The Bride Tamer Read online

  Quick As A Flash, Vivian Hit The Switch, And The Room Went Mercifully Black.

  “You must be the sister-in-law,” he murmured dryly. “The one who didn’t want to meet me.”

  “No! I’m not her! And I don’t know her. And you don’t, either,” she replied, panicked.

  Vivian moved away from the wall and began to fumble frantically in the dark for her bathrobe, cursing when her fingers were shaking too violently to pull it on.

  Bedsheets rustled. Not good.

  “You stay right where you are!” she screeched, backing toward the shower.

  “I like the light better on,” he said. “The view was better.”

  “Well, I don’t. And I don’t want to know who you are.”

  “The name’s Cash McRay. And I damn sure want to know the name of the naked lady who saved me from my nightmare. I was drenched in sweat from terror—and there you were, like Venus arising from the sea—to rescue me. Exquisite Aphrodite.”

  She groaned aloud. Now her future brother-in-law had seen her in her birthday suit!

  Dear Reader,

  Welcome to another passion-filled month at Silhouette Desire—where we guarantee powerful and provocative love stories you are sure to enjoy. We continue our fabulous DYNASTIES: THE DANFORTHS series with Kristi Gold’s Challenged by the Sheikh—her intensely ardent hero will put your senses on overload. More hot heroes are on the horizon when USA TODAY bestselling author Ann Major returns to Silhouette Desire with the dramatic story of The Bride Tamer.

  Ever wonder what it would be like to be a man’s mistress—even just for pretend? Well, the heroine of Katherine Garbera’s Mistress Minded finds herself just in that predicament when she agrees to help out her sexy-as-sin boss in the next KING OF HEARTS title. Jennifer Greene brings us the second story in THE SCENT OF LAVENDER, her compelling series about the Campbell sisters, with Wild In the Moonlight—and this is one hero to go wild for! If it’s a heartbreaker you’re looking for, look no farther than Hold Me Tight by Cait London as she continues her HEARTBREAKERS miniseries with this tale of one sexy male specimen on the loose. And looking for a little Hot Contact himself is the hero of Susan Crosby’s latest book in her BEHIND CLOSED DOORS series; this sinfully seductive police investigator always gets his woman! Thank goodness.

  And thank you for coming back to Silhouette Desire every month. Be sure to join us next month for New York Times bestselling author Lisa Jackson’s Best-Kept Lies, the highly anticipated conclusion to her wildly popular series THE MCCAFFERTYS.

  Keep on reading!

  Melissa Jeglinski

  Senior Editor, Silhouette Desire

  ANN MAJOR

  THE BRIDE TAMER

  Books by Ann Major

  Silhouette Desire

  Dream Come True #16

  Meant To Be #35

  Love Me Again #99

  The Wrong Man #151

  Golden Man #198

  Beyond Love #229

  In Every Stranger’s Face #301

  What This Passion Means #331

  *Passion’s Child #445

  *Destiny’s Child #451

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  *Wilderness Child #535

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  *The Goodbye Child #648

  A Knight in Tarnished Armor #690

  Married to the Enemy #716

  †Wild Honey #805

  †Wild Midnight #819

  †Wild Innocence #835

  The Accidental Bridegroom #889

  A Cowboy Christmas #967

  The Accidental Bodyguard #1003

  *Nobody’s Child #1105

  Love Me True #1213

  Midnight Fantasy #1304

  Cowboy Fantasy #1375

  A Cowboy & a Gentleman #1477

  Shameless #1513

  The Bride Tamer #1586

  Silhouette Intimate Moments

  Seize the Moment #54

  Silhouette Romance

  Wild Lady #90

  A Touch of Fire #150

  Silhouette Special Edition

  Brand of Diamonds #83

  Dazzle #229

  The Fairy Tale Girl #390

  Silhouette Books

  Silhouette Christmas Stories 1990

  “Santa’s Special Miracle”

  Silhouette Summer Sizzlers 1992

  “The Barefooted Enchantress”

  Birds, Bees and Babies 1994

  “The Baby Machine”

  Silhouette Summer Sizzlers 1995

  “Fancy’s Man”

  Montana Mavericks Weddings 1998

  “A Bride, Baby and All”

  Matters of the Heart 2001

  “You’re My Baby”

  Lone Star Country Club:

  The Debutantes 2002

  “Frankie’s First Dress”

  Silhouette Single Title

  *Secret Child

  ANN MAJOR

  lives in Texas with her husband of many years and is the mother of three grown children. She has a master’s degree from Texas A&M at Kingsville, Texas, and is a former English teacher. She is a founding board member of the RWA and a frequent speaker at writers’ groups.

  Ann loves to write; she considers her ability to do so a gift. Her hobbies include hiking in the mountains, sailing, ocean kayaking, traveling and playing the piano. But most of all she enjoys her family.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  One

  Florence, Italy

  “Cut them off! Then he’ll suffer!”

  Cash’s hand froze on the auditorium door that led to the parking lot and helipad outside when he heard the screams to emasculate him.

  Roger, his personal assistant, peered at the swelling crowd from a nearby window and said far too cheerily, “More and more people are streaming into the plaza. Lucky for you, these are modern times and they aren’t wearing swords in scabbards. So, I think it’s safe enough for you to run for it—”

  “What’s the matter with them? They’ve had months to get used to my design,” Cash said.

  Cash McRay wasn’t a coward. But the roar of five thousand angry Florentines on the other side of the door threatening to cut off precious parts of his body made his blood run cold. His tall angular body felt like an immovable weight as he hesitated. His large, size-twelve feet rooted themselves to the floor.

  The death threats grew louder. Hell, maybe he should have played it safe. He’d known the design of the ultra-modern museum was over the top, but had he held back? Hell, no.

  “How ironic that the good citizens of Florence want me dead at the precise moment I’d begun to think I might feel like living again someday,” he said wryly. Unable to block the memory that had haunted so many of his nightmares, he saw his beloved Susana and little Sophie, lying so still and beyond his reach in their coffins.

  Roger placed a hand on Cash’s broad back and shoved him forward. “Relax. All the cannibals want is you…on a platter.”

  Cash whirled, and Roger flashed him the winning smile that had gotten him his job a year ago. Only tonight the kid’s snowy white smile made Cash grit his teeth and ball his hands into fists.

  “You talk too much,” Cash growled. “And you smile too much. It’s dangerous. Did anybody ever tell you, you should be a model for a toothpaste ad?”

  “Yeah—you! All the time. And it’s getting old.”

&
nbsp; “I’d rather grin goofily for a living than have my testicles served as shish kebab.”

  “This is good. Finally, a joke from you.”

  “Life goes on,” Cash muttered, determined to believe it.

  “Especially since you bumped into Isabela Escobar in Mexico City,” Roger said, showing too many teeth again. “Office gossip has it you are going to propose.”

  “Why do I have to be cursed with the nosiest staff in the world?”

  “There have been a lot of perfumed letters.”

  Cash seethed inwardly. Whether he intended to marry her or not was nobody’s business. Aloud he said, “I can’t propose to her or anybody else unless you get me out of Florence alive.”

  Roger threw the door open and pushed him hard. “Run for it, loverboy! I’m right behind you!”

  Lowering his head and ducking behind his leather briefcase, Cash dove through the throng that was being held in check behind velvet ropes by beefy security men.

  It was early April, and the night air chilled him. The parking lot was jammed. The helipad platform was a hundred yards off to the right. Policemen formed a human barricade all the way to the chain-link fence surrounding it.

  When strange hands and arms groped angrily at his legs, he sprinted for the ladder to the helipad, where the black rotors of a jet helicopter chopped a violet sky. Deftly he dodged the microphones that were thrust at his tanned, aristocratic, much-photographed face.

  “How could you build such a futuristic monstrosity in a city noted for its architectural beauty and history?” a woman yelled.

  “Egotist! Deconstructivist! Modernist! Postmodernist!”

  A man with oily black hair rushed him. Fortunately, two guards grabbed the ingrate by the shoulders. “Florence glories in its past,” he yelled. “Your museum looks like a crab squatting on a giant toilet!”

  Roger smiled and shouted glib answers in his horrendous Italian to the red-faced fellow.

  “Did your billionaire daddy bribe the city officials to pick your insane design?” someone else yelled at Cash.

  “Avant-garde, please,” Roger corrected, his toothy grin as bright as ever.

  Stung by the reference to his father, Cash hesitated on the third rung of the ladder and turned just as a rock bounced off his left shoulder.

  “No comment!” Roger yelled from a few feet behind him as a hand yanked one of his expensive Italian shoes off. “Climb, Cash, before the natives down here strip me naked! I’m right behind you.” More fabric ripped. “Ouch! Let go of my trousers! Hey! The bastard almost got me. Climb! You’re not the only one they want to barbecue.”

  Chain links chimed as a dozen men fought their way over the makeshift fencing. Before the rabble-rousers could reach the ladder, Cash and Roger were in the helicopter. Dozens of flashes went off in their faces. Then the heavy door slammed as the police pulled the climbers off the platform.

  Cash leaned back and sighed. Then he jammed his hand in his trouser pocket to make sure the velvet box with Isabela’s engagement ring inside was still there.

  Isabela was dark and fiery—and so vivaciously alive that maybe she could make him forget his loss. He tried to summon her image. Instead, he saw the still, white features of his wife, Susana, and their precious little daughter, their golden heads gleaming on satin pillows. He heard his stepmother’s soft whisper behind him, ordering him to close their caskets.

  “You two okay?” Count Leopoldo’s soft elegantly accented voice was barely audible over the roar of the helicopter as it took off. “You still game for a private tour of the Galleria degli Uffizi?”

  Leopoldo, or rather Leo, and he had roomed together at Harvard.

  Cash nodded wearily, his thoughts returning momentarily to the present. The Galleria degli Uffizi was one of the world’s great museums of Renaissance art. Susana had never come to Florence without going there….

  He turned his head to stare out the window at his creation. In the dying sunlight, from this angle, indeed it did look like a giant golden crab squatting by twin telescopes. As he studied the slanting expanses of gridded glass and the bridges in between the rectangular columns of limestone that had been likened to a crab’s legs, he felt a pang of doubt.

  The museum was the first thing he’d built since his home in San Francisco had burned. The house he’d designed for Susana had brought much enthusiasm and notoriety and many commissions from all over the world. He’d been away in Europe supervising the renovation of Leo’s island retreat when his own house had burned, and he’d lost everything that mattered.

  The helicopter shot straight upward into the purple dark, the whir of the rotors drowning out the noise of the crowd. Soon the people in the streets looked like ants. As the helicopter swooped toward the oldest part of the ancient city, all Cash could see were red-tiled roofs, boulevards, squares and the brown glitter of the serpentine Arno, the famous, unpredictable river that had raged through the city on more than one occasion with devastating effect. Florence had survived disasters far worse than one whimsical building.

  His old friend Leo had asked if he was okay.

  Cash shot Leo a furtive glance. “I forgot what fun it was to be the most hated ‘pop’ architect on the planet.”

  “Controversial architect,” Roger amended. “Hell, this is good. Tomorrow you’ll be on the front page of every newspaper in Europe.”

  “How can you be so damn optimistic—when people want to kill me?”

  “My people,” Leo began, “Italians, Florentines, we are passionate idiots. You must forgive us. Today we hate you—in four hundred years we will deify you.”

  Cash glowered. “A lot of good that will do my moldering corpse.”

  “He wants gloom and doom,” Roger said conversationally to Leo. “So, all right, Cash, I’ll give you gloom and doom.” His pearly smile lit the dark. “You lost the New York proposal.”

  Cash lowered his head into his hands and experienced the all-too-familiar, bleak, empty sensation of creative despair. He ran his big hands through his shock of thick black hair.

  Most people wouldn’t have much sympathy for him. Even after Susana’s death, everybody had told him he was a fool to mope when he had so much to live for.

  “You have your talent, your name, your youth….” Your money, they’d meant.

  If a man was rich, everybody thought he should be happy. They didn’t know. Money, the kind of fortune he possessed, cut him off from almost everybody, from his own humanity even, from feeling anything remotely real. He lived behind walls, sometimes in total isolation. He buried himself in his work.

  But his grief was real, and he had regrets like anybody else. He’d loved his wife and child to distraction. If he’d known how little time he had with them, he would never have left them so often to work in all those far-flung places.

  People thought because his picture was in magazines, he led a charmed life. “You’ll marry again,” they said. “A man like you…can have anybody.”

  At first he’d thought he could never betray Susana by marrying another. But nearly three years had passed, and it was getting harder and harder to live on memories. Two months ago, he’d been in Mexico City visiting his old mentor, Marco Escobar, after he’d had a heart attack. Isabela had popped into her father’s hospital room and dropped her shawl. When he’d picked it up, her hand had lingered on his. When she’d shown him sympathy, he’d felt a flicker of interest, the first since his wife’s death. And he’d thought maybe…maybe…

  “Your Manhattan design was great, Cash. Really,” Roger said. “Everybody said so. You’re just ahead of your time. Look on the bright side. At least you won’t build something that will make Manhattanites scream for your testicles on a skewer, and I won’t lose another expensive shoe. New Yorkers are a lot more violent than Italians, you know.”

  “Maybe. But New Yorkers are a lot more receptive to modern architecture too.”

  It is always a mistake to retrace one’s steps. No sooner was Cash inside the Uffizi tha
n he regretted coming. The walls of the museum that housed the works of the world’s finest collection of Italian Renaissance art seemed to close in. The musty odor of the old building and paintings suffocated him.

  The memories were still too sharp; Susana’s ghost feet too vivid. Only vaguely was he aware of the dimly lit masterpieces, half hidden by glass that loomed above him and Leo in the shadowy gallery.

  “The last time I was here, I was with Susana,” Cash whispered.

  “I know,” Leo said, not without sympathy. But he was a man of the world. His first wife had died in a car crash, and he was now on his third marriage—to a beautiful Parisian model.

  Leo’s heels clicked as he kept walking until they reached a certain gallery in the depths of Galleria degli Uffizi. Suddenly Botticelli’s Birth of Venus soared above them. Outside the sun had set, and it was raining softly, a spring shower that would soon be over.

  The last time he’d been here with Susana, the summer sun had been glorious outside, glorious in her hair, more brilliant and awe-inspiring even than the light in Botticelli’s famous paintings. Cash had wanted to stay outside, to walk in the sunny squares with Susana, to feed the pigeons and look at the buildings. But as always, she’d had her heart set on coming here.

  He and Susana had honeymooned in Florence. Even on that visit, she’d dragged him out of their bed to visit the Uffizi Palace every afternoon, not because the building was one of the most important examples of Italian Mannerist architecture, but because she’d loved Botticelli so much.

  “If Botticelli were alive, I’d be insanely jealous,” he’d teased her once.

  She’d laughed as she’d run through the galleries ahead of him. And always she’d ended up here, staring at The Birth of Venus.