The Inconvenient Bride

“I’m frizzing, too!” Delilah, the other model, complained.

“And not the blue. I don’t like her in the blue,” Ballou decided, scrutinizing the dress Alison had just put on. “Let’s try the yellow.”

“I can’t wear yellow!” the model objected. “I look dead in yellow.”

“You’re going to be dead in yellow,” Finn said, “if you don’t shut up. We have thirty of these damn things to get finished and we’ve only done six! Sierra! Let’s go!”

They went. The models stood patiently while Sierra slicked them down again. Ballou fussed and fumed and fretted and changed his mind and Finn griped and growled and cussed and shot.

And all the while Sierra tried to stay up-beat because after all, she told herself, in the greater course of the universe what difference did it make?

It was rain. A yellow dress or a blue one. Curly hair. Frizzy hair. Straight hair. What difference did it make?

It didn’t.

Not like Frankie.

That was really what made it a lousy day—thinking about Frankie.

Frankie Bartelli was going to die.

Sierra hated to even think that. Her mind rebelled at the thought. Her emotions rejected it furiously. But for all her rebellion and all her rejection, it was going to happen—unless he got a kidney transplant—and soon.

Sure, some people lived a long time with kidney problems. Some people did just fine on dialysis for years and years.

But they weren’t Frankie, who for the last few months had been fading right before Sierra’s eyes.

They weren’t eight years old, either, with their whole lives ahead of them.

They didn’t dream about climbing mountains and going fishing and playing baseball. They didn’t draw the niftiest spaceships or the scariest green monsters or detailed plans for the “best tree house in the world.”

They didn’t love Star Trek and root beer floats and double cheese pizza. They didn’t have big brown eyes and sooty dark lashes and a cowlick that even Sierra’s most determined hair gel couldn’t subdue for long. They didn’t have the world’s croakiest laugh and a grin that melted you where you stood.

Or maybe they did.

Sierra didn’t know. She didn’t know about anyone—except Frankie.

He and his mother Pam had been Sierra’s neighbors since she’d moved into half of the third floor of a four-story walk-up in the Village three years ago.

Frankie had been a lot healthier-looking then. A lot stronger. And Pam hadn’t had that hunted, haunted look in her dark brown eyes.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she’d said, her voice cracking when she’d first told Sierra what the doctors had told her.

To Sierra it was simple. “If he needs a transplant, we’ll get him a transplant,” she had vowed.

But Pam, desperate but realistic, had shaken her head in despair. “The hospital wants two hundred, fifty thousand dollars up front before they’ll even agree to put him on the list.”

It seemed like highway robbery to Sierra. Extortion. Every vile thing she could think of. Just because Pam was a self-employed illustrator whose insurance coverage had managed to fall through some crack, that was no reason for them to deny Frankie.

And she said so hotly and furiously more than once.

But they had denied him. Just this morning Pam had repeated it. “They won’t even see him unless I come up with 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.

“I’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.

“Okay. 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!”

“Damn!” Finn’s face turned red. “Sierra, get the reflector.”

“I’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.

“The 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.

“Because 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.