The Millionaires' Club: Ryan, Alex and Darin: Breathless for the Bachelor

“You don’t really want me to go…do you Roman?”

He let out a deep breath, crossed to the bed. “How many times have I told you not to call me by my real name?”

“All right. All right.” Now it was her voice that was filled with impatience. Her pale blue eyes that heated to electric flame. “Nathan. I know the drill. You’ve reminded me often enough. As long as we’re stuck in this dust trap, you’re Dr. Nathan Beldon, not Dr. Roman Birkenfeld, and I’m nurse Mary Campbell, not Marci Carson. Now…you don’t really want me to go, do you…Nathan?”

His gaze raked her body. No. He didn’t want her to go. At least not for another hour or so. He still needed her to play out this scam. And he needed to work off some of his tension with Nurse “Good-body.”

He hadn’t been thinking straight lately. He needed his wits about him. He needed to regroup and refocus and marshal his thoughts, reassess his plan. Forget about what he’d done to the real Dr. Nathan Beldon whose identity he’d stolen…quit worrying about being found out. Even if the Dallas PD found Beldon’s body—and he’d made sure they wouldn’t—the police wouldn’t be able to pin the murder on him. He wasn’t stupid. He hadn’t gotten where he was by being stupid.

All he needed to do was keep it together so he could get to Natalie Perez. The bitch. She was the one who’d screwed things up. She’d gotten wise to his black-market baby ring and skipped with both her baby and his money—money he’d been hoarding from baby sales for months so he could pay off the loan sharks who’d covered his Atlantic City gambling debts. He was as good as dead if he didn’t get the baby and the money back. Thanks to Natalie Perez, he’d been roughed up good and his life had been threatened—with the promise that they would not let him die easily if he didn’t make good on his loan. Soon.

He swiped a damp palm over his jaw. He had to get to that baby. And he had to recover the half million she’d stolen from him so he could get the monkey off his back.

So, no. He didn’t want the woman warming his bed to leave. He wanted some relief from all this pressure. Keeping up the sham of his false ID, constantly being on guard against the loan sharks catching up with him, figuring out angles to get out from under…it was taking a toll. He wasn’t sleeping. He’d lost weight.

“Come on, baby,” Marci purred, and lay back on the pillow. “I’ll make you feel better.”

Yeah, he thought. She was a regular Florence Nightingale…and he was in need of a healing hand.

He crossed over to the bed and stretched out on top of her. He’d worry about Carrie Whelan in the morning. Stupid little do-gooder. She was an easy mark—ripe for the picking. She was as naive as a baby and already halfway in love with him. She was only a means to an end—totally expendable. Everyone in this little cow town was easy to fool…including the hospital board. They hadn’t even questioned the Texas medical credentials he’d lifted from Beldon’s office. Stupid yokels. It had been so easy to infiltrate the medical community and gain hospital privileges. He’d simply approached the chief of staff and stated he was interested in participating in their physician’s exchange program. The administrator, who just happened to have been looking for a replacement for a doctor who had recently moved out of state, had been happy as a damn clam to take him on.

Everything was fine. He was in control. All he had to do was stick with the plan and use Carrie Whelan to get to Travis Whelan, who was his most direct route to Natalie Perez.

And once he got to Natalie…she’d pay. He’d make her pay dearly for what she’d done to him. He’d make them all pay. No one bested Roman Birkenfeld. Not his sanctimonious brother and holier-than-thou sister, not his parents, whom he could never please.

Well, he was pleasing himself now. And he wasn’t going to let a woman—one woman, Natalie Perez—bring him down.

Four

Carrie couldn’t believe it. Nathan had actually called her again—the very next day—and he’d asked her to go out with him that same night. His aggressiveness was exciting and flattering, and she was going for it.

She picked up the bottle of pricey and very sexy perfume her friend, Stephanie Firth, had given her for Christmas a couple of months ago. With what she felt was an act of daring, she spritzed it across the tops of her breasts. Then she took one final look at herself in the mirror.

The dress was new. It was also black and short and body hugging and cut low enough to show an incredible amount of cleavage.

Resisting the urge to tug the hem down a little closer to her knees and the square-cut bodice a little closer to her chin—in both cases many, many, many inches closer—she slipped into four-inch stiletto heels. The sexy shoes, all slim straps and sleek black Italian leather, were another extravagance. It wasn’t often she could even wear heels on a date for fear of towering over the guy.

“Let’s face it…it isn’t often you get to go on a date, period, thank you very much, Travis,” she muttered, then forced herself to steer away from any negative energy—and away from any thoughts of how Ryan might react to the way she looked. He’d probably tell her to put on a sweater.

Well, tonight wasn’t about pleasing Ryan. Tonight was her night. Hers and Nathan’s. Stephanie was the only one who even knew about their dinner date. Ry showing up at the Royal Diner the other night was just a little too coincidental. She wasn’t taking any chance of her brother or Ry sabotaging her evening with some misguided notion that she wasn’t capable of making her own choices.

With a sweep of siren-red lipstick that matched her nails and assurances that she was simply being sophisticated, not obvious, she grabbed her coat and headed for the door. She had no intention of keeping Nathan waiting. He’d had a devil of a time carving out a few hours from his schedule at the hospital—that’s why they were meeting at Claire’s instead of him picking her up. That was fine by her. It would give her a chance to make an entrance.

She wanted to knock the doctor’s socks off. If this outfit didn’t do it, she didn’t know what would. And when the little voice niggling away at the back of her mind tried to tell her she might be making a mistake, that she might be leaping a little too fast, that he might be pushing a little too hard, she made a conscious decision to ignore it.

She was a big girl. She’d always been a good judge of character. Nathan Beldon’s character was just fine. So was his smile. He wasn’t Ry. But for once and for always, Ry wasn’t interested. And Nolan… She stopped herself, horrified, and cursed Ry under her breath. Nathan not Nolan. Nathan was interested. Very interested. And she and her little black dress were going to make sure he stayed that way.

The wine, Carrie thought, was perfect. The candlelight was romantic and Nelson— She mentally slapped herself over her repeated mental block when it came to Nathan’s name and made a promise to slap Ryan, too, the next time she saw him, for planting the seed that refused to die.

Okay. She could do this. Nathan. Nathan, Nathan bo-bathen, banana-panna mo-mathan, fe, fi, fo, Nathan. Na-than.

Got it.

Deep breath. Regroup.

She smiled across the table. Reestablished the mood. One more time: the wine was perfect, the candlelight was romantic and Nathan was definitely interested.

“Have I told you how incredibly gorgeous you look tonight?” he asked, his gaze flicking from her face to her very-there cleavage then back to her face again.

Assuring herself that his hot looks made her feel desirable, not a little uneasy, she blinked demurely over her wineglass. “Twice. And frankly I can’t think of a single reason for you to stop now.”

His chuckle was deep and sexy as he lifted his glass toward hers. “To the beginning of a beautiful…friendship,” he added after a meaningful pause.

“Yes,” she said, ignoring a little flutter of nerves and clinking her glass to his. “To beginnings.”

Ry felt like a louse. Hell. He was a louse.

“You want to tell me what this is about now?”

He smiled grimly across the front seat of his black Lexus at his friend, Stephanie Firth. The model-slim librarian and high school drama coach was a quietly stunning beauty who had not yet figured out exactly how pretty she was or how to use her shy intellect to intrigue the opposite sex.

He and Steph had been buddies since grade school. These days she wore her light brown hair straight and long. Back then she’d worn it in pigtails and hidden her pretty brown eyes behind owlish glasses. He’d been the class clown, she the class brain who had taken a lot of grief over her intelligence and her tall, gangling frame, which she had since grown into quite nicely.

She used to help him out with geography and he used to knock Josh Bowstead, the class bully, into the scrub brush out back of the middle school playground whenever Josh got a yen to call her egghead or Einsteinette or pencil or bean pole or be a general pain in her easily bruised and very fragile ego.

They’d even tried the dating thing once during their freshman year, then laughed themselves silly over a first kiss that was pretty much all locked braces and sweaty palms. The experience had been enough to satisfy them both that the only chemistry between them involved the notes she’d slipped him so he could study for his chem final. But their bond of friendship had stood up over time and she still turned to him when she was in a pinch…just as he turned to her.

Tonight, however, he was using her. If that didn’t make him a louse, his plans to spoil Carrie’s date did.

“Why does tonight have to be about something?” he asked evasively as he parked the car. The Lexus wasn’t a four-wheel-drive like the trucks and SUVs he favored, but it was one smooth, sleek machine, and he hadn’t been able to resist it when he’d seen it on the lot a month ago. You could never have too many horses or too much horsepower, he’d always said. “Can’t an old friend take an old friend out to dinner without having to have a reason?”

“Oh, I suppose they could,” she said, slicing him a suspicious look as he led her through the front door of Claire’s, “but, gee, isn’t it coincidental that you had to head straight home after your meeting at the bank, until I told you Carrie had a dinner date with Dr. Beldon, and then suddenly, why, you were just dying for one of Claire’s rare filet mignons?”

“Yeah, well—” he cleared his throat of the lump of guilt that had lodged there and forced a smile “—a guy’s got to eat.”

“Uh-huh,” Steph said, telling him with a look that she didn’t know what he was up to, but that steak, no matter how well prepared, was not a factor in his motive for bringing her here.

Thankfully, before she could call him on it, the maître d’ was escorting them to a table set with sparkling white linen, slim burgundy tapers and fine Austrian crystal.

The moment Ry spotted Carrie and Beldon seated at a secluded table in the corner of the room, the decor and genteel ambiance of Claire’s faded to a distant, background buzz.

All he saw was Carrie.

In a killer dress that damn near dropped him to his knees.

The vibrant fire lighting her eyes and brightening her cheeks was rivaled only by the shimmering highlights the candlelight cast in her silky red hair…and by the flames licking through his belly and spreading by slow degrees to his groin.

He’d always thought she was pretty. Had done his damnedest to avoid thinking about the fact that she was also sexy as hell. There was no avoiding it tonight. Not the way she looked.