Brides for the Billionaires: The Billionaire's Marriage Bargain / The Billionaire's Marriage Mission / Bedded at the Billionaire's Convenience

His wife turned to give him a knowing look, the startling beauty of her four daughters obviously inherited from her. ‘We don’t have a dog, Donald,’ she told him dryly. ‘And you know you aren’t allowed to go to the pub, if that’s where you’re sneaking off to,’ she added reprovingly.

‘I take exception to the word “sneaking”,’ her husband teased back. ‘And I’m allowed to go in the pub. I just can’t have the pint of beer I would like to have while I’m in there!’

‘Well, I’m sure Dominick has absolutely no interest in going to the pub … do you, Dominick?’ Nancy looked at him enquiringly.

No, he didn’t have any interest in going to a pub, or in being alone with Kenzie’s father. But neither did he want to stay here to watch Kenzie as she relaxed in the company of her close-knit family.

Kenzie had asked him to do something for her, and he had agreed, and in return she would give him exactly what he wanted. Getting involved in the intimacy of her family was not part of that bargain.

Kenzie had turned to look at him now, the sharpness of her gaze obviously seeing his lack of enthusiasm for any father/son chats that might occur between the two men once they were alone at the local pub.

‘How about Dominick and I take our things up to our room and freshen up first?’ She slipped her hand into the crook of his arm even as she smiled brightly at her family. ‘You can “walk the dog” just as easily in half an hour or so, can’t you, Dad?’ she teased.

‘Half an hour, an hour, as long as I can escape from this chatter about weddings for a while!’ Her father nodded, his grin belying his words.

Kenzie could feel Dominick’s tension as they left the room together and walked up the stairs. She knew that he had always found the easy affection of her family slightly overwhelming. And that it was something he wanted no part of.

It was understandable in a man who hadn’t grown up in a loving and stable family, but it also made his agreement to come here this weekend all the more surprising. And the payment he would demand more worrying …

‘I’m sorry about that.’ She grimaced as she sat down on one of the twin beds in the room her mother had told her she and Dominick were to use for the night. ‘Do you think you’ll be able to stand a whole weekend of it?’ She frowned as she looked at him.

‘Oh, I think I’ll probably survive,’ he drawled, thrusting his hands into the pockets of his denims as he moved restlessly around the room. ‘What’s the prognosis on your father?’ he asked as he remembered, despite Donald’s cheerfulness, those tell-tale signs of recent illness in the older man.

‘Good.’ Kenzie nodded, dark lashes fanning down over her cheeks as she looked towards the floor. ‘It was more—frightening, than anything else, I think.’ She glanced up at him, her eyes bruised and shadowed. ‘The doctors say it’s a warning for him to slow down, that’s all, that he can return to work at his estate agency in a couple of months’ time. But my mother wants him to sell up and take early retirement,’ she added ruefully, aware that she was talking too much in her nervousness of being alone with Dominick. She was sure he didn’t really want to hear all this, and that his interest had just been idle conversation on his part.

Dominick nodded. ‘And?’

She shrugged. ‘He says he isn’t sixty yet, and he hasn’t earnt enough money to retire. But they won’t accept any help from me,’ she added with a sigh.

He could see how Nancy and Donald would baulk at accepting financial security from their eldest daughter. But what—

Damn it, he had no intention of being sucked into this warmly loving family!

It was against every principle of aloof self-containment he had lived his life by since he had been able to completely escape his parents’ influence twenty years ago.

Despite having the grades, he had chosen not to go to college, and instead had worked in a hotel, working his way up from lowly Porter to Assistant Manager, and then Manager by the age of only twenty-three. Then he had gone completely out on a limb to finance the buying of the hotel and had completely turned it around into a profit-making concern.

That first hotel had only been the start, and now he owned hotels and apartments all over the world, amongst other things.

Very shortly, when his four months of planning came to fruition, he intended owning a cosmetics company too …

Before, he had managed to achieve what he had because he had never allowed emotions to overrule his head.

Until he had met and married Kenzie …

A chink in his armour.

But a chink, once he’d had her safely installed in his life as his wife, that he had kept under perfect control.

Until she’d begun to question why he never told her he loved her.

Until she’d begun to talk about them having a baby together.

Kenzie had insisted that the child the two of them had together wouldn’t experience the emotionally battered upbringing he’d had. But Dominick had remained adamant against that argument, a development that had obviously caused Kenzie deep unhappiness.

As far as Dominick had been concerned though, there had been no reason for them to have children. They had been happy as they were, so why rock the boat?

Kenzie hadn’t seen it that way, and things had become incredibly strained between them, with their love-making no longer the pleasure it had once been, and a barrier seeming to come down between them.

When Carlton Cosmetics, in the guise of Jerome Carlton himself, had begun to spend a lot of time with her in an effort to persuade her into accepting a lucrative contract to be the face of their new product, that estrangement had deepened.

Quite to what extent Dominick hadn’t been made aware of until he’d spoken to Jerome Carlton some weeks later.

And by then it had been too late. Kenzie had made her choice, and it hadn’t been him or their marriage.

She had accepted the contract Jerome Carlton had offered on behalf of Carlton Cosmetics—and Carlton’s more personal offer that she move into his life!

Kenzie breathed a sigh, and stood up, the movement bringing Dominick’s attention away from his thoughts. ‘The bathroom is through there.’ She pointed to an adjoining door. ‘Take as long as you like. Don’t come down again at all, if you would rather not. I’m sure my family will accept that you’re tired after working all day and then having to drive here.’

‘I’m thirty-eight, Kenzie, not eighty-eight!’ he rasped impatiently. ‘And I seem to remember being perfectly capable of going in to work the next morning as usual after some of our more—strenuous sexual marathons,’ he added tauntingly.

Kenzie paused in the doorway, her expression pained. ‘And there you have the difference between us in stark reality, Dominick,’ she told him sadly. She knew that difference was everything, and that it always had been, only she had been too much in love with Dominick, too blind to see it, at the time. ‘You see, I thought the two of us were making love,’ she explained at his scowl, ‘not having a “sexual marathon”!’

His mouth twisted scathingly. ‘You always did like to pretty things up in rose-coloured glasses!’

‘Whereas you,’ she murmured softly, ‘have always worn blinkers and so see nothing at all except what’s directly in front of your nose, giving you an extremely narrow view of the world!’ She closed the door softly behind her as she left, knowing there was nothing more to be said, and that she couldn’t reach Dominick this way. She never had been able to.

She blinked back the tears as she moved hurriedly back down the stairs to rejoin her family, eager to be back amongst their warmth and love.

Dominick gazed after her with pitying derision.

Love!

That was for people like Kenzie, not him. It was for people who hadn’t had the notion of love kicked out of them by their own parents’ infidelities when they were a kid. Because loving someone, one person, for a lifetime, simply didn’t exist.

But what about Nancy and Donald? an annoying little voice asked inside his head.

An exception, not the rule, he told himself firmly. One successful marriage didn’t make up for the fact that almost one in two marriages ended in divorce nowadays.

Love wasn’t to be trusted, he had learnt at a very early age. It only made fools of everyone—and he had no intention of ever joining the ranks of the foolish!

CHAPTER FIVE

‘WHAT did you and Dad talk about while you were out?’ Kenzie prompted curiously as she came back from preparing for bed in the adjoining bathroom.

The two men had disappeared together for over an hour earlier once Dominick had come back downstairs, and Kenzie had been unable to stop feeling anxious the whole time they’d been gone. She wondered what two such different men could possibly have found to discuss for that length of time, and her look of concern had earned her quite a lot of teasing from her sisters as they had mistaken that anxiety for missing Dominick.

Her family obviously had no idea, but she had got used to missing Dominick during their months of separation. She had never quite accepted it, but at the same time she knew there was no point in pulling herself to emotional shreds over something she, and her love, couldn’t change. Dominick couldn’t ever change.