Free A Breathless Bride by Fiona Brand Page A

savage desire to dismiss Tomas, who was hovering at the entrance to the courtyard.
    His PA was under strict instructions not to interrupt this interlude, or let anyone else do so, which meant that whatever Tomas had to say was urgent.
    Positioning himself so that he blocked Sienna from Tomas’s view, and the curious stares they were now attracting from the handful of guests who had drifted near the French doors, Constantine took the phone Tomas handed him and answered the call.
    The conversation with his chief financial advisor was brief and to the point. The legal tangle his father and Roberto Ambrosi had concocted between them had resulted in an unexpected hitch. Lorenzo had signed away water rights Constantine needed for Roberto’s bogus pearl enterprise. No water rights meant no marina development, which effectively froze a project in which he had already invested millions.
    Constantine terminated the call and handed the phone back to Tomas. Dismissing him with curt thanks, he turned back to Sienna. He had expected that in the brief interval it had taken to deal with the phone call she would close off from him, and he wasn’t wrong. Grimly, he noted that in the space of less than two minutes she had smoothed her hair back into an elegant knot, found her evening bag, which she had dropped, and recovered the cool composure that irked him so much.
    A jagged flash of lightning signaled that the violent electrical storm had rolled overhead. Sienna, he noticed, didn’t so much as flinch. Her gaze was already focused on his room of retailers and, no doubt, the prospect of closing a number of lucrative sales deals.
    Not for the first time it occurred to him that he might have more success with Sienna if he had one of her order sheets in his hand.
    When she would have strolled past him, using the avenue of an interested group of spectators who had strolled out onto the courtyard to view the pyrotechnics as an escape route, Constantine blocked her way.
    “We haven’t finished our discussion.” He indicated the softly lit decking that encircled the ground level of the house. “We can conclude our business in the privacy of my study.”
    Sienna teetered on the brink of refusing, the danger inherent in a private meeting suddenly vastly more potent than the financial threat.
    In the end, though, she nodded and mounted the veranda steps, eager to at least get under cover. “I take it the phone call was bad news?”
    Constantine’s calmness was utterly at odds with the white-hot intensity of the kiss. “Nothing that can’t be handled.”
    The call had been bad news, but that suited Sienna. A return to animosity would be a relief, neutralizing the panicked notion that Constantine was intent on maneuvering her back into his bed.
    A hot pulse of adrenaline went through her as the thought gathered momentum. She should never have kissed him back. It had been a reckless experiment. She had practically thrown herself at him. Temporarily at least, it had altered the equation between them, giving him a power over her she had vowed he would never again have.
    As if to underscore her imminent danger, a deafening clap of thunder sent her wobbling off balance. One stiletto jammed in a knot in the decking timber and in that moment the lights went out, plunging them into darkness.
    Constantine’s arm curved around her waist. She found herself pressed against the hard outline of his body, her breasts flattened against his chest. She registered the firm shape of his arousal pressed against her stomach. Heated awareness flashed. Reflexively, she shoved at his chest and bent down to release her foot from the stuck shoe. As she straightened, her head connected solidly with Constantine’s jaw in a replay of what had happened the previous day.
    Constantine lurched off balance. A second white-hot flash illuminated the fact that on this particular stretch of veranda there was no railing to halt his fall, just a sculpted patch of shrubbery. In the