3 Brides for 3 Bad Boys (15 page)

"I wanted to marry Phoebe and I cared about her, but I don't think I'm any more capable of real love than my father was."

From all that she'd heard about Hoyt Sloane, that was pretty self-denigrating, not to mention unbelievable in her estimation. "I don't think you're like your father."

"In some ways I'm not." Again that enigmatic frustration laced his voice.

"What if you fall in love with someone else?"

"Not going to happen." He sounded very sure of that. Too sure.

"Are you still in love with Phoebe? Did you come back expecting to marry her and find out she'd fallen for your brother?" Scenarios were spinning through her head more quickly than a movie reel on fast forward.

"I am not still in love with Phoebe."

"But did you come back planning to marry her?" she pressed.

When Carter wanted to hide his feelings, he did it very well. Absolutely no emotion showed on his face. "I want to marry you
now,
and that's all that matters."

"And you want to pay me." She couldn't quite get over that aspect to the situation. "A lot of money."

"Yes."

"And you want me to go to bed with you. Every night."

Blue fire scorched her from his eyes. "Yes."

"So,
you are paying me to go to bed with you."
What else could it be? He didn't know her well enough to care about her in any other sense. "I guess the kiss in the office was a test trial of sorts, wasn't it?"

An expression of discomfort overcame his features. "You could call it that."

"I must have passed." Amazing, really, when she considered how often she'd failed that particular test in the past.

"I'm now certain the passion is explosive and mutual if that's what you mean."

"But how can you be sure I'll be a good wife? I could be a closet kleptomaniac or something."

"I had you checked out." He said it so casually, as if that was what all men planning to get married did.

"That's despicable."

"It's smart."

"How would you feel if I had you investigated?" she demanded, even while acknowledging to herself that if she'd been smart enough to have her future husband investigated when she was twenty, she would never have gotten married.

"What would be the point?" He rolled his shoulders back, molding the muscles of his chest with the tight cotton of his shirt.

Her eyes traveled down to shorts that hinted at even more delightful wonders below. It was all she could do not to drool.

Apparently oblivious to her lascivious thoughts, he dropped back onto the sofa beside her. "My whole life has been on display and the subject of New Hope gossip since the day I was born. Paying to have me investigated would be overkill."

He didn't sound bitter, just resigned. And he was right. She did know a lot about him. More than she wanted to. Enough to fall in love with a man who although he wasn't a fantasy, might as well have been. He'd been just as unreachable.

Totally unattainable and yet she had been unable to stop thinking about him since the first time she'd seen him. He'd been visiting her department, the wiz-kid, heir apparent. Not to mention gorgeous and totally sexy.

She'd cried the day she read the announcement of his engagement to Phoebe.

And told herself she was an idiot for doing so.

It all started when she learned what kind of childhood he'd had. A father who was a philanderer and a mother who made ice seem warm by comparison were so different from her own affection-filled household growing up. The knowledge had kindled feelings that had grown over the years into something as intimate as they were inappropriate and hopeless.

Only now the fantasy was coming true, and,
"You're paying me a half a million
dollars to have sex with you."

For a woman voted by her first husband as least likely to entice a man into bed, the idea of being paid for such an arrangement had a strange, heady appeal.

Carter looked ready to explode, though.

She ignored the blustering. He didn't love her, but she could gain a lot of satisfaction from knowing he wanted her, Daisy Jackson, enough to not only marry her, but to pay her lots and lots of money to go to bed with him.

Okay, he needed a wife to fulfill the terms of his father's will, too, but he could have married someone else, someone from his social set. He'd chosen her.

His father had been a womanizer of the first order, but his brother was the faithful kind, or at least he had been in his first marriage and showed no inclination to flirt with other women now that he was married to Phoebe. It had always been Daisy's opinion that Carter was a lot more like Rand than he was like Hoyt Sloane.

The clincher, though, was the certainty that if she said no, he'd find some other woman. He had to get married. That was a fact, and she wasn't so simpleminded she thought he'd hang around moping if she turned him down.

His engagement to Phoebe had hurt her; watching him marry another woman after he'd offered her the opportunity to be the one would kill her.

"Okay."

He'd been going on again about how he didn't need to pay women for sex, had never bought a prostitute in his whole life, yadda, yadda, yadda, but at her one word, he went silent as the inside of an airtight drum.

Carter couldn't believe she'd agreed.

He'd been sure she was too offended by the idea he was paying her for sex to go through with it. Apparently he'd been wrong. Far from angry, she looked very pleased with herself.

"You're going to marry me?"

"Yes."

"You understand that though I need to get married to fulfill the terms of my father's will, I consider this every bit as binding as any other marriage?" He needed to make sure she got that aspect of the situation.

He had no desire to marry her and then divorce her six months down the road.

He'd spent four years wanting her and figured it would take at least that long to wear a slight edge off of his desire for her. He wasn't sure he could ever satisfy it.

"We're not marrying for love, but we're marrying for life, right?"

He nodded, relieved she didn't seem to mind about the love thing.

"And if I love you … is that going to bother you?"

The question stumped him. How did he feel about her falling in love with him?

Her head cocked to one side. "Is it that difficult of a question?"

"No."

"So?"

He thought of the way Phoebe looked at Rand, the sense of peace his brother seemed to have when he was around her. "You can fall in love with me if you want."

"Thank you." She said it politely, but her lips twitched.

He grimaced. "That sounded pretty arrogant, I guess."

She shrugged, and his gaze locked in on the movement of her generous curves.

He could slip his hand inside her T-shirt and touch her with no problem at all.

"If this marriage is forever… "

Forever. That sounded good. "Yeah?"

"I want children, as in plural." She bit her lip and looked at him appealingly.

"Not right away, but I definitely want them. Once we're sure the marriage is going to work."

Any man who saw that look and wasn't moved by it would have to be stone dead in the region of his heart. "Okay. I would have liked brothers and sisters—

that actually lived with me growing up,"
he clarified.

Her chocolate brown gaze melted with an understanding that made him uncomfortable.

"Hey, it's no big deal. I've got two brothers now."

She nodded. "I'd like to meet them. I mean, I've seen Rand a few times and even met him at a charity-a-thon I was running in. He's gorgeous, but I've never even seen your other brother."

He did not like hearing her call Rand gorgeous. "You're not marrying my brothers."

She laughed. "I wouldn't want to."

"But you do want to marry me?"

"Yes."

"And you don't have a problem with it being a real marriage?"

"I wouldn't consider any other kind."

So, the passion was important to her, too. Good.

He moved closer to her, inhaling her scent and letting loose the desire inside him he'd kept leashed to have this conversation.

Her soft brown eyes widened. "Carter?"

"I think we should celebrate our engagement." She leaned back until the couch stopped her from going any farther.

He followed her, stopping when his lips hovered just above hers, and he put his hands on either side of her head. "Don't you?"

"C-celebrate?"

To answer, he put his mouth over hers. She tasted faintly of coffee, but her own sweet flavor overrode anything else. Her mouth was everything and more he had dreamed it would be. Soft. Tantalizing. Luscious.

He played at the seam of her lips with his tongue until she opened her mouth on a small sigh. Her hands tunneled under his T-shirt, and the feel of those sweet little fingers on his stomach sent his already erect flesh into a state of raging excitement.

He wanted her.

Now.

He grabbed the hem of her shirt and pulled it off. She let him, but made a small noise of unhappiness when she had to stop touching him to get the shirt off. As soon as it was out of the way, she went back to touching him.

Now that she was naked, at least on top, he wanted to be, too—so he could feel her chest against his, something he had not been able to do during the nuclear meltdown kiss they'd shared in her office.

Fabric ripped as he yanked the shirt off.

She giggled, but her laughter stopped when he pressed his hot skin against hers.

Turgid points pressed into his pecs while the softness of her breasts molded him. Man, it felt good. Too good. The urge to be inside her grew to gigantic proportions, but he wasn't going to hurry. No way. There was too much he wanted to see and do first.

He pulled back so he could look at her. Her breasts were flawless. Round. Firm.

The perfect size to fill his big hands. Tip-tilted, hard nipples the color of ripe raspberries just begged to be suckled and laved with his tongue. The creamy fullness tempted him to touch and tease.

"You're beautiful."

"So are you."

He looked up at the sound of such husky words coming from her.

Her eyelids were at half-mast, not quite hiding the expression of want burning in their chocolate depths.

"Men are not beautiful."

"Whoever said that has never seen you."

Oh, man. He was going to lose it. With a growl he couldn't begin to suppress, he landed on top of her and started kissing her again.

She kissed him back, her need every bit as ferocious as his own.

Her hips arched up toward him, and he pressed into her. It was wild. It was hot.

He was going to come in his shorts again if he didn't do something fast.

He broke his mouth away from hers. "Where's the bedroom?"

"What's wrong with the couch?"

"Not a damn thing, but we need protection." She went completely still beneath him. "You mean a condom?"

"Yeah." Hell, he'd settle for her telling him she was on the pill right now. No way was she a health risk. She wasn't promiscuous, and he knew he was clean.

"Are you on the pill, honey?"

"No."

"Okay, then we need a condom." He would definitely prefer to go without one.

He wanted to be closer to her than he'd ever been to another woman physically, but they'd both agreed that children were a future undertaking.

"I don't have one."

He reared up like someone had hit his ass with a cattle prod. "What?"

"I don't have condoms."

"Why not?" Didn't she care about safe sex?

"Because I don't need them."

"That's not a safe attitude to take, Daisy."

"It is for me."

His Daisy wasn't dumb enough to think she was immune to STDs, so there had to be another reason. "Why?"

She crossed her arms over her gorgeous breasts, and he wanted to howl at them being covered up. "Because I'm not sexually active."

"Not sexually active?" he parroted, not taking in what she was saying very well.

It was hard to think with her half-naked in front of him.

"As in I am not currently engaged in a sexual relationship, nor have I been for a long time."

"How
long are we talking here?"

She glared, and her lips sealed like zip-lock.

"Come on. You can tell me."

"Six years," she burst out, sounding both embarrassed and angry she'd had to admit it. "I haven't had sex since my husband died."

C h a p t e r F i v e

"
W
hy the hell not?"

Okay, he'd had his own experience with celibacy, but it had not lasted
six
years.

How had she stood it?

"I'm not a very sexual person."

He laughed out loud, but she didn't even crack a smile. She meant it.

"Right." He rocked his hard penis against her mound, and she moaned, her eyes going glazed with renewed passion, just that fast. "Tell me again how not sexual you are."

"I'm not," she said on a sigh and tipped up toward him. "At least not with anyone else. You bring out stuff in me I didn't know I could feel."

As much as he loved hearing that, he was ready to explode, and he didn't have a condom either. How stupid could he get? He'd known what he wanted when he came here. "I don't have anything either."

Her eyes widened, then filled with tears, and she hit his shoulder.

"Ouch! What was that for?"

"You started this, and now you tell me we can't finish it?"

"I'll take your car and go buy some, all right?" He'd offer to do something else, anything else … but the truth was he wanted it all. He needed to come sheathed inside her.