Needed: One Convenient Husband(2)

He had no illusions about why Mario had done a complete about turn and  made him a trustee, when for years he had treated Kyle as if he was a  marauding predator after his one and only chick. For years Eva had  stubbornly resisted Mario's attempts to find her a safe, solid husband  from amongst the sons of his wealthy business associates. Mario, forced  to change tack, had swallowed his objections to the "wild Messena boys,"  and had then tried to marry Eva off to both of Kyle's older brothers,  Gabriel and Nick. When that strategy had failed because Gabe and Nick  had married other women and Kyle's younger brother Damian had a  long-standing girlfriend, in a last desperate move, Mario had finally  settled on Kyle as a prospective bridegroom.                       
       
           



       

His gaze still locked on Eva, Kyle strolled back to his Maserati. Now  that he knew Eva wasn't the bride, he should drive back to Auckland.  Back to his ultrabusy, smoothly organized life. If he left right away,  he could even make the uncomplicated dinner date he had with Elise, a  fellow banking executive he had been seeing on and off for the past few  months, mostly at business functions.

But as he approached the Maserati, which was nose to tail with Eva's  white sports car, he couldn't shake the sense that something about the  way Eva had stormed off had not rung true. It occurred to him that the  tears he thought Eva had been about to cry could have been fake. After  all, she had taken acting classes. She had been good enough that she had  even been offered a part in a popular soap, but had turned it down  because it had conflicted with her desire to start her own wedding  planning business.

Suddenly positive that he had been duped, he dropped the Maserati's key  back into his pocket. There could be only one reason why Eva wanted him  to feel guilty enough that he bypassed the reception. She had already  found a new candidate for groom and he would be attending as her guest.  Since she only had three weeks to organize her final shot at a wedding,  keeping her new prospective groom close made sense, because time was of  the essence.

Certainty settled in when he caught the tail end of a conversation with  someone named Troy. His jaw tightened. Troy Kendal, if he didn't miss  his guess. A flashy sports star Eva had met less than a week ago in a  last, desperate attempt to recruit a groom. Out of nowhere, the jealousy  he had worked hard to suppress because it was just as illogical as the  desire that haunted him, roared to life.

If Eva had been crying, they had been crocodile tears.

She had been getting rid of him.

In no mood to leave now, Kyle waited until Eva terminated the call and dropped the phone in her bag. "We need to talk."

"I thought we just did."

Dropping her bag on the passenger seat, she dragged off her sunglasses  and checked her watch, subtly underlining the fact that she was in a  hurry to leave. Without the barrier of the lenses, and with strands of  hair blowing loose around her cheeks, she seemed younger and oddly  vulnerable, although Kyle knew that was an illusion, since Eva's  reputation with men was legendary. "There's a solution to your problem.  If you marry a Messena, there are no further conditions, other than that  the marriage must be of two years' duration."

Her brows creased as if she was only just considering an option that  had been bluntly stated in the will. "Even if I wanted to do that, which  I don't, that's hardly possible, since Gabriel and Nick are both  married, and Damian's as good as."

Kyle's jaw clamped at the systematic way she ticked his brothers off  her fingers, deliberately leaving him off the list. As if her fingers  had never locked with his as they'd strolled down the dimly lit path to  Dolphin Bay, as if she had never wrapped her arms around his neck and  kissed him.

"There's one other Messena," Kyle said flatly, his patience gone. "I'm talking you, me and a marriage of convenience."





Two

Eva choked back the stinging refusal she wanted to fling at Kyle. She  didn't know why she reacted so strongly to him or the idea that they  could marry. Mario's previous attempts to marry her off to other Messena  men had barely ruffled her.

A year ago, when she had read the terms of the will and absorbed the  full import of that one little sentence, she had been so horrified she  had wanted to crawl under the solicitor's desk and hide. The whole idea  that Kyle, the only available Messena husband-and the one man who had  ditched her-should feel pressured to marry her, had been mortifying. "I  don't need a pity proposal."

The wind dropped for a split second, enclosing them in a pooling,  tension-filled silence that was gradually filled with the timeless  beauty of the wedding vows floating from the church.

"But you do need a proposal. After two years, once you've got your inheritance, we can dissolve the marriage."

Kyle's clinical solution contrarily sent a stab of hurt through her, which annoyed her intensely.

A former Special Air Service soldier, Kyle had the kind of steely blue  gaze that missed nothing. He was also tall and muscular, six foot two  inches of sleek muscle, with close-cut dark hair and the kind of grim  good looks and faintly battered features, courtesy of his years in the  military, that mesmerized women.

All of the men in the Messena and Atraeus families seemed to possess  that same formidable, in-charge quality. Usually, it didn't ruffle her  in the slightest, but Kyle paired it with a blunt, low-key insight that  was unnerving; he seemed to know what she was going to do before she did  it. Added to that, she wouldn't mind betting that he had gotten rid of  some of her grooms with a little judicious intimidation.                       
       
           



       

The idea of marrying Kyle shouldn't affect her. She had learned early  on to sidestep actual relationships at all cost. The plain fact was, she  wouldn't have trusted in any relationships at all if it hadn't been for  Mario and his wife picking her up when they'd found her on the sidewalk  near their home one evening twelve years ago.

When they'd found out she was on the run from her last home because her  foster father had wandering hands, they had phoned the welfare people.  However, instead of allowing her to be shunted back into another  institutional home, Mario had made a string of phone calls to "people he  knew" and she had been allowed to stay with them.

Despite her instinctive withdrawal and the cold neutrality that had  gotten her through a number of foster homes, Mario and Teresa had  offered her the kind of quiet, steady love that, at sixteen, had been  unfamiliar and a little scary. When they had eventually proposed  adopting her, the plain fact was she hadn't known how to respond. She'd  had the rug pulled emotionally so many times she had thought that if she  softened and believed that she was deserving of love, that would be the  moment it was all taken away.

In the end, through Mario's dogged persistence, she had finally  understood that he was the one person who wouldn't break his word. Her  resistance had crumbled and she had signed. In the space of a moment,  she had ceased to be Eva Rushton, the troubled runaway, and had become  Eva Atraeus, a member of a large and mystifyingly welcoming family.

However, the transformation had never quite been complete. After  watching her own mother's three marriages disintegrate then at age  seventeen finding out why, she had decided she did not ever want to be  that vulnerable.

She caught a whiff of Kyle's cologne and her stomach clenched. And  there was her problem, she thought grimly. Although, why the fiery  tension, which should have died a death years ago-right after he had  dumped her when she was seventeen-still persisted, she had no clue. It  wasn't as if they had ever spent much time together or had anything in  common beyond the youthful attraction. Kyle had married someone else a  couple of years later, too, so she knew that what they had shared had  not affected him as deeply as it had her.

Now, thanks to Kyle's interference, she had three weeks to marry anyone but him, and the clock was ticking...

Frustration reignited the nervous tension that had assaulted her when  Jeremy had informed her he was backing out of their arrangement, but now  that tension was laced with a healthy jolt of panic. Mario Atraeus  couldn't have chosen a better watchdog for the unexpected codicil he had  written into his will if he had tried.

She had been so close to marriage, but now Jeremy had run like a  frightened rabbit. She couldn't prove that Kyle had engineered the job  offer to get rid of Jeremy. All she knew was that he had used the same  tactic twice before. Every time she got someone to agree to marry her,  Kyle got rid of him.