, tried to ignore it.
    Now she stepped round Finn and looked up into Dominic’s ice-chip eyes. “What do you want?”
    â€œI want you to marry me,” Dominic said.
    Â 
    He didn’t care that she looked poleaxed or that Finn looked murderous or that everyone else seemed to think he’d just escaped from bedlam.
    He repeated the words. “Marry me,” in case she wanted to pretend she hadn’t heard them.
    â€œMarry…you?”
    It was the first time he’d seen Sierra Kelly