Briar snorted. ‘They’re well and truly hidden if he has.’
‘And he is a very good-looking man.’
‘I guess, if you go for the bandit look.’ She frowned, the direction her mother’s arguments were taking suddenly niggling at her. ‘Anyway, we’re talking about Diablo Barrentes. The same Diablo Barrentes who has set out to bring down the Sydney establishment, and the Davenport family first and foremost. What’s it matter what he loo—’
‘Briar—’ her father’s gruff tones interrupted them from behind ‘—I’m glad you’re still up. Can you spare me a minute or two?’
She breathed a sigh of relief. Her father’s appearance meant Diablo must have gone at last, and good riddance to him. She was sick of feeling on tenterhooks in her own home. And at least now she might find out what was going on. If her father was planning on accepting help from Diablo, she’d have a few things to say about it first.
‘You go with your father,’ her mother urged, her smile too thin, too unconvincing, as she gestured towards the door. ‘We’ve finished anyway.’
She caught the loaded look that passed between her parents. Something was going on. Why didn’t her parents look happier if there was a lifeline in the offing?
Or were Barrentes’s terms too costly?
A sick feeling snaked in her gut. Nothing would surprise her. Diablo would be sure to want to stick the boot in now that he had her father down.
Damn the man. She’d do everything possible to ensure they could avoid his greedy clutches.
‘Actually,’ her mother piped up, catching her daughter’s hand in a sudden change of heart, ‘maybe I should come along with you.’
‘No!’ insisted Cameron, insinuating himself between the two women and breaking their grasp. ‘You stay here,’ he directed at his wife. ‘This won’t take long. And then I could probably use another coffee.’
‘So are you ever going to tell me what’s going on?’ Briar asked her father a few moments later, wishing he would say something—anything—as he led her through the house. His silence was unsettling. ‘What did Diablo want?’
Just outside the library he paused and turned to her, taking both her hands in his, the look on his face almost one of defeat, and this close up she was shocked to see how dark and heavy those circles under his eyes really were. It might be late but it was clear the stress of their circumstances was eating away at him, too. From inside the library the old grandfather clock ticked away the seconds ominously.
‘Briar,’ he said on a sigh, ‘before we go any further, I want you to know that I didn’t want this to happen, you have to believe that.’ He peered at her so intently she could feel his utter desperation, his bony hands cold and unsettlingly clammy around her own.
She swallowed. ‘You didn’t mean what to happen?’
‘I need you help,’ he continued, evading her question, ‘even though I know that what I am asking of you may be too much.’
‘It’s okay,’ she replied with a confidence she didn’t feel, squeezing his hands back. She tried desperately to raise a smile but a racing heart and a mind filled with shadows and creeping foreboding wouldn’t let her. ‘So what is it you want me to do?’
A dark flicker of movement wrenched her attention away from her father as a prickle of awareness skittered along her skin.
Diablo! So he hadn’t left after all! And now he stood leaning casually against the doorway. Although the look on his face was anything but.
Victory, his features proclaimed.
It was there in the dangerous glint in his eyes. It was there in the voracious tilt of his smile. And it was there in the menacing darkness of his attitude.
‘It’s really quite simple,’ Diablo announced, answering for her father, his teeth flashing dangerously as he levered himself away from the door and closer to her.
‘Your father merely expects you to marry me.’
CHAPTER TWO
‘IF THAT’S your idea of a joke, Mr Barrentes…’ Briar’s voice sounded strangely calm in spite of the explosions going off behind her eyes ‘…I’d say you were seriously overdue for a sense of humour transplant.’
He laughed. Or rather he rumbled, that low rolling sound that vibrated uncomfortably through her.
She bristled, trying to dispel the rush of heat that came with his proximity. ‘I’m afraid I don’t see the joke.’
His mouth quietened, his eyes stilled. On hers. ‘That’s because it is no joke. Your father has agreed that you will marry me.’
For a moment she was speechless. But only for a moment. Then it was her turn to laugh, wiping away his wild assertions with a sweep of one hand. ‘You’re crazy! Dad, tell him how ludicrous he sounds. There’s no way you’d ever expect me to do something so absurd as to marry someone like him.’ She looked at her father, inviting him to agree—imploring him to agree—but her father said nothing, his eyes more desolate than she’d ever seen them, and the laughter died on her lips just as hope died in her heart.
‘Briar,’ he said in the bare bones of a whisper, reaching for her shoulder, ‘you have to understand—’
A hitched moment of realisation passed and then, ‘No!’ She recoiled from both his touch and from what his eyes told her. ‘There’s nothing to understand.’
‘Please,’ her father pleaded, ‘before you mother hears us.’ He motioned them both into the room before closing the door behind them. ‘You must listen to me.’
Her mind a blur, she let herself be bustled inside the room before she turned on her father, blurting out just how she felt. ‘How can I listen when what you say makes no sense?’
‘And how can you say it makes no sense,’ Diablo argued from the sidelines, one arrogant eyebrow cocked, ‘if you don’t listen?’
She snapped her head around in his direction. ‘If I’d wanted your opinion, I would have asked for it.’
He didn’t look nonplussed. Far from it. In fact he looked altogether too pleased with himself as he leant back against her father’s desk, his hands planted wide either side of him, pulling his shirt taut across a muscled chest that looked far better than any man’s had a right to. The open V of his shirt revealed olive skin that was impossibly smooth, almost glossy, and a hint of dark chest hair. She forced her eyes higher, aware that she’d been staring. Her mother was right. Diablo Barrentes was one good-looking man. Why did someone so detestable have to be blessed with such good looks and such a killer body? There was clearly no justice in this world.
He smiled then, as if amused by what her face betrayed of her thoughts. ‘You are as prickly as your name suggests, my wild rose.’
‘I am not your wild rose! Don’t you understand? I don’t want to marry you. And there’s no way on earth you can make me.’
She turned her attention back to her father as another cog suddenly slipped into place. Suddenly her mother’s ‘he must have some redeeming features’ discussion made sense, though not the sudden secrecy. ‘What’s this really about? Why did you make us come into the library? Mother knows about this arrangement, doesn’t she?’
Her father looked grey. ‘She knows something of the proposal, it’s true.’
Briar’s gut churned. ‘Something of the proposal’? What more could there possibly be? What she was hearing already set her stomach roiling. And the very concept that her future had been mapped out by her own parents—the two people she’d always assumed loved her and wanted the best for her—was too much.
‘So